I've been severely disappointed by the AVclub's series on the grunge era. The writing for it is so full of self-loathing and hatred for their own youth that it taints almost every paragraph. To grow up during an important music period and miss the point of it due to your insecurities is such a fucking waste.
Nope, it was the fame that killed him, pure and simple; Cobain’s demise had made him a martyr for sensitive, camera-shy artists, and Vedder rushed to pound the nails in.
Vedder does it in a manly baritone so as not to alienate his core audience, but still—a song like “Daughter” would have never come from a meat-and-potatoes rock band of Pearl Jam’s stature a few years earlier. Along with the similarly folkie “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town,” Vedder turned feminine character studies into group-friendly sing-alongs for millions of young men who were otherwise blissfully clueless about the female experience.
fucking roll eyes
Daughter could have been Son. Fuck, it's treading in the same ground as Alive.
It’s refreshing to see someone analyze the grunge era without nostalgia-tinted spectacles or outright loathing it for what it has spawned in the last decade.
But whatever you think of the article, your chosen quotations are pretty piss-poor to use to rail against the AVClub hipsters. The first is in regard to Vedder’s reaction to Cobain’s death; his (and others) exclusive finger-pointing to the media, it having little to do with the fact that he was a perpetually self-loathing smack addict on the verge of losing his wife.
“You know, all these people… lining up to say that his death was so fucking inevitable… well, if it was inevitable for him, it’s gonna be inevitable for me, too,” Vedder thundered to writer Allan Jones a month after Cobain’s death under the headline “I’m Not Your Fuckin’ Messiah” in Melody Maker. “See, people like him and me, we can’t be real. It’s a contradiction. We can’t be these people who just write these songs. We have to live up to the expectations of a million people.”
The writer isn’t wrong; Vedder, and others tooting the same horn, set up Cobain as a martyr for serious artists outside the corporate grasp.
The second quote isn’t saying Pearl Jam fell off after “Ten” -- it’s saying, at the time, a band as famous as Pearl Jam, or with a similar jock-rock appeal, could never have gotten away with writing songs as challenging or with the sort of depth and message of Daughter, Elderly Woman Behind the Counter, or yes, Alive. You’re reading negativity where it doesn’t exist.
No, I am reading assumptions by the writer based on his own self-loathing. That statement about Daughter is laughable.
It assumes:
1. The gender of the kid is important enough to make it a character study. Which it is not. It's a character study as much as Alive is, which is to say the song is about the situation more so than being a little girl.
2. That the audience couldn't understand male feminism and their singing along with it was ironic. That's pure self loathing directed upon a generalized past.
And screws up:
3. If you were looking for male feminism in that album, or just Vedder dealing with gender expectations, then you'd be talking about Leash off that same album.
The Cobain messiah thing is about the wording and the placing of Vedder as the one nailing him up. Media outlets were already going that way. Vedder identified with Cobain because he was on the brink of suicide himself. To have Vedder as the one nailing him to the cross is some retroactive hyperbole.
Again, out of touch with his own youth, lost in his self loathing.
