Pearl Jam - Corduroy

They can buy but can't put on my clothes.

Album: Vitalogy [3rd album]
Recorded: Seattle, Atlanta & New Orleans
Genre: Rock, Grunge
Album Release: November 22nd 1994
Length: 4:37
Producer: Brendan O'Brien & Pearl Jam
Vocalist: Eddie Vedder [age 29]
Label: Epic Records

Official Audio


Live

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 40 million
YouTube Music: Over 20 million

Credits & Gear

Bass, drums, guitar [x3], mellotron, slide guitar

Details

• By 1994 the lead singer of Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, knew the commercialisation of grunge had reached a fever pitch when he saw a corduroy jacket in a shop window selling for $650. The style was popular amongst followers of the Seattle sound and just a few years prior, Vedder purchased a similar coat for just a few dollars in a local charity shop.
  
  Paying $650 for a jacket was against the spirit of grunge, which valued anti-consumerism, and one of the ways it's adherents rejected such materialism was through the threadbare, bargain basement nature of their fashion. That someone would spend such an obscene amount of money on a jacket and claim to be 'grunge' was an insult to the genre. $650 in 1994 would be worth $1,382 in October 2024. Vedder wrote 'Corduroy' as a response to this commercialisation. The song includes lyrics such as 'they can buy but can't put on my clothes', meaning a poser can look the part while not 'getting' the spirit of the music.
  
  

  

  Vedder in his trademark corduroy jacket
  

  
  Another line from the song is 'I would rather starve than eat your bread', which suggests Vedder would rather die than sell his soul by betraying the authenticity of his music. By the mid-90's grunge-coded characters were appearing regularly throughout the media, and while some efforts, such as Cameron Crowe's film Singles (1992) made a genuine effort to understand the genre, others adopted the aesthetic without giving much thought to the values and beliefs of the culture surrounding the music.
  
  

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