The shift in 1998 really just brought PJ back to the standard observed by all other bands of their profile at the time. So it felt like a big about-face for them relative to the exceptional circumstances they had created in the years just prior, but not necessarily something that felt weird in general, especially since a lot of it came with a sort of mea culpa to the effect of, “Hey, we tried this, we thought we were saving you money, but we realize that mostly we were just making it harder for you to see us live and find out what we were up to.” Same with the official bootlegs: “We see that people are charging $40 for bad recordings of our concerts; we can do this right and charge you $15 for good recordings of them.” Classic win-win.

To me the PRAMG concept rests entirely on the decrease in new creative work, coupled with a seeming increase in effort to sell other things, many of them nonmusical and some of them pretty silly. When a band is creatively engaged, that marketing feels like part of the churn that keeps the whole thing going. When they’re not, but the rest of it continues anyway, it calls attention to the missing ingredient.

The fact that the PRAMG era dovetails perfectly with the rise of social media is no doubt a huge part of why some people register this the way they do. And it is overwhelmingly not a phenomenon unique to PJ.

Maybe it's better to look at the PRAMG as the Post-Epic/Sony era instead.

I think my first "wait what??" was the Verizon deal during S/T; that's not to say there was nothing before that (and I find Stip's argument that it began at Yield very compelling), but I'd really "come of age" and was well into my 20s when S/T came out, so the commercial choices they made (or maybe just lazily sat by while other people made on their behalf) became a tougher pill to swallow

in 2024, I think there are various factors that I've come to terms with, including but not limited to

- they've got older, of course, and no longer feel they need to prove anything; they want to find the sweet spot between enjoying their music, and delegating on everything else (which, conversely, can at times give the impression they phoned in the music)

- I'm convinced Ed has / had trauma from Roskilde; he processed it closely on Riot Act; then Pearl Jam was reborn, a new band whether we like it or not; they didn't want to be a band that started moshpits anymore, in multiple ways; I think of the fact that Ed laughed at old footage of himself when he went on Jools Holland (not an amused laugh, a pained, embarrassed... take it away from me laugh), and the music he made increasingly being about how we don't have much time left, so we have to love, now, before we're gone

- this all seemed to result in a band who "fought to get it back again" because life is too short to keep sabotaging our career anymore

I think that over the years I've grown both apathetic to, and accepting of, the things I haven't loved about the PRAMG, and also in my empathy; I might not like what happened but I know (as a traumatised person myself) that there's a pre-trauma me, and a post-trauma me, and however much I'd like to reach back and salvage whatever cool bits I can find about pre-trauma me, it ain't gonna happen; I go forward as I am and as things are, or I stop; Pearl Jam decided not to stop, so we got Pearl Jam 2.0

If Cobain heard Avocado…

i kind of can't get behind this concept anymore, because S/T now feels to me like "back when they were still great," and the real drop off started with BS.