“I don’t need that”: the pop artist Eddie Vedder called too boring for him
By the time that grunge had taken over, it was clear that hair metal needed to die. The entire appeal of a bunch of heavy metal jocks clogging up the airwaves every time MTV came on had become far too monotonous, and when bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden started making waves around the same time, people started to realise what music could be beyond talking about their love for sex, drugs and rock and roll. And while Pearl Jam did have a lot in common with those rock and rollers of yesteryear, Eddie Vedder wasn’t shy from throwing a few cheap shots as well.
As much as Pearl Jam loved the biggest acts from the 1970s, from Led Zeppelin to Cheap Trick, Vedder was still a punk at heart when he joined the group. He had worshipped bands like Ramones and The Clash, and compared to the old guard, bands like Poison and Cinderella may as well have been variety show acts like The Monkees if their guitars happened to have a little more distortion behind them.
But you have to wonder if that was a problem with the bands themselves or the medium they were working with. Poison and Warrant were always going to be copying what came before them, and while they did love bands like Sweet and David Bowie, it was clear that some of the genuine talent got lost in translation when listening to tracks like ‘Nothing But A Good Time’ and ‘Cherry Pie’.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t a way to incorporate visuals into grunge, either. ‘Black Hole Sun’ is one of the most insane videos any alternative act has ever made, and Vedder himself helped bring the warped vision of ‘Jeremy’ to life, even if MTV forced them to cut some of the most important scenes out of the final edit. Even if the videos were strange, they all came back to the music, and Madonna was practically the antithesis of what the grunge movement was doing.
“She’s someone who manipulates the media…”
eddie veder
Although ‘The Queen of Pop’ had a fantastic decade working on projects like Ray of Light, ‘Justify My Love’ would have been the opposite end of the spectrum compared to grunge. Some people may have appreciated the fact that she was being provocative for the sake of it, but all that Vedder saw was someone desperate for attention since there wasn’t much behind her songs.
When talking about their music later, Vedder viewed Madonna’s music as something too pedestrian to care about, saying, “We’re not Madonna. And I don’t mind mentioning the name because it’s a good example, and she’ll be proud of the fact that I’ve even mentioned her. She’s someone who manipulates the media, someone who has a new look and a new theme behind every performance. And someone like that, look what they’ve had to do. They end up having to shock and strip and go as far as you can go. And I’m sorry, that’s boring, so boring to me. I don’t need that attention. I don’t want that attention.”
That didn’t stop some hard rock acts from getting in on that action later in the decade, though. The minute that grunge fell in 1994, people were already looking for the next thing, and the need for everyone to be shocked out of their skin ended up becoming more and more prevalent, from Rob Zombie putting horror movie dialogue into his songs to Trent Reznor making the most aggressive hit songs anyone had ever heard.
Each of them may have had their place, but that was not how Vedder thought. He was a student of the old school of rock and roll, and while any kind of visuals can make for great shock value in the moment, he was more than happy to let his music do the talking every time he got up onstage.
