21st Century Pearl Jam (3/7)
Hi I’m back.1 Last week I blabbered on about 2002’s Riot Act and this week I shall blabber on about 2006’s Pearl Jam.
But first I’ll blabber on about, like, 1995. I loved it when Pearl Jam boycotted Ticketmaster in the mid-90s.2 This meant dragging themselves and their crew and their equipment out to random fairgrounds or whatnot and setting up their own shows. It was a lot of effort, meant losing millions in revenue they could have gotten from playing traditional venues, and then the DOJ dropped its antitrust investigation against Ticketmaster anyway. It’s the kind of thing that might be easy to be cynical about. But middle-school me took away the lesson that it’s worth trying to do the right thing, even when it’s hard, and even if it probably won’t work, and grown-up me appreciates that lesson still.
In the 2000s, that same stubborn persistence struck again. The band made their anti-war sentiments clear on 2002’s Riot Act, and while on tour for that album, drew ire from a subset of fans who apparently hadn’t been paying attention the entire time? Which the band responded to not by retreating, but by making a whole-ass anti-war album, 2006’s Pearl Jam.
I was going to focus in this little series on highlighting more minor tracks, and “World Wide Suicide” conversely charted higher than any other Pearl Jam track in the 2000s.3 But it does capture the theme of the album, and it’s the easiest song to find live videos for, and the live version does rock pretty hard so:
Bonus Tracks: The header title comes from my favorite song on Pearl Jam, “Army Reserve.” Which makes for a nice one-two (gut) punch with the following track, “Come Back.” (Also if anyone is wondering if things will ever lighten up, next week, I promise).4
Happy Day Threading!5