Rock stars themselves bear some responsibility for the creation of brand “rock stardom”. In her book “No Logo”, a study of the effects of advertising on culture, Naomi Klein traces the inversion of artists and corporate wage earners to the 1980s, when seemingly every ’70s rock star who survived youthful hard living into hale middle age entered into a synergistic alliance with other, bigger brands. Comeback concert sponsorships, commercial licensing agreements, lucrative advertising contracts and co-branded merchandising opportunities offered the aging rock star, drifting into irrelevance, advantages only a die-hard romantic and well-funded idealist would turn down: a final, global victory lap; an extra couple of hundred million in the bank; and a shot to trade enshrinement in a specific era for an eternal, ahistoric, ever-fungible brand “relevance”.
Carina Chocano, “Revolution Blues”, The New York Times Magazine (16 August 2015), 14.