This is how I wrote then:
Pearl Jam is also, after all, an excellent live band for long periods of time. Hard working, energetic, generous, interacted. Eddie Vedder not only retains his guttural vibrato, he also knows how to control a giant audience.
This is how I would write today:
Pearl Jam is for a long time a perfectly okay live band. Hard working, energetic, generous, interacted. The band’s basic problem remains, however – it does rock that very much wants to stand for something different and challenge, but at no point does it.
The 21st century has been a dizzying time. First, everything became available. The torrent pages and then the streaming services made the most obscure from all corners of the world and popular music history at all times a push away (although most, unfortunately also a lot of rock journalists, of course used their newfound freedom to continue listening to exactly what most others listened to).
Pretty soon everything was also allowed. All those sharp boundaries that were previously part of the music and, of course, more importantly, the music critique, were erased. Everything we thought was obvious would be tested again, questioned and preferably of all overturned. It showed that you had quite a nice and not so neurotic attitude to your own taste.
In response to the extremely snobbish and dogmatic 90’s, this revolution had its point, basically the change is probably for the better, but for the individual critic’s judgment, this revolution could, in weak moments, have devastating effects. At worst, the treacherously permissive spirit of the times could trick unsuspecting reviewers into deviating from their most basic principles, abandoning their most important ideals, and more or less selling their souls (for an average concert review fee).
I know more about everything this than most. I gave a Pearl Jam concert a rating of four. And had I been able to tell it to my fifteen-year-old self, it would have resulted in something that could have been a scene in a high-concept sci-fi thriller where the younger version, in pure anger, completely pulverizes the older one.
So what happened? Why did it go as it did on that unfortunate day ten years ago?
I probably wanted to “challenge myself”. In keeping with the spirit of the late 00’s and early 10’s era, I imagined that a high grade for an aging grunge colossus would show some kind of open mind to an old pop string, that it would appear like a heartwarming attempt to step out of my comfort zone, that the doubt about my previous musical ideals would indicate some kind of increased maturity or depth.
The problem was that it forced me to pretend to appreciate Pearl Jam. A band I actively disliked for more than 30 years. When far too many of my peers in the early nineties got lost in the viscous hard rock called grunge, I was one of those who resisted, refusing to put on my flannel shirt and cargo shorts (not to mention Stone Gossard’s unfortunate combination of tight linen and plum stops when Pearl Jam rocked the entire free world with Neil Young at an MTV Gala 1993).
My problem with the genre, then as now, was that the grunge was painted as an alternative, as in alternative rock, but I never understood what, because it rather just drove the rock even further down in the most muddy and overused wheel tracks. The whole cultural popular existence of the genre was a kind of middle-class provocation that only worked in an American context where each new generation produces a large batch of Republican and distorted Christian parents who want nothing more than to be upset, and was caught in a kind of juvenile constructed exclusion. Do you see my crazy goatee? Do you understand how difficult I am? Do you see that I dressed down even though I grew up in a villa, do you understand how real it is? Do you see that I dyed my hair blue too? Do you see my protest, Dad? Why don ‘t you see me, please? Dad?
Possibly there is something genuinely touching in the Pearl Jam men’s constant and over the years increasing pursuit of (very American individualistic) freedom, all Pearl Jam men’s favorite movie is Sean Penn’s “Into the wild” about a guy who just shit in modern life and finds itself on the roads and close to nature, but it was of course just a dead end where all the mighty rock men sooner or later end up.
And apparently me too then. Because ten years ago I imagined that I wanted to break free from expectations and for a moment forget that thirty years ago I chose My Bloody Valentine and A Tribe Called Quest over Pearl Jam. A choice I stand for and am prepared to defend into eternity, but which in a moment of weakness I thought I needed to question.
I wanted to show that I dared to go out on unknown paths. Get me out in the wild. Instead, I rushed straight into the worst trap of all – I myself, if only for one night, became a Pearl Jam man.