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LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves] @hexbear.net

Hot take: I fucking hate Pearl Jam

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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58 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I also tried to get into Pearl Jam in high school since they were part of the grunge canon or whatever but I could only stand 2 of their songs enough to keep in my library because I had this embarrassing recurring fantasy that my crush would wanna listen to my iPod and be impressed with my music taste so I wanted to cover all my bases

    Well that never happened and I don't really listen to grunge anymore aside from Alice in Chains

  • I grew up on grunge/90s alt and with Pearl Jam but after all that was already over. To me it was always part of one big sweet ass era of music. I get not being into the yarling, but to me its great. I don't have to know what Veder is saying cause I can feel what he's going for. They have so many good songs to me but one underrated one imo is Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.

  • 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 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

  • When I was young and the only way to get music was CDs, I tried to like Pearl Jam as my experience was limited. At the time they were fine, but hell I'd never put them on now.

    • same

      I got into them through the music video for do the evolution but listening to the song on its own now it's just eh

      I don't think they're unbearable, but they're like the ac/dc of gen x, where some people hype them up so much because it was a popular band when they were young, but listening to it now, it's like "I wouldn't be annoyed if I heard this at a state fair"

  • I hold no ill will towards anyone in pearl jam, by all regard they seem okay and have done some genuinely kinda cool not music stuff or related to .music with the ticket master rebellion. But wow do I absolutely hate their music visceral reasons and ones I could probably explain if need be. Also Jeremy had feels like a real exploitative song if they made a dime from it

  • This is one of those posts where I don't mean for it to be bait whatsoever, I am being totally genuine here,

    Good luck lol, Pearl Jam is bad though fwiw.

  • i dont even have a strong opinion on pearl jam, they are that band with that marble mouth baratone singer.

    it's cool they fought ticketmaster tho.

  • 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?

  • 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.

58 comments