Ten

As much as historians and cultural commentators think it’s true, I never really bought the whole diffusion paradigm of particular cities being a pressure cooker for art and artistry. In some ways, I could believe that important people converge there, invent something, and then splinter to the hinterlands to spread their new discoveries, but the just-so story and feedback cycle of it all bothered me. Perhaps this explains my disdain for New York people—they’re convinced that the only way a scene can form is if it’s in Brooklyn. In the same way that people spontaneously invented the telephone in multiple places around the same time, I believe there are cultural conditions that give rise to specific kinds of cultural expression, provided the raw materials are there.

The raw materials for grunge music were: affordable places to live and practices, not much of an extant music culture, and a bunch of people willing to do their own thing in different arrangements. Honestly, Seattle 1991 is not too dissimilar from where I came from ten years hence (or now, for that matter). This fallow place gave people chances to hone their craft, to fail outside the spotlight, and to write things that bucked the trends currently happening in mass culture. Pearl Jam, in particular, is an intersection point between a couple of different bands, almost an edge in a network rather than a node itself. They benefited the most from this self-contained scene work, allegedly.

This is not music for me—I’ll be clear about that. The songs are supposedly emotionally legible and capture complex lyrical themes, but each song’s presentation--the style of singing with Vedder’s braying nasalizations; the instrumental timbres and tone of the rhythm guitar and bass; the noodling pentatonic lead guitar solo on every track--blurs together in the worst possible way. The album opens with a snippet of something that sounds like an interstitial segment from a Tom Waits record and consequently ends the same way, making the record sound like one big loop when it restarts. I found myself aching to hear those sounds, the congas, the shaker, because that was the most interesting piece across the whole almost-hour, and because it meant my time was up.

In some ways I pity the band. The context collapse of alternative rock would happen just a few years after Ten came out, and their sound and approach became folded into the music industry mainstream. Fast-forward some more, and alternative became a genre by itself. Alternative to what? For me, an alternative to this.

Verdict: Set it Free

Do you find Pearl Jam delicious?