![]() Their third release, Vitalogy, took pride in its overt weirdness. Pearl Jam tried their hardest to pump the brakes, to halt that barreling ascent to the top of the charts. The band, uneasy with their regular presence on MTV, declined to shoot videos to support their 1993 blockbuster follow-up Vs., which nevertheless managed to become the fastest-selling album ever (a record Garth Brooks shattered five years later). Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut Ten spawned a string of music video mainstays, particularly the VMA-winning “Jeremy,” and sold over 13 million CDs and cassettes. Back then, being a huge alternative rock act meant you’d achieved genuine pop stardom, and “pop” was the dirtiest of words. ![]() They were, for a moment, the biggest rock band in the world, a superlative the boys actively loathed and readily undermined. In 1994, Pearl Jam bristled at what we would now consider the countless upsides of massive success. Really, is it so bad that a large swath of the listening public cares about your art, even if it is just what’s being played on the radio? What, exactly, is the downside of that sorry state? The truckloads of money? The sold-out stadiums? The endless cover articles? No artist today would, for a nanosecond, blink at the opportunity to get their music into the ears of as many people possible. How quaint.Ī blockbuster hit, by definition, necessitates the widespread dissemination of a product, be it a single, a music video or an album. And to be commercial, well, that meant you were cookie-cutter, factory-produced, the product of corporate capitalism. ![]() They held to a punk credo, a dogma that claimed anything popular was, necessarily, commercial. There was a distant past, far from the sorry state of music-making in the streaming era, when “serious musicians” actively eschewed success or, at the very least, bemoaned their hefty paychecks loudly in the pages of Rolling Stone and Spin. ![]()
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