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In the beginning of the video above, you can see already that Eddie is bristling against anything that takes away from the music - the first two Pearl Jam videos were actually live performances rather than staged lip-sync productions. There was Poison’s “Something To Believe In” in 1990, but it’s kinda hard to take a song like that seriously from the band behind “Unskinny Bop.” There was George Michael’s “Praying For Time,” which is kind of a relentless screed about how awful we should all feel about how we live our lives (that still hits me in the gut whenever I listen to it - “charity is a coat you wear twice a year.”) I’m sure there were many more, but I wasn’t much aware of them, and I wasn’t all that socially conscious, so “Evenflow” broke through on the wave of that riff, delivering pretty stark imagery about a broken man living on the street with nowhere to go, and anywhere he COULD go is a “hall of shame” anyway, and he’s still praying to something in hopes that it won’t be nothing, which is not a sentiment I heard a lot of back then - the concept of atheism, or a shit God who doesn’t care. As far as songs dealing with this issue, I’d known Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror” in 1987, still a pretty powerful song (meaning it can make me misty-eyed if I let it in). This was a bluntly angry song about the plight of the homeless. (Again, I’m not above it all, but Bon Jovi seemed like they weren’t as obnoxious as most of the cock bands and they’d occasionally tell a compelling story.) At the time, Pearl Jam’s second single “ Evenflow” had hit the airwaves, so I tape-recorded it off the radio and gave it a listen… and soon became obsessed with trying to figure out the words. He’d earlier convinced me to like Bon Jovi’s “New Jersey” album, so he was trustworthy. Guns or Bulletboys or something and I was sick and tired of that crap.Īt some point in 1992, my friend Drew told me to give Pearl Jam a chance. But there was just so much of it for so long that I started to hate it all, and the first time I saw the video for “Alive,” I flipped the channel in about 30 seconds, assuming with a groan that it was just another L.A. I wanted something different, but I was in no way cool enough to actually explore alternative music at the time, although I did get a little hip-hop by osmosis from my brothers. But most of it was godawful crap like Motley Crue’s “Girls Girls Girls” that I just hated. I’ll still belt out “I’ll Never Let You Go” by Steelheart if it comes on my shuffle. Since most of this was geared toward me, the pubescent cishet white boy, I can’t claim to be immune. It worked every time - so much that even a clueless teenager like me could see the pattern. Obnoxious asshole schlock-rock had a proven formula - debut with a hard-rocking number that shows us they don’t give a damn about the rules, then follow it up with a power ballad to let us know how emotionally deep they are. It was almost all there was, as far as I could tell. Some of us were, however, capable of disliking the misogynist content of these songs, even if we didn’t quite understand the concept yet. Cock Rock is what most people refer to as “hair bands” these days, but this was an era where some of us still sported the mullet unironically (and seriously, if you’re doing that ironically, cut it out, huh?), so we didn’t really see much wrong with the hair until years later. When we did get cable, my middle and high school years, it was in time for the Age of Cock Rock. Idol was the closest I got to being aware of punk. There was no internet, and my family didn’t get cable until the mid-80s, but my grandmother had it, so I’d watch as much as I could when we visited to try and see my rock hero Billy Idol, “Weird” Al Yankovic, or any of the New Wave faves I had.

I grew up in a tiny homogeneous suburb of Toledo, Ohio, on a steady diet of 1980s-era MTV, when music videos were their bread and butter.