But Corduroy never feels like some spoilt rock star's moaning, in part because the song is less "a new complaint" than a statement of defiance, spinning Pearl Jam's own rejection of the malign elements of their success into a larger theme of resistance, of refusing to corrupt their ideals.
How can we abide an academic professionalism that corrupts that ideal?
"This is a record about self-subversion," he told me, about the way the country has sabotaged and corrupted its ideals and traditions.
The downside of such a system, of course, it that it can too easily become hidebound and corrupt, turning the meritocratic ideal into rule by a self-interested, insular and self-perpetuating autocracy.
Armenian leadership over the same period has not been ideal either: corrupt and megamoniacal, it has however avoided the type of morally bankrupt hereditary dictatorship that the Aliyev clan has imposed on their country.
While scandals involving Labour politicians should ideally revolve around money and show noble ideals corrupted by high office, a Tory scandal needs sex, preferably with someone trashy.
He also believed that scholarly ladies and gentlemen could live happily and virtuously on farms distant from the corrupting metropolis -- an ideal that lurks behind such ventures as Brook Farm, Walden and the MacDowell Colony.
"This is where we bottomed out," Mr. Ray said, "where the ideal was corrupted," and he realized that "the dream of being able to work within the studio system as some maverick, autonomous independent" was a fantasy.
The original trilogy loyalists, now in their 40s, think that the prequel of the late 1990s and the re-releases of the originals corrupted the Star Wars ideal by being tailored to a politically correct audience.
To Krueger, it is in the economic sphere that American integrity has been eroded and its ideals corrupted.
