One of my favorite rock albums growing up was Pearl Jam's Ten. It's eleven tracks of some of the best alternative rock the 90's ever made. Every song is packed with a ton of energy and soul from all members of the band, particularly vocalist Eddie Vedder. And while many of the songs feature driving grooves and strong, charged riffs, the overall theme of the album, if one can be identified, is the cycle of trauma. This is what Myles Werntz writes about in his essay for Secular Music & Sacred Theology, how Pearl Jam invokes suffering and tragedy into the lyrics of Ten. What I want to focus on upon reading Werntz's essay is the ability of the band to channel these lyrical topics into such extremely passionate and adrenaline-boosting performances. It's difficult to read into the lyrics of Ten and not notice how dark all the subject matter is. "Alive" and "Once" are two parts of a story about a young man who learns that the man who he thought was his father is actually his stepfather and that his real father is dead. His mother makes a sexual advance on him, causing him to run away from home. The man descends into madness and goes on a killing spree. "Even Flow" is about a homelessness. "Why Go" is about a young woman institutionalized by her misunderstanding parents. "Jeremy" is about a boy, ignored and mistreated at his school and by his parents, who kills himself in front of his classmates. It goes on. So, the question I'm asking is how can a band who writes songs about topics like these do this? Pearl Jam's performance at the Norwegian music festival Pinkpop in 1992 is one of the most inspiring concerts I've ever seen. The video starts in the middle of a song, "Even Flow", and the band continues with a lot of cuts from Ten and ends with a few covers. Every member of the band is on fire here. The drummer and the guitarists are perfectly in sync with each other. At one point, bassist Jeff Ament falls on the floor and just keeps playing, bouncing back up after ten seconds. And Vedder is earning his status as a rock god in this performance. It's crazy how on point he is. Every ounce of him is being channeled into his singing. It's genuinely awe-inspiring. Whenever I watch this performance, I get chills. There's this crazy adrenaline boost throughout, but especially during the songs "Why Go" and "Black". I feel like I'm witnessing the magic of music in this video. And I ask myself, how are they able to do that with songs about suicide, depression, and depravity? I think Werntz's essay helps me answer this question. He challenges the idea that Ten is "simply a dystopian collection of songs" and instead puts forth that "it is a work designed to question whether past violence inevitably leads to future violence." Werntz draws on the work of John Howard Yoder to suggest that perhaps what Pearl Jam hints at in the album is that "the solution to trauma and violence lies not in repeating it, but in breaking free of its bonds and presuppositions." The band has created something like a "secular parable" to orient its audience. This requires a telling of the story, a full acknowledge of the trauma suffered, so that it may be overcome. In light of this, I can read Pearl Jam's Pinkpop performance as the act of breaking free. With this incredible live concert, Vedder and the band stake the claim that trauma does not have to entrap or suffocate. It can be broken and transcended. Maybe it's an exorcism of demons, maybe it's giving the demons the middle finger. But Pearl Jam, I think, at Pinkpop demonstrated that suffering doesn't have to be the end, that there's a chance for redemption. It may not be a Christian telling of redemption, but its powerful all the same.
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AuthorSam Coker Archives
April 2018
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