IT HAS LONG been my ambition to sell out. The thought of being offered an enormous, retirement-grade sum of money from a morally dubious, credibility-damaging source has never presented me with much of a dilemma. I’ll take self-loathing and a Ferrari over dignity and a Honda Civic any day.

Ah yes, I know what you’re thinking: I have lived in Hollywood for too long. But Hollywood isn’t to blame: it is hip-hop. The culture of black, urban rap music celebrates the capitalist exploitation of art (and pretty much anything else) as well as the conspicuous display of the cash earned from all that exploitation.

Look at Sean “Diddy” Combs, the rapper, fashion mogul, record-label boss and all-round pop culture entrepreneur. The man has enough money to buy Finland. Yet he still took a reported $3 million to appear in an advertisement for an acne cream. With a straight face, Diddy went on television to explain how the zit treatment “moisturises my situation and maintains my sexy”. And he was still invited to host the cooler-than-thou MTV Video Music Awards.

I mention all this because of a story I reported on last week about a (white) drummer called John Densmore. Survivors of psychotropic drugs will remember Densmore as being a member of the Doors, the trippy Los Angeles quartet whose lead singer, Jim Morrison, died from a suspected heroin overdose in 1971. Before Morrison’s death, Densmore and his band mates drew up an idealistic contract that said they all had to agree on any deal to license their music to advertisers.

Today Densmore is taking a one-man stand against what he sees as selling Jim Morrison’s soul to Mammon, vetoing advertising deals worth nearly $20 million from Cadillac and Apple Computer. His former band mates are fuming in their Honda Civics. It is to their credit that Densmore hasn’t yet died in a freak accident with a baseball bat.

A couple of decades ago, Densmore’s position might have seemed admirable; cool, even. Today it just seems stupid. A hip-hop musician in the same position would not only sell the song, but also buy stock in Cadillac, then elect himself to the board, where he probably would organise the hostile takeover of a white musician’s back catalogue.

Along the way, he would earn enough money to launch his own premium brand of petrol. The music press, meanwhile, would praise his “street smarts”.

The difference, of course, is race and class: hip-hop comes from poor, black urban areas, where people feel excluded from the capitalist system. Making money is not considered selling out because it is a form of empowerment: it shows that a black kid can do for himself what a white middle-class kid is given at birth. Indeed, you could argue that the trend was started by Michael Jackson when he bought the Beatles’ publishing company, ATV, for $47.5 million in 1984.

Today hip-hop empowerment is everywhere: 50 Cent (aka Fiddy) not only launched his own brand of grape-flavoured vitamin water — called Formula 50 — but took a stake in the company that makes it. The rapper was reportedly offered the deal after executives saw him with a bottle of vitamin water in, yes, a Reebok advert. Formula 50, incidentally, was launched to coincide with the release of Fiddy’s new album, Valentine’s Day Massacre .

White musicians tend to hate themselves for this kind of salesmanship. Black musicians, generally, do not. Indeed, America’s latest business self-help book is Make It Happen: The Hip-Hop Generation Guide to Success.

Today virtually all music outlets are corporate-owned, advertiser-sponsored and share-price driven. Radio stations and television channels are also divided into special-interest categories for marketing purposes. In America, you will never hear an R&B track on rock radio, and vice versa. The only remaining route to a mass audience is via advertising — because national ad campaigns, such as the one for Apple’s iPod, are still remarkably effective.

Bono has realised this; so have Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. All have sung for Mammon. When Cadillac couldn’t buy Break on Through to the Other Side by the Doors, it used a single by Led Zeppelin instead, introducing the band to a new generation of fans.

That’s not selling out.  That’s accepting reality.  And making the world a better place.