The “aggressive” genre Eddie Vedder said was too boring for him
There hasn’t been a more willing student of rock and roll than Eddie Vedder since the 1990s.
While there were many artists to come out of the grunge era who wanted to change the status quo and show people what could be done without a can of hairspray, Vedder was always willing to learn from nearly every single rock star he came across. He knew that no one was equipped for fame, and there was no greater lesson for being a better rock star than losing yourself in a bunch of records.
After all, that’s how all good songwriters operate. Take Bruce Springsteen, for instance. He was known as the greatest salt-of-the-earth rock and roll star the world had ever seen for years, and yet when listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town, you can hear someone who’s plagued with a lot of self-doubt and is trying to do everything he can to make sense of who the hell he was after Born to Run changed everything.
But whereas Vedder was looking to quote his heart whenever he sang, it’s not like there wasn’t room to get angry. Despite grunge being its own thing, the closest genre similarity was punk rock, and judging by how much he worshipped artists like Ian MacKaye, it’s not like Vedder wasn’t willing to take the route of Fugazi and play to smaller clubs for the rest of his life if he wanted to.
During the era when Vedder was growing up, though, not every punk rock band was built the same. All of them worshipped at the altar of bands like Ramones and The Clash, but there had been a lot that changed within a few years. There was the hardcore brand of punk with bands like Minor Threat and Descendents, but there was a lot more chaos to be found the further you got to California.
You have to remember that this was the kind of music that The Decline of Western Civilisation was made for, and listening to a band like Fear or The Germs, the whole appeal is that the music sounds like it’s just teetering on the edge of falling apart at every single second. That kind of energy is palpable from the minute that you put on one of their records, but if you ask Vedder, there was nothing really in there that appealed to him.
There’s no doubt that the band could make their own heavy tunes like ‘Blood’, but Vedder wasn’t willing to go into nihilistic territory like that, saying, “I never had access to bands like Fear or Black Flag. I had my army jacket and my skateboard, but that was my transportation. I was more into Springsteen and storytelling kind of stuff. The aggressive punk thing was kind of latent for me.”
Because listening to Pearl Jam’s music, not everything is about doom and gloom all the time. You’d be forgiven for thinking that a song that had a bunch of heavy guitar riffs and Vedder screaming his lungs out may have been in the same category as those bands, but it all served to enhance the story in the lyrics. And by the end of even their most visceral songs, Vedder at least knows how to leave the audience off with a little bit of hope by the end.
No one’s denying the more edgy slant that a lot of grunge bands had, but Vedder was not going to sit around and watch bands talk about self-destruction. They may have been using it as a form of therapy, but Vedder wasn’t only trying to shout about his problems in song. He believed that there was power in music, and maybe by the time one of Pearl Jam’s tunes was over, he might be able to work his way through his own issues.
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