stop eating lady gaga’s oreos

‍ ‍This is an excerpt from experimental psychologist Adam Mastroianni’s unfailingly interesting Substack, Experimental History. You can read the full version here.

      Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today.

      It’s 1992. Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten is selling well. But then MTV puts the music video for their song “Jeremy” in heavy rotation, and the band rockets into superstardom—shows suddenly sold out, fans smashing record store windows, the whole shebang.

      That’s familiar enough, but what happens next is not. Pearl Jam responds to this hullabaloo by refusing to make music videos for the next five years. They decline photoshoots and interviews. When their producer tells them that their song “Better Man” is a surefire hit, they cut it from their second album. Nevertheless, that album sells nearly a million copies in its first week, setting a record. Then it sells six million more, staying at #1 on the Billboard chart for over a month.

      They say that the past is a foreign country, and reading a Pearl Jam profile from the early ‘90s, it certainly feels that way. The writer takes for granted that fame is inherently bad. And not just because fans might, say, break into your backstage dressing room and steal your notebooks—which they did—but also because commercial success and artistic integrity are so obviously at odds with one another. Kurt Cobain had mocked the band for catering to the mainstream, and the criticism clearly stung. It was understood that being popular was somehow, paradoxically, uncool, and that Pearl Jam owed everyone assurances that they hadn’t gotten too big for their britches.

      I am just barely old enough to remember this era, when “selling out” was a bad thing you did with your career, rather than a good thing you do with your stadium tour. “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century,” the book where I first read this story about Pearl Jam, quotes the ‘90s chronicler Chuck Klosterman: “the concept of ‘selling out’ [...] is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.”

      I gained consciousness at about the time that Backstreet Boys, NSYNC and the Spice Girls gained worldwide fame, and I understood that it was hip to hate them. This didn’t stop them from selling millions of records, of course. But there was a sizable sector of society that refused to join in, a clutch of (sometimes snobby) purists who were ready to turn on anyone who got too big or too rich. As the music writer Chris Dalla Riva points out, around this time, a rock band could lose permanently lose their street cred for appearing in a Miller commercial.

      That feeling was part of a larger anti-consumerist vibe percolating through culture at the time. This was the era of Super Size Me and the anti-World Trade Organization protests that came to be known as the Battle of Seattle. My parents furnished me with copies of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” and Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist manifesto “No Logo.”3 My English teacher made the whole class read anti-consumerist YA novels like “Feed” and “The Gospel According to Larry.” I got so caught up in the fervor that I almost showed up to a school dance with a handmade sign that said “I AM PROTESTING CONSUMERISM.” I chickened out at the last second, but clearly there was some potent zeitgeist going on if a 13-year-old was about to stake their reputation on, I guess, not buying stuff?

      Fast forward to today, and that zeitgeist is long gone. Meghan Thee Stallion is a Popeyes franchisee, Drake would like you to try online gambling, and Maroon 5 is covering Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as a tribute to Hyundai. Shortly after she charted her first hit, the rapper Ice Spice was partnering with Ben Affleck and Dunkin’ Donuts on an Ice Spice Munchkins Drink. We’ve got punk icon Iggy Pop selling insurance and Bob Dylan appearing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial. Lollapalooza once featured alt rock and heavy metal; these days, you can catch a set by DJ D-Sol, better known as David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And if you love Lady Gaga’s album Chromatica and the associated HBO special Gaga Chromatica Ball, then don’t miss these limited edition Lady Gaga Chromatica-themed Oreos!

Hyper-commercialism is nothing new, in music or anywhere else. (See, for instance, the band KISS’ officially licensed Kiss Kasket). People who bemoan our era of “late capitalism” rarely realize that phrase is 100 years old. The only thing that’s unprecedented about these craven cash-ins is how well they seem to be working. Selling out no longer carries a stigma—if anything, fans are excited for tie-ins between their favorite bands and their favorite brands, no matter how shameless.

The Chromatica Oreos reportedly flew off the shelves, earning a thumbs-up even from the Washington Post’s food critic. Some people complained about the texture and the color, or how it was simply a re-release of the much-hated “golden” Oreo, but they did not complain that it is cringe, perhaps even depraved, for a musician to collaborate with an international food conglomerate to stick her name on a million mass-produced sandwich cookies.

And if that doesn’t send Kurt Cobain spinning in his grave, wait until he finds out that Gen Z thinks Nirvana is a clothing brand.