They did free concerts and actively organised against Ticketmaster's efforts to suppress that, but yeah the music itself is reasonably trash. Silverchair did their sound better on Frogstomp, and they were still in high school at the time.

Thank you for saying this. :there are dozens of us:

Pearl Jam is really the pop rock equivalent to the 90s alt/ "grunge" scene. I feel like theyre more emblamatic of the whole post grunge movement more than anything.

It’s ok to like Pearl Jam. It’s ok to not like them.

Maybe it has something to do with Singles. Who knows.

This is one of those posts where I don't mean for it to be bait whatsoever, I am being totally genuine here,

Good luck lol, Pearl Jam is bad though fwiw.

Have you tried vibing harder?

I feel you. I hate Steely Dan. I respect the musicianship, they wrote extremely memorable licks, and they get stuck in my head for weeks if I listen to like 5 seconds of a song off "Aja." They're good at what they do and I get why people like them. But I don't. I hate having them stuck in my head. Be more forgettable, Steely Dan! You talented jazz-rock fuckers!

Sometimes bands just don't work for a person. Sometimes it's an entire genre. Sometimes it's just not the right time in your life and one day you'll like it. It's all valid, comrade. As a kid I hated opera and jazz. Now I love chilling out to some Miles Davis or cooking while listening to Pavarotti.

As for Pearl Jam they're kinda grandfathered into my musical taste (older Millenial, Xennial, whatever you wanna call it) but basically just "Ten" as I sorta stopped listening to them as I got into the whole pop punk thing in the late 90s. Maybe I'll check out some of the suggestions in this thread - I might dig it now that I'm older.

I've listened to every pearl jam album and i confirm they are mid at best

Pearl Jam paved the way for Creed and I can never forgive Scott Stapp for putting out the lamest and most annoying songs of my childhood. Due to my hatred for Creed I must also sacrifice the yarls of Pearl Jam as well.

based and hating white music pilled

they never should have let kkkrakkkers have guitars

Death to America

I kinda dig em but I know they're not for everyone. I mostly like em for the vibes, Vedder is incomprehensible (even as a fan I understand him maybe half the time) but the noise hits the right spots for my autism

I'd probably recommend songs where Vedder is a bit clearer: Sirens, Elderly Woman Behind The Counter, Hard Sun (Vedder solo stuff from Into The Wild), Daughter, or Dissident. But honestly some bands just don't click

I'm the same with Led Zeppelin. I respect the musicianship they have, and while on paper I should love them (and I love Greta Van Fleet who're basically a Zeppelin cover band) but there's something about Zeppelin that doesn't click for me

Vedder sounds like he's doing a bad impression of Cobain, who had that sort of low grumble to his voice but it was more subtle and natural and you could feel it was coming from a place of genuine pain. but with Vedder it just feels like an affect he's putting on because he think it sounds cool. that phony grunge voice became so trendy and got even worse with post-grunge bands like Creed and Nickelback. Pearl Jam sucks but Creed makes Pearl Jam sound like Nirvana

I don't hate them but i understand why theyre called mid.

I also tried to get into Pearl Jam in high school since they were part of the grunge canon or whatever but I could only stand 2 of their songs enough to keep in my library because I had this embarrassing recurring fantasy that my crush would wanna listen to my iPod and be impressed with my music taste so I wanted to cover all my bases

Well that never happened and I don't really listen to grunge anymore aside from Alice in Chains

By all account I should like them but I find the music intolerable. If you kinda dig a bit of that Neil Young but dreamy sound then I highly recommend Built to Spill. Keep it Like a Secret specifically. I think they kind of peaked there and never could get back. It's not grunge but it's what I wanted that PNW sound to grow into. Then clear channel ate radio and MTV turned 16 and got pregnant.

Hey I love pearl jam and everything grunge. This is blasphemy.

I grew up on grunge/90s alt and with Pearl Jam but after all that was already over. To me it was always part of one big sweet ass era of music. I get not being into the yarling, but to me its great. I don't have to know what Veder is saying cause I can feel what he's going for. They have so many good songs to me but one underrated one imo is Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.

I agree with you and I’ll take it one step further - I don’t like most grunge.

I think the problem for me is grunge takes a lot of influence from hard rock and heavy metal, two genres I’ve never been big on. A lot of grunge bands are just too close to hard rock for me. I absolutely hear it in Eddie Vedder’s vocals. Maybe it’s something similar for you. You might try listening to some Pearl Jam precursors - Green River is a grunge band I really like. Temple of the Dog I never really listened to but they have that one cool song Hunger Strike. There’s also Mother Love Bone but I’ve never really listened to them.

You may also be reacting to the slew of derivative Pearl Jam copycats that popped up in the wake of the grunge explosion. Post-grunge is a genre that’s generally looked down upon, and I think a lot of those guys copied a lot from Eddie Vedder’s vocal style. It might be a case of you being more familiar with the derivative knock-off bands that Pearl Jam spawned, and only being able to hear those bands when you listen to Pearl Jam.

The [Pearl Jam] Stand in Jojo is pretty funny, so at least there's that.

So I like Pearl Jam, but sort of in the way that they're surprisingly okay for mainstream rock and the band to my knowledge isn't composed of sex criminals. I kind of get them mixed up with Foo Fighters on occasion, to such an extent that I had to check which band had a Black Metal side-project. It wound up being Grohl on that account. But like, if you don't like just hunting through their B-sides on Spotify, it might just not be for you.

Preach.

I really only listen to Even Flow by these guys.

I like Daughter and am not sure I’ve heard any of their other songs tbh

When I was young and the only way to get music was CDs, I tried to like Pearl Jam as my experience was limited. At the time they were fine, but hell I'd never put them on now.

I agree with almost everything you said, I could never get into them but everyone else loves them.

Although, in college I did really like the 'Into The Wild' soundtrack that Vedder did solo, but I haven't listened to that in years so I don't know if I'd still feel the same (Society is the song I remember the most).

Not entirely Pearl Jam, but "Hunger Strike" by Temple of the Dog (mix of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden members doing a tribute to one of their buddies who died really young) might be up your alley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUb450Alpps

Growing up, I liked a fair amount of grunge, but Pearl Jam never made it on my radar until I was a grown-ass adult. In context of other bands from the early- to mid-90s, they're all right; Vedder brings an almost singer-songwriter vibe to the material (albeit a near-unintelligible one), and the instrumentation itself is nothing to write home about, which is why I find it so fucking funny that Mike McCready and Stone Gossard will always go full guitar nerd in interviews about how various songs were written/recorded. Eddie's a giant lib causehead, and is usually on the right side of things (e.g., encouraging concertgoers to help out people living in homeless encampments near concert venues), but I can't speak to any level of follow-through there. Regardless, Ten is about the only one of their albums that I'll regularly listen to. I think of it the same way that Chuck Klosterman describes the album Night Songs by Cinderella -- it's so exemplary of its genre that it could also be passed off as parody.

There is an old Eddie Vedder story where, very early in Pearl Jam's career, he overheard people singing lines from "Black" at the beach. He ran up to them and asked them to stop singing because the lyrics were too personal to him.

Make me fries.

sad guitar solo

I hold no ill will towards anyone in pearl jam, by all regard they seem okay and have done some genuinely kinda cool not music stuff or related to .music with the ticket master rebellion. But wow do I absolutely hate their music visceral reasons and ones I could probably explain if need be. Also Jeremy had feels like a real exploitative song if they made a dime from it

If you want to give it another shot, in addition to some of the more iconic songs (black, even flow, daughter, alive) there are a few just below that level that you might like (go, corduroy, dissident, given to fly, yellow Ledbetter). But the real way to give them a shot is to watch their full concerts from the first couple years when they were together. Specifically, watch the pink pop performance from the Netherlands in the early 90s. That will give you a better idea of what the actual experience was like for people that had been, at that time, given nothing but boomer rock and other things that denied the reality of the shit sandwich Gen X was being served. If that doesn’t at least pique your interest a bit more, then they really aren’t for you and that’s ok.

The people in here saying they are a bad copy of nirvana or that can’t forgive them because of the shitty imitators that tried to ride their coattails are off base in my opinion. On the former, it’s like they heard that one clip of Kurt Cobain trashing Eddie Vedder and decided to run with it (and apparently ignored Kurt’s later retractions and apologies about that, admitting that he was essentially being an edge lord shithead, which he had a really bad tendency to be). On the latter, Creed sucked but that’s has nothing to do with Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam other than the fact that they basically cribbed off of their sound and image sort of but badly. That would be like not liking The Simpsons because you think Family Guy is bad.