The 1991 song Michael Stipe said defined grunge: “It deeply resonated emotionally”
Even though by the time the 1990s came around, REM were beginning to soften their sound and produce music that was a little less adjacent to their post-punk and art rock roots, the influence that they’d had throughout the previous decade had reached a number of acts who were taking their approach and allowing it to mutate in fascinating ways.
It’s well-established that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was a huge idoliser of REM, and that he greatly admired Michael Stipe’s way of marrying together pop melodicism with a jagged edge. What Cobain would end up doing with this influence was using it to create genre-defining records that took a love for indelible hooks and laid crunching riffs over the top, with their trio of albums now being regarded as the high point of grunge.
However, it certainly wasn’t just Nirvana that Stipe had an influence on, and many others in the wider rock world would take the work of REM in other directions. Given how broad the taste of Stipe and his bandmates had always been, and how many disparate things had inspired the Athens, Georgia band in the first place, it makes sense that their work would end up being far-reaching and have a direct impact on a multitude of nascent scenes in the subsequent decades.
Others within the grunge scene may well have been fans of what REM offered, and the respect was seemingly mutual, with Stipe explicitly praising a number of the acts who emerged from the scene in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, particularly those who had come from the genre’s epicentre in the Pacific Northwest states of Washington and Oregon.
While grunge was definitely a product of its time, and still evokes this original period of activity when replicated in today’s musical climate, those who were at the top of their game during the initial boom were the ones who were evidently incorporating a broad range of influences and songwriting nous into their work. This is something that Stipe was able to notice from afar, and despite not having been an active part of the scene, he could appreciate what was going on as an important figure who inspired its emergence.
While Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, arguably had the greatest cultural impact of any grunge record, and remains perhaps the most celebrated album released in 1991, Stipe believed that another album from the same year arguably eclipsed it in terms of capturing everything that good rock music ought to encompass.
Speaking to Artist Waves in 2021 for the 30th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s Ten, he proclaimed that Nirvana’s contemporaries produced something that drew from so many different angles on their debut album, and noted how one song in particular was still the absolute pinnacle of grunge. “Lyrically, ‘Even Flow’ told a story,” Stipe argued.
“Songs didn’t much tell stories then, that was fresh and new, and they all looked cool, too. Not retro. Not punk. Just like a Pacific Northwest something-is-going-on, an attitude that the rest of the country hadn’t picked up on yet.”
Stipe continued, noting the features he picked up on in the song. “Musically, it was The Feelies, Glenn Branca, and Presence-era Led Zeppelin. It deeply resonated emotionally, and spearheaded, and helped crystallise an era.” Namedropping classic rock, no wave and jangle pop acts as important touchstones that he was able to pick up on in Pearl Jam’s music, it’s hardly a surprise that ‘Even Flow’ and Ten were impressive to someone like Stipe who had himself absorbed so much from these diverse scenes.
On top of that, the knack that frontman Eddie Vedder displayed for storytelling, not just on this song but throughout the album, is sure to impress someone with the lyrical flair of Stipe. The similarities may not be immediately obvious, but when you dig deeper, there are so many parallels between the two that this appreciation begins to fall into place.
