Ozzi is the perfect choice to tackle the challenge of making a cohesive narrative out of a story that travels from mosh pits to executive boardroom meetings to sweaty tour bus spats without ever losing its rhythm ... Part of what makes Sellout sing is its ability to return us to a time in the music industry that now feels like a relic of the past: an era when devoted followings were built from memorable, constant live performances and the unsolicited mailing of demo tapes to labels ... Offering a nimble balance of history, analysis and colorful anecdotes, Sellout ultimately finds its greatest strength in its objectivity. Far from being a castigation of the featured bands, Ozzi’s book is instead a refreshingly dispassionate attempt to explain why some bands were able to find immense success from partnering with a major label while others disintegrated as a result of making the same decision.

Ozzi’s reporting is strong, balanced and well told. There are no (well, very few) clear-cut good guys and bad guys. If the band-by-band structure sometimes limits the ability to look at the bigger picture, it still represents a worthy successor to its obvious inspiration, Michael Azerrad’s 2001 examination of the ’80s indie underground, Our Band Could Be Your Life. The additional challenges facing the Donnas and the Distillers, bands made up of or fronted by women, remain bracing, and the inherent difficulties of maintaining a group’s focus as its circumstances change are timeless.

... those looking for inside baseball on punk, emo, and hardcore’s most (in)famous acts will find plenty to dive into within Sellout ... Throughout the book, Ozzi’s prose is lucid, engaging, and largely objective ... However, where Ozzi’s true strength as a writer and storyteller comes through is in the meticulous construction of chapters, and how these seemingly personal stories gradually lock together to form the backbone of the book’s larger subcultural chronology ... Sellout’s biggest strength is that doesn’t seek to cast judgment on acts for their decision to jump in with the majors ... As Ozzi’s brilliant epilogue serves to illustrate, this period was one of rapid upheaval for the music business ... To have the opportunity to play their music, release records, and bring punk to the masses—with or without major-label support—was always going to be a labor of love, requiring skill, dedication, and unwavering passion. And fittingly, the same could be said for Sellout.

What makes Sellout so engrossing is that it profiles both the artists and the suits—the label heads and their A&R reps. Ozzi not only provides a rigorously researched look at how labels targeted bands and fought to sign them; he also amasses an impressive number of firsthand accounts of major-label talent scouts acting like major league sleazeballs ... Part of the book’s appeal lies in rooting for bands to beat the odds—even when you know they won’t. As a result, the bulk of the stories in Sellout are cautionary tales ... As the stories progress, patterns emerge. There’s a fascinating parallel between the labels’ struggles to convince bands of their street cred and the bands’ struggles to convince fans they hadn’t lost it. Who was kidding whom? That’s not a question Ozzi examines ... At the intersection of punk and commerce is a great deal of denial, useful self-deception on both sides. The artists maintain they’ll stay true to their roots, meaning they’ll never change ... The labels, meanwhile, convince themselves they can bend the bands to their will and make hits ... These incompatible positions drive much of the conflict in Sellout.

... while it can be fun to hear stories of out-of-control parties and behind-the-scenes bad behavior, the book’s real value comes through far clearer when the writer and his subjects grapple with the strange admixture of success in a punk subculture that often thrived in opposition to such a notion ... it’s a little surprising Ozzi didn’t simply opt for an oral history, letting only the artists’ voices shape the narrative. His style is briskly efficient and workmanlike, more often than not filling in the details and tracking the step-by-step history of what was happening, rather than offering his own opinions on the events ... It may be a bit inside-baseball at times for people who don’t follow these various scenes and their histories...but overall, it’s a compelling and sometimes hair-raising account of what it meant to throw in your future with a large corporation in hopes of translating that effort into units sold—and the promise of a career in rock.

Anyone familiar with Ozzi’s writing knows that he’s very good at making fun of things, however he manages to tell these stories without sarcasm or snark, fully conveying how destructive this phenomenon was for Bay Area bands like Green Day and Jawbreaker ... But what’s most interesting is the way Ozzi characterizes the unique nuances between these bands and their audiences and why the aforementioned acts bore the brunt of this self-righteous indignation more than, say, Jimmy Eat World or The Donnas ... Ozzi is able to provide context and details to these situations in a way that makes the stories as compelling to completists as they are to casual fans. This is due to the fact that he’s able to craft a cohesive narrative that weaves through the book, connecting these stories and musicians through a staggering amount of interviews and research. It’s a tricky task, however the dots are connected in a way that illustrates the real-life crossover of these seemingly disparate acts and keeps the book rooted in reality. Above all, Sellout is a compelling time capsule of a time before social media dominated our lives, and bands could make a living without resorting to meet-and-greets, VIP experiences, and other supplementary income streams that would make Maximum Rocknroll columnists scoff.

... a fast-paced story ... Throughout, Ozzi’s crisp prose and vibrant storytelling colorfully capture a flamboyant chapter in music history. This accomplishes what the best music books do: drive readers back to listening.