Could This Finally Solve the Mystery Of Me Not Liking Pearl Jam?!

Ahhhhhh, Pearl Jam.

Good old Pearl Jam.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the band that we now sometimes think of as the last remaining grunge band.

Because you see, I love the idea of Pearl Jam. A heavily classic rock-influenced, riffy, progressive, socially conscious, anti-Ticketmaster grunge group—with a bloke named Eddie in it (always a bonus!)—and a good band name to boot (I think. I’ve never been able to come down on one side of the fence or the other on this one).

But I mean, slight uncertainty over name aside, what’s not to love?!

Well, their actual music as it turns out.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate it. In fact, I really love it—though, again, just in theory. In real life, I don’t think I’ve ever been able to finish listening to a single Pearl Jam song and certainly not to an album. I don’t know why! I don’t know what it is. All the components are there. But when they’re put together in the way they are, I’m just not into it. It’s like if someone grabbed all the ingredients of your favourite dish, but then they mixed ‘em up and cooked them in some strange, backwards way that meant the final result came out … strange. Sideways. Not what you wanted.

That’s what Pearl Jam is like for me. And it makes me sad. I want to love them. I love Nirvana. I love Soundgarden. God knows I fuc*king love Alice In Chains.

It makes me doubly sad that I can’t put my finger on exactly why it is that Pearl Jam’s actual music doesn’t work for me. I’ve started to think that maybe I’ll never know. That maybe I’ll never be able to put words to it. I did however stumble upon a video earlier today that made me feel as if I glimpsed a hint of the truth. The video’s by a YouTube channel called ‘There I Ruined It,’ which does truly hilarious work by messing with popular songs in various ways, like for example doing this to Metallica:

Their take on Pearl Jam is nowhere near as dramatic. In fact, it’s a masterclass in subtlety, in that it takes a Pearl Jam tune and it stretches and exagerrates the Pearl Jam-ness of it all in such a way so as to make casual listeners like me say: ‘Wait, this isn’t the actual song?!’ It took my brain quite some time to start unpicking the ways that this isn’t the song as it actually, originally, is. And I think I need to sit and meditate on that for a while. Maybe that way I’ll begin to get closer to the answer. In the meantime, behold:

Side note: Did you remember that Eddie Vedder once looked like this:

And also like this:

The man is a damn chameleon sometimes. To me those are two different dudes. I’m gonna keep trying to like the music they all made.