New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd started a brouhaha when she lambasted Bob Dylan, the man responsible for some of the 1960s' most iconic protest songs, for letting Chinese authorities pre-approve his set list for a concert in China. "He sang his censored set, took his pile of communist cash and left," Dowd scoffed. Dylan didn't say a word about artist Ai Weiwei, who the Chinese government arrested last week in one of its harshest crackdowns on dissent in years. Of course, Dylan is much changed from the young man who, at 22, walked off the set of CBS' Ed Sullivan Show because they wouldn't let him sing a song that lambasted the John Birch Society. But Dylan would be the first to say he never cared about selling out: In his memoir Chronicles, the music legend said he never cared about being seen as an anti-establishment figure. And hell, he's been doing Pepsi commercials for a good while now.
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Katy Perry didn't start out kissing girls and liking it. Born to evangelist parents who only let her listen to Christian music, Perry got her start singing in church. She was signed by a Christian record label in 2001 and released a self-titled alt-rock album under the name Katy Hudson. But the label folded that same year, leaving her Christian music career in jeopardy. Katy changed her name and her image and voilà! —international superstar. All it took, it seems, was a little less faith and a lot more pseudo-bicuriosity.
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Roger Clemens was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 1983 and spent the first 12 years of his career setting records, winning awards, and helping the Sox get to—but not win—the World Series. He eventually left after the team's general manager said he was in the "twilight" of his career and the team opted not to re-sign him. From there, Clemens did short stints with several teams, ultimately ending up with bitter Sox rivals the New York Yankees for an obscene $28 million. By that point, some of his original fans decided he was just chasing the money.
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One of the baddest-ass rock stars of all time, Ozzy Osbourne was the lead singer of Black Sabbath, the band that single-handedly ignited heavy metal. Osbourne himself has been called the "Godfather of Heavy Metal" and nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." But that image was all but buried by The Osbournes, an MTV reality show Ozzy filmed with his wife, Sharon, and their children Jack and Kelly. (Their oldest daughter, Aimee, refused to be part of the show and ridiculed it publicly.) Though it came to be MTV's most successful show up to that point and made Ozzy and Sharon one of the richest couples in the U.K., it mostly featured the family lying around the house cursing like has-beens.
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Nearly 30 years after Marlon Brando broke big in A Streetcar Named Desire, it was clear what he cared about: He agreed to play Superman's father, Jor-El, in the 1978 version of Superman only if he was paid a huge price. He also demanded that he would never have to read the script—his lines would be displayed off-camera. Brando ended up being paid $3.7 million for just two weeks of work, and when the studio refused to pay the same sum for his role in the sequel, Brando refused to let them use the footage.
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The Black Eyed Peas began as rap duo William Adams (will.i.am) and Allan Pineda (apl.de.ap), who started performing together as eighth graders in 1988. But just before the release of their third album, Elephunk in 2003, they decided to go for broke, adding a hot girl and cranking out polished pop songs. Rolling Stone wrote that they "gave up their pursuit of backpack-rapper cred" and "made a kind of spiritual practice of recording futuristic songs—a total aesthetic commitment that extends from their garish wardrobes to their United Colors of Benetton worldview." Not only did they go pop, but the Peas display a prodigious talent for finding the bottom of the barrel with songs like " My Humps". Not only do some of their biggest hits have gibberish for lyrics, but they're often released in cleaned-up, even-more-inane form for radio. Giving up the pursuit of backpack-rapper cred, it's clear, brings in the big bucks.
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Jerry Rubin was the son of a union man and dropped out of Berkeley to focus on his leftist social activism, first protesting a local grocer who refused to hire African Americans and then the Vietnam War. He co-founded the Youth International Party (the "Yippies") and eventually helped lead the March on the Pentagon in Washington in 1967. But he couldn't resist the siren call of the Reagan years. In the 1980s, he became a successful entrepreneur and was one of the first investors in Apple. Rubin toured the country debating his former Yippie co-founder, Abbie Hoffman, and saying things like, "Wealth creation is the real American revolution."
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The Brooklyn Dodgers predated Major League Baseball and hailed from Brooklyn before it was absorbed into New York City. In other words, their roots were as deep as a sports team's can go. Their rich history in Brooklyn ended, though, with a battle between greedy real-estate moguls and city bureaucrats. New York's construction coordinator wanted the team to play at a city-built park in Queens that eventually became Shea Stadium, but the team's owner, Walter O'Malley, wanted land around Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards—still a controversial property today—for his team. In the end, O'Malley's business instincts won out over the team's tradition, and Los Angeles was happy to lure him all the way across the country.
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First he walked on the moon, then he danced with the stars: Aldrin was a jet fighter pilot during the Korean War and went on to be part of the first successful manned mission to the moon. On July 20, 1969, he was the only the second man in history to walk on the lunar surface. Moon-landing deniers learned to stay away from Buzz Aldrin after he punched a conspiracy theorist in the face. But at age 80, Aldrin decided to come back for a victory-lap television career. In 2010, he had a brief run on Dancing With the Stars, and is rumored to be involved with Michael Bay's next Transformers sequel. But through it all Aldrin has kept an ironic, self-effacing cool, making it pretty clear the TV appearances are more about having a good time than lining his bank account. And most of the time—like when he made a hilarious cameo on 30 Rock—his fans wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
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Iggy Pop's 1970s hit "Lust for Life" was a punk anthem—that is, until it started showing up in commercials for Royal Caribbean International cruise line. The song, co-written with David Bowie, is an ode to drug culture, and includes lyrics like "No more beating my brain / with liquor and drugs." (Those lines, of course, are missing from Royal Caribbean's family-friendly ads.) The song was so jarring that readers of the online magazine Slate picked it as the most misused song of all time.
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Elia Kazan was a Hollywood legend—the man who introduced young actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean to the public, and directed films like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. He was also once a member of the Communist Party, a part of his life that came back to haunt him when the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee was investigating many in Hollywood they believed had communist sympathies. In one of the bitterest periods in Hollywood history, Kazan agreed to testify before the committee, and named eight friends who had also been communists. The group was already on the HUAC's list, but Kazan's testimony was seen in Hollywood as a deep betrayal that cast a shadow over the rest of his career. "I hate the communists and have for many years, and don't feel right about giving up my career to defend them," Kazan said. "I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this."
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