This is one of those posts where I don’t mean for it to be bait whatsoever, I am being totally genuine here, but with the reaction I’ve gotten for stating this opinion throughout my life, I figured I’d start with thatI do not like Pearl Jam at all, save for a song or two I think are good, I like the song Black quite a bit and I heard another song I can’t remember the name of once that I thought was alright. But every single time I try to listen to this band’s discography, I hate it. At one point, I wanted to like Pearl Jam and listened to Ten a ton to try to acclimate myself to the album like I’ve done with many others I had an initial sour taste to. I thought it was annoying. If every band from the 90s is Red Hot Chili Peppers but more or less annoying on a spectrum, Pearl Jam is on the lower end of that spectrum. However, I still find Pearl Jam to be annoying and uninspiring.

Am I just too young to understand them? There are a lot of vocalists I don’t understand that I like because of how they use their voice as an instrument, but I find how Vedder using his vocals absolutely indecipherable. Someone will hear some lyrics from him and be like “damn I felt that” when I didn’t understand a goddamn word Vedder had said. I’ve listened to a lot of grunge, really love The Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr. the most because I’m also a lover of dream pop and shoegaze. I should be okay with Veddar having indecipherable vocals, it just seems like they way he does it is stupid.

If you guys have any suggestions for Pearl Jam songs you think I’ll like, feel free to comment them, I’m not going to just be a shithead. I’d also appreciate hearing what you guys specifically appreciate about the group or the song you comment. I feel like I’m missing so much context with how many people I like also being Pearl Jam fans, but maybe I’m not missing anything and other people also agree with how annoying they are?

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  • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Not entirely Pearl Jam, but “Hunger Strike” by Temple of the Dog (mix of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden members doing a tribute to one of their buddies who died really young) might be up your alley:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUb450Alpps

    Growing up, I liked a fair amount of grunge, but Pearl Jam never made it on my radar until I was a grown-ass adult. In context of other bands from the early- to mid-90s, they’re all right; Vedder brings an almost singer-songwriter vibe to the material (albeit a near-unintelligible one), and the instrumentation itself is nothing to write home about, which is why I find it so fucking funny that Mike McCready and Stone Gossard will always go full guitar nerd in interviews about how various songs were written/recorded. Eddie’s a giant lib causehead, and is usually on the right side of things (e.g., encouraging concertgoers to help out people living in homeless encampments near concert venues), but I can’t speak to any level of follow-through there. Regardless, Ten is about the only one of their albums that I’ll regularly listen to. I think of it the same way that Chuck Klosterman describes the album Night Songs by Cinderella – it’s so exemplary of its genre that it could also be passed off as parody.

    There is an old Eddie Vedder story where, very early in Pearl Jam’s career, he overheard people singing lines from “Black” at the beach. He ran up to them and asked them to stop singing because the lyrics were too personal to him.

    Source

    https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pearl-jam-five-against-the-world-244637/2/

    And one night, while sitting out on a deserted coastal sand bluff, contemplating life after the death of a friend, guitarist Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch, he heard strange voices coming from the hill behind him. They were singing “Black,” the fragile song that to Vedder had come to symbolize the overcommercialization of the band. He’d fought to keep it from getting overplayed, didn’t want a video made of the song. Vedder hiked out of the bushes to ask the surprised hikers not to sing the song. Months later, he still remembers their odd and concerned looks as they faced the angst-filled author of the song.