


The once-explosive accusation that a rock ’n’ roll band is a sell-out, aimed at artists who make an accommodation with industry, has come to seem a little naive since it was first bandied about in the 1960s. Whether it’s that well-known monument to prudence Iggy Pop extolling the virtues of car insurance, the Zombies promoting Tampax or Bob Dylan shilling for Victoria’s Secret, they’re all at it these days. Elton John wants you to dial UberEats, the Stones will start you up with a $139.99 Keurig coffee machine, and by now it might be easier to list the names of rock stars who haven’t chugged Pepsi on TV than those who have. And you’d have to go even further back than the Sixties — Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 110,” in fact — to find the definitive lament about the corrupting marriage of art and finance: