That’s what the PR said, anyway - it was the kind of tale that is used to establish a band’s “realness” in the media, and it actually sort of worked for a while. Defying the threat of eternal damnation, the brothers recruited their cousin Matthew to play guitar, invested in a closetful of impossibly tight jeans, and formed a hard-drinking and hip-swinging rock group.
KOL’s first two albums were accompanied by a mythic backstory that involved the group’s trio of brothers - Caleb, Nathan, and Jared Followill - being raised by a traveling Pentecostal preacher who forbade his boys to taste the sinful fruit of rock and roll. You might remember that the Tennessee trad-rock outfit once had a reasonably hip reputation in the early ’00s as a Strokes/CCR hybrid. The last time I heard it was five years ago, and it was directed at Kings of Leon. But I remember people still occasionally using “sell out” after that. “Selling” anything in a music context suddenly seemed like a Herculean task. The most commonly regarded turning point away from deriding artists for openly chasing corporate dollars is probably Moby licensing every track off his album Play in 1999, and for obvious reasons - it came out the same year Napster launched and the record industry’s implosion commenced. I‘m not sure of the exact moment when using the term “sell out” officially fell out of fashion in pop-music discourse.