Editor’s Note: This article was originally written in March 2020, shortly before the pandemic that changed the world forever. Some portions of this article are amended to reflect such happenings since then. This article is now finally being published for the world to see on the 30th anniversary of the release of Pearl Jam’s landmark debut album Ten, an album still worth listening to despite the following cautionary tale.
“I’m still alive”, bellowed Eddie Vedder in Pearl Jam’s debut 1991 hit single “Alive”. These days, this declaration comes off as either a brag or a distasteful observation on the state of affairs of grunge. Despite the nature of the original song, a creepy ode to an abusive incestual relationship that could only be a hit single in the grunge era of rock music, this chorus instead now defines the current state of both Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam themselves. With the body count of grunge music sadly reaching corona virus levels before corona virus even existed, “Alive” has taken on new and disturbing context. That leads us to the topic of conversation, Pearl Jam’s perseverance despite an ongoing crisis in their own quality. As grateful as I am for their continued survival, they’ve easily provided diminishing returns over the years, specifically since the turn of the millennium, and while you could say the same thing about nearly any band from the 1990’s, Pearl Jam provided an exemplary body of work and tale. Now they’re back after 8 years with a new album, and there’s no better excuse to take on the task of grunge’s last living holdout.
Pearl Jam is a historically relevant band, to understate their significance is pretty much impossible even on a website like mine. The rest of two decades of rock music pretty much followed in their example. When it comes to mainstream popularity, album sales and chart numbers, Pearl Jam crushed Nirvana for statistical dominance in the 90’s, and they will forever rightfully be considered rock stars of 90’s music. With Ten, Vs. and the actual songs on Vitalogy, they really did make some of the best “grunge rock” songs, whatever the fuck “grunge” is actually supposed to describe. With all respect to Pearl Jam, let’s begin at a good point to roast, their millionaire man march against Ticketmaster. This was Pearl Jam’s first big stand up against something moment and it was noble at the time. What wasn’t noble was the first big “fuck you” Pearl Jam album in No Code. No Code was basically a giant “fuck you” toward Pearl Jam fans who weren’t down with their weirder, more experimental and yet more mellow side. That’s why it spent a month at #1 in the charts upon release despite making Down on the Upside and Alice in Chains self-titled sound like Superunknown 2 and Jar of Flies 2. Pearl Jam, while rooted in basic classic rock music much more than their peers of their time did, took large risks much more than you’d think over the course of their discography. I applaud them for this, but it also leads to why I am not as enthusiastic about their work after grunge’s heyday. For all the flack they get, Pearl Jam does remain the truly most divisive band of their era to retain the respect they get.
While I do not enjoy No Code so much, with 1998’s Yield, the group released one of their greatest albums. This is not a position shared with much of the public, but Yield was a brief respite from what was a naturally trending downward consistency. In my opinion, Yield is one of Pearl Jam’s best albums, this was an underrated career highlight that goes ignored by a lot of people who like them only for their heyday. Songs like “Brain of J”, “In Hiding”, “Faithful” and “Do the Evolution” are some of Pearl Jam’s best, and the weird moments here are much more palatable than No Code’s or even Vitalogy’s “fuck off to the casuals” moments. The bad news from here on out is that there would never again be a Pearl Jam as consistent as Yield. Pearl Jam even broke their MTV embargo to release a music video for “Do the Evolution” directed by Todd McFarlane, the comic book artist responsible for Venom, Spawn and the artwork for Korn’s 1998 album Follow the Leader. In “Do the Evolution”, Eddie Vedder predicts the end of the world will occur in 2010. Sorry Ed, you were about a decade off, but you aren’t alone. Your buds in Bad Religion also predicted the world would end in 2010.
In 1999, Pearl Jam released the most commercially successful single of their career. No, it wasn’t “Jeremy”, “Alive”, “Even Flow”, “Daughter”, “Better Man” or even “Black”, which wasn’t even released as a single and rose to popularity on reputation alone. Pearl Jam’s throwaway fan club release “Last Kiss”, a sappy cover of a doo wop song from 1960, became their biggest hit of all time and went all the way up to #2 on the Billboard Top 100 singles chart and was only blocked from #1 by Jennifer Lopez. Why? This is something I really don’t understand, I’ve basically never heard this song on the radio and when I listened to Pearl Jam’s B-side compilation Lost Dogs this was not one of the standout tracks, it was in fact one of the worst on there. For comparison, “Jeremy” only hit #79 on the Billboard Top 100 chart and none of the other singles from Ten even charted on it, and Pearl Jam’s previous biggest hits on this chart were strangely “Spin the Black Circle” at #18 and their only other top 10, the collaboration with Neil Young “I Got Id” at #7. These are also weird selections as I also have never heard either of those songs on a rock radio station, compared to say “Alive” or “Black” which still get played on an hourly basis nearly 30 years later.
The early 2000’s saw Pearl Jam continuing down the weird and confrontational route of their career with the release of Binaural. This was yet another album that was crafted to cull off fans who weren’t down with their more experimental and less straight ahead rocking songs. Binaural’s flaw is that the two singles released, “Light Years” and “Nothing as it Seems” are far and ahead the best songs on the album. However, that’s not to say the rest of the album isn’t worth hearing, as it has its moments like “Insignificance” and “Grievance”. This was the first album to feature then former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, and with his addition to the lineup, Pearl Jam finally broke free from their Spinal Tap-esque rotation of drummers for good. On June 30, 2000, nine fans died from being trampled at a concert in Denmark at the Roskilde Festival, which then caused Pearl Jam to consider retiring for good. However, a short month later they were back on tour in the US, and on that tour, the band began professionally recording every performed concert. In 2000 and 2001, Pearl Jam released 72 live albums. That is not a typo, the band released every single concert they performed on the tour as a live album and continued to do so up through 2014. Nowadays, Pearl Jam have their own Sirius XM radio station which plays full concerts daily, but at the time, this was considered a strange and bold choice.
So at this point, you’re probably wondering why this article has lacked the usual snark and venom that one of my retrospectives usually carries. This is where it ends. In 2002, Pearl Jam released the album Riot Act which in my opinion has been unfairly considered the band’s worst album. While Pearl Jam has never released a St. Anger or Scream level abomination, it really confuses me as to why this album is widely considered their worst album. This was Pearl Jam’s new album when I first got into them in middle school back in 2003, and with age this album has definitely come into it’s own finely. I would go as far as saying this is the last good Pearl Jam album, and I am not alone in this regard. There even exists a segment of Pearl Jam fans that refer to the band’s catalogue after this album as the “Post Riot Act money grab”, and I personally agree with this sentiment. Riot Act was where this band’s fanbase was permanently split, the idiots who took offense to Eddie Vedder’s anti-George W. Bush antics aside, it was the last time this band really took chances with their experimentation and still sounded good doing it. It must be nice to be a band like Pearl Jam, where only debuting at #5 and selling 200,000 copies of an album in a week’s time is considered a giant flop. Riot Act might be maligned by the vast majority of Pearl Jam devotees, but I think this was their most successful attempt at causing a rift in the fanbase yet. Songs like “Love Boat Captain”, “You Are” and “All Or None” might be big hurdles for the casuals but I fucking love these, they’re the last flashes of weirdo brilliance for this band before they folded and squealed. Something like “Arc” is still annoying to even me, but hey, if it was alienating the people who managed through something like No Code or Binaural and still held on, more power to Pearl Jam. Fuck the casuals. But that’s where everything came to a screeching halt and Pearl Jam lost the people who actually enjoyed their active trolling and dismissal of the haters, because after Riot Act, there exists a total polarity shift in this band.
The dedicated Pearl Jam fans had some real relief when they released Lost Dogs in 2003 and the Live at Benaroya Hall live album in 2004, but for others, this period marked a long chasm between releases. After regularly releasing an album every two years or less from 1991 to 2002, Pearl Jam took a four year hiatus between albums. Some would consider this a good thing, but when Pearl Jam finally decided to return, there were some who would have personally wished they’d just stayed away forever. On May 2, 2006, Pearl Jam released their self titled album also referred to as “The Avocado Album” because of it’s album art. The “post Riot Act money grab” effect was in full here, this was supposed to be a return to form, but it honestly pales in comparison to Riot Act for me. While the singles “Worldwide Suicide” and “Life Wasted” were in fact some great late career bangers from the band, the vast majority of this album is Pearl Jam on autopilot and by the numbers, and when it gets bad it gets very, very bad. Sure, there’s a few salvageable moments outside the singles with “Severed Hand”, “Inside Job” and “Gone”, but then you have some of the worst songs Pearl Jam had come up with in their career at that point to wade through. Things like “Big Wave” or “Unemployable” are pure fucking cringe, and a song like “Come Back” attempts to go for the big bombastic days of “Better Man” and “Black” of yore but just falls flat on it’s fucking face instead. At this point in their career, Pearl Jam were also unwisely falling into the Smashing Pumpkins trap of relegating some of their best material to being performed live a couple times and never being heard from again. The following song called “Cold Confession” that was rejected from this album is so hard to track down that it will almost certainly be removed from Youtube by the time this article publishes (2021 update: It’s still there!), and that explains my problem with Pearl Jam at this time enough. It also doesn’t help that they released the self titled album the same day as Tool’s new album at the time, Tool was easily going to hog up all the talk of new rock music at that point in time, but it made purchasing the album an easy afterthought for me. This was the last Pearl Jam album I actually bought, and I don’t own this anymore.
By the time Pearl Jam was getting around to releasing another new album in 2009, they had all but been written off for me. The hypocrisy shone particularly brightly when Pearl Jam linked up with Target to exclusively release this album’s physical copies in their stores. Yes Pearl Jam, the band that tried and failed to wage a war against Ticketmaster and spent the better part of the last 15 years alienating the 13 million people who bought Ten, were suddenly all in on the cash grab express train of big box retail exclusivity when they released Backspacer. In the late 2000’s, there was an odd period where physical CD’s were letting out their dying breath via releasing exclusively through certain supermarkets. In some cases, like AC/DC’s 2008 album Black Ice being released only at WalMart, it was a smash success. The AC/DC album sold almost 800,000 copies in the first week. On the other hand, Guns n’ Roses released their joke album Chinese Democracy through Best Buy exclusively and it was such a spectacular failure that you can now find unopened and shrink wrapped Chinese Democracy CD’s in any dollar store. Kiss’s WalMart album fared a similarly pathetic fate, but who the fuck actually listens to Kiss anyway, there’s a band that was all style and no substance. As far as I know, the only album ever exclusively released at Target was this Pearl Jam album, and while it sold quite well and saw Pearl Jam return to #1 on the charts for the first time since No Code strong armed it’s way there on previous track record alone, yeah this might be the single worst Pearl Jam album. It is just obnoxious and downright terrible at worst and unmemorable at best. There’s nothing to like here for me, this is where Pearl Jam pretty much lost me. It’s a horrible album that was bad at the time and only sounds worse for wear now. At least No Code or Binaural had a handful of great songs, this album doesn’t even have good songs, it doesn’t even have tolerable songs. It just has track after track of pointless pedantic bullshit, and this will probably always remain Pearl Jam’s all time low for me personally. Without a trace of facetiousness, I can confidently say a song like “I Got Bugs” or “Pry, To” are better than the entirety of Backspacer. Fuck this shit, throw it in the trash.
From here on out, I kind of stopped paying attention to Pearl Jam as far as new music was concerned. While Soundgarden and Alice in Chains lead the pack in the 90’s grunge reunion marathon of the early 2010’s, Pearl Jam’s material was becoming as downright degrading and uninteresting as Stone Temple Pilots. By the time 2013’s Lightning Bolt limped around, I had all but checked out. I would absolutely jump at the chance to see Pearl Jam live at any time, whether earlier missed years when they did play here or even now in the bleak, corona ridden era of cancellation wasteland. But as far as new material has gone, Pearl Jam remains running at a steady miss category for me. “Sirens” was the other single from this album that had decent success and is a generic and plodding piano driven ballad typical of old washed up dad rock bands. The rest of the album, well I listened to it once when it came out and never again. I never will. For 5 long years afterwards, we didn’t hear much from Pearl Jam, but they continued to tour the world and remind everyone of their real strength at this stage in their career, the live performances. In 2014, they shocked everyone by performing the entirety of No Code and Yield at two random dates in Illinois and Wisconsin with no prior announcements. This was repeated again in 2016 with Ten in Philadelphia, Vs. in Greenville, South Carolina and Binaural in Toronto. Sorry Toronto, I don’t know what you did to piss them off that much. That sort of unpredictability just furthers the truth that Pearl Jam’s live show remains worth seeing well into their now thirtieth year of existence. You never know what you’re going to get, and you definitely aren’t going to be given an early warning either.
In 2018, Pearl Jam finally released a new song, and it was the tired old anti Trump rant you were always expecting it to be. Not that I didn’t support the message, but goddammit that song sounds so uninspired. This is what you give to the people not only waiting 5 years, but having had to deal with the utter destruction of the grunge revival in the meantime? Come the fuck on and sound like you actually give a shit. With the untimely and tragic deaths of legends like Chris Cornell and Scott Weiland in recent years, Pearl Jam was living up to the “I’m still alive” chorus as a reluctant hero and this is what their next song was. It was so sad to witness but unfortunately predictable that after all this time, it would still take Pearl Jam another 2 years to get around to a new album, and by the time that was readied for release, it was already too late. Enter COVID, the career killer.
If there was something longtime fans weren’t going to take kindly to at this point, it was another bold step toward taking risks. I actually do once again applaud Pearl Jam for making a choice like this. The first single from their first album in 7 years, Gigaton, would be this Talking Heads meets The Cure style post-punk venture. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t particularly think it’s a good song either. It’s a very drastic choice for first new song off the new album, especially when the new album wasn’t all about taking those risks. Therein lies the point that the new album at the time was still the same tired and unadventurous recycling that Backspacer and Lightning Bolt had going for them already. Pearl Jam’s comeback was shortly and tragically curtailed by the March 2020 COVID shutdown, and their avenue for living up to their legendary status in performing 3+ hour live shows in stadiums and coliseums was to this day ended. As we slowly creep forward in wavering statuses regarding live music performances, we are left to see what can go on in regards to Pearl Jam. In recent years, their live show is clearly what the people care about, and Gigaton was unfortunately their worst selling album of all time, debuting at a lowly #5 but with 100,000 less albums sold than Riot Act’s #5 debut 20 years earlier. Pearl Jam had been driven to possibly their lowest point of public perception ever with the cutoff of their primary source of praise and their new album’s flop. While I did enjoy the opening song “Who Ever Said”, I can’t say I’ve revisited much else on the album in the year and a half since its release. It’s better than Backspacer, but then again almost anything ever is better than Backspacer.
And now here we are in 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic and floundering. Pearl Jam have yet to announce any new touring dates, and it’s rather complicated how that would even work out given the circumstances of their usual touring schedule. Sure, you’ve got bands like Guns N’ Roses and festivals like Lollapalooza out there hosting the superspreader events of the times, and their usual venues are packed in for baseball games, but with a band like Pearl Jam I doubt we’ll be seeing them announcing tour dates until next year at the earliest. For as much as I’ve been deriding and insulting their work of the last nearly 20 years in this article, their live show speaks for itself, and the first 10 years’ worth of material has (mostly) stood the test of time. Pearl Jam was one of the most celebrated bands of their era and now remain one of a very small amount of survivors to carry the legacy on. The closest things we’ve got left on their scale are 3/4ths of Alice in Chains (who are on hiatus again as Jerry Cantrell will release his first solo album in 20 years soon), and now two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recipient Dave Grohl (who’s latest Foo Fighters album is the Backspacer of Foo Fighters albums). While Mark Lanegan and The Melvins are still alive and kicking ass, to say they carry the culture significance of a Pearl Jam level stature would only be delusional, regardless of how much I love their respective works. Pearl Jam didn’t so much live long enough to become the villain as much as they simply outlived their contemporaries. Grunge vocalist is the most dangerous occupation in all of rock music after all. There isn’t anything truly unusual about their career arc at all, nearly any band at their level that lived this long has succumbed to a period in stagnation in the recorded music department, or has suffered misguided or contradictory foibles when comparing their younger worldviews. Hell, read anything on this website written about Metallica or Smashing Pumpkins for even worse examples. Eddie Vedder’s fanboy-ism of the Chicago Cubs aside (Cleveland Indians deserved to win the 2016 World Series, fuck you), there aren’t any obvious or major reasons to hate on Pearl Jam, and their true bottoming out years of the Backspacer and Lightning Bolt days seem to be in the, ahem, rear view mirror. One can only hope we keep having the chance to sing along with Eddie to that “I’m still alive” chorus for years to come.
VS. MusicK 