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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Make me fries.
sad guitar solo
I really only listen to Even Flow by these guys.
I feel exactly the same and I thought I was weird for not liking them. I found this video and now i know im not alone!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
If you want to give it another shot, in addition to some of the more iconic songs (black, even flow, daughter, alive) there are a few just below that level that you might like (go, corduroy, dissident, given to fly, yellow Ledbetter). But the real way to give them a shot is to watch their full concerts from the first couple years when they were together. Specifically, watch the pink pop performance from the Netherlands in the early 90s. That will give you a better idea of what the actual experience was like for people that had been, at that time, given nothing but boomer rock and other things that denied the reality of the shit sandwich Gen X was being served. If that doesn’t at least pique your interest a bit more, then they really aren’t for you and that’s ok.
The people in here saying they are a bad copy of nirvana or that can’t forgive them because of the shitty imitators that tried to ride their coattails are off base in my opinion. On the former, it’s like they heard that one clip of Kurt Cobain trashing Eddie Vedder and decided to run with it (and apparently ignored Kurt’s later retractions and apologies about that, admitting that he was essentially being an edge lord shithead, which he had a really bad tendency to be). On the latter, Creed sucked but that’s has nothing to do with Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam other than the fact that they basically cribbed off of their sound and image sort of but badly. That would be like not liking The Simpsons because you think Family Guy is bad.
So I like Pearl Jam, but sort of in the way that they’re surprisingly okay for mainstream rock and the band to my knowledge isn’t composed of sex criminals. I kind of get them mixed up with Foo Fighters on occasion, to such an extent that I had to check which band had a Black Metal side-project. It wound up being Grohl on that account. But like, if you don’t like just hunting through their B-sides on Spotify, it might just not be for you.
I don’t hate them but i understand why theyre called mid.
Pearl Jam paved the way for Creed and I can never forgive Scott Stapp for putting out the lamest and most annoying songs of my childhood. Due to my hatred for Creed I must also sacrifice the yarls of Pearl Jam as well.
In the mid 2000s I was buying a bunch of CDs from bands I thought I liked just because I had some money since I was working for the first time. And I bought a pearl jam live album and it was easily my most hated album. Never played it, when I ripped the songs into an mp3 player I skipped all of them.
I think the only song I enjoy from them is “do the evolution”, because it has a pretty dope animation music video.
I kinda dig em but I know they’re not for everyone. I mostly like em for the vibes, Vedder is incomprehensible (even as a fan I understand him maybe half the time) but the noise hits the right spots for my autism
I’d probably recommend songs where Vedder is a bit clearer: Sirens, Elderly Woman Behind The Counter, Hard Sun (Vedder solo stuff from Into The Wild), Daughter, or Dissident. But honestly some bands just don’t click
I’m the same with Led Zeppelin. I respect the musicianship they have, and while on paper I should love them (and I love Greta Van Fleet who’re basically a Zeppelin cover band) but there’s something about Zeppelin that doesn’t click for me
Layla, you’re gonna have to tell me if I’m confusing you for someone else or not, but didn’t we at some time in the past year or two share some music with each other where you showed me that your choice of favorite songs were very intense to me and that my choice of favorite songs were too slow and boring for you?
I feel like you’re getting me mixed up with someone else, I’m more of a dream pop bitch most days and typically like slower music
Ooh sounds like we need to have a music exchange sometime then
Vedder sounds like he’s doing a bad impression of Cobain, who had that sort of low grumble to his voice but it was more subtle and natural and you could feel it was coming from a place of genuine pain. but with Vedder it just feels like an affect he’s putting on because he think it sounds cool. that phony grunge voice became so trendy and got even worse with post-grunge bands like Creed and Nickelback. Pearl Jam sucks but Creed makes Pearl Jam sound like Nirvana
I feel you. I hate Steely Dan. I respect the musicianship, they wrote extremely memorable licks, and they get stuck in my head for weeks if I listen to like 5 seconds of a song off “Aja.” They’re good at what they do and I get why people like them. But I don’t. I hate having them stuck in my head. Be more forgettable, Steely Dan! You talented jazz-rock fuckers!
Sometimes bands just don’t work for a person. Sometimes it’s an entire genre. Sometimes it’s just not the right time in your life and one day you’ll like it. It’s all valid, comrade. As a kid I hated opera and jazz. Now I love chilling out to some Miles Davis or cooking while listening to Pavarotti.
As for Pearl Jam they’re kinda grandfathered into my musical taste (older Millenial, Xennial, whatever you wanna call it) but basically just “Ten” as I sorta stopped listening to them as I got into the whole pop punk thing in the late 90s. Maybe I’ll check out some of the suggestions in this thread - I might dig it now that I’m older.
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=VUb450AlppsGrowing 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.
Say Hello to Heaven is THE song by the temple of dog and vedder wasnt on it
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
They did free concerts and actively organised against Ticketmaster’s efforts to suppress that, but yeah the music itself is reasonably trash. Silverchair did their sound better on Frogstomp, and they were still in high school at the time.
They are actually better than pretty much every other grunge bands when it came to Ticketmaster. No other grunge band backed them because they thought Pearl Jam were sellouts and posers.
I’ve listened to every pearl jam album and i confirm they are mid at best
