In 1994 Eddie Vedder, the furrow-browed, vibrato-voiced lead singer of Pearl Jam, decided to don David’s mantle and take down Ticketmaster. Critics called it a watershed moment for Gen X; fans applauded the band’s “artistic integrity.” To protest the company’s inflated fees, Vedder & Co. filed a nervy lawsuit, testified before a congressional subcommittee, and canceled their summer tour, opting instead to haul their own fences and electricity to a string of shows at the few fairgrounds, parks, and colleges still untouched by Goliath’s greasy mitts. Sure, the whole jury-rigged, anti-Ticketmaster vision quest collapsed under the weight of its own principles halfway through. But that was OK. As Vedder sang on “Not for You,” “If you hate something, don’t you do it too.” And in those days, nothing—not even flannel—was more rock and roll than taking the high road.
Fast-forward to the fall of 2009. Vedder and the gang have decided to sell their latest album, Backspacer, exclusively at Target. To publicize the partnership, they’ve agreed to appear in a television commercial for the massive suburban discount chain, while a similar deal with Verizon has transformed snippets of new songs into promotional prerelease ringtones. Given Pearl Jam’s principled past, you’d think that fans would be sort of upset, or shocked, or something. And yet the most anyone can muster is a yawn. “I don’t mind getting paid and making economic decisions that benefit me,” wrote one Slate.com commenter, a self-described “diehard” who probably would’ve burned Vedder in effigy had he shilled for a phone company 15 years ago. “And I don’t begrudge them that opportunity either.”
If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the evolving relationship between artists and their audiences over the past decade, the End of Selling Out—or, more precisely, the End of Obsessing Over Who Has Sold Out and Who Hasn’t—won’t come as a surprise. Still, seen in retrospect, it’s a sizable and relatively sudden shift. As recently as 1998 or so, rock fans—whether of the indie-, punk-, hard-, or classic-rock varieties—seemed to adhere to a simple code of ethics: “F—k the man.” That’s not to say that deals with the devil didn’t exist before Y2K; the Rolling Stones, for example, have been cycling through corporate sponsors since the Age of Aquarius. It’s just that hard-core fans used to react as if signing to a major label or licensing a song for commercial use was blasphemous. But now more bands than ever are climbing into bed with corporations, and no one’s batting an eye. The question as 2010 approaches is not only why artists have recently been so willing to align themselves with big business, but why we’ve been so willing to let them—and what this willingness says about the deeper ways our culture has changed since the turn of the century.