Grunge – My (life in) music lists

Best tunes of 1991: #25 Pearl Jam “Jeremy”

I started off this Best tunes of 1991 series with an honourable mention post on Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit”, ruling it out from my top 30 from the outset. In that post, I touched on how I quickly grew to dislike the Seattle scene and any of the bands associated with that sound, whether or not they actually came from that particular geographical area. And it was completely irrational, being less to do with the bands themselves or their music than it was the industry machine and the music press. It was these bands that brought ‘alternative’ to the mainstream and the focus on them effectively narrowed the scope and sound of the genre in North America for way too many years. But before I start ranting again, let me just say that Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” was one of the songs that somehow transcended all of this for me and I couldn’t help but like it.

It was definitely the music video that caught my attention. Considered one of the most controversial of all time, it has been rarely seen on television in recent years. It’s a touchy subject for sure. Teenager brings gun to school. The video, of course, is an extension of the song lyrics which Eddie Vedder wrote based on an article he had read about real events. It was just a short paragraph in a newspaper that he expanded, imagining a back story for the troubled Jeremy that hinted at the not uncommon stories of neglect and bullying.

The song was the third single off Pearl Jam’s debut album, “Ten”, and due to heavy rotation of the video, became a hit for the band, selling tons of copies of their album and kickstarting their career as one of the more important bands in alternative rock. And yeah, their music sounds commonplace enough nowadays but it was just that much different back in 1991. It’s aggression matches the subject perfectly and Vedder’s soulful moan is now iconic and all the more harrowing when he sings lines like: “Daddy didn’t give affection and the boy was something mommy wouldn’t wear.”

But the beauty of it all is that Pearl Jam does not distance themselves from Jeremy, Vedder admitting that he remembered picking on the boy and acknowledging that “we unleashed a lion”. We are all the bullies and the bullied and I think that universality haunted a lot of people. It certainly did me.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1991 list, click here.

Best tunes of 1991: [Special honourable mention] Nirvana “Smells like teen spirit”

Ok. So I before I get started into my Best tunes of 1991 list, I wanted to clear something up right away: Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit” is NOT the number one song. Nay, it didn’t even make my top 30.

I’ll explain.

In the fall of 1991, I was entering into my fifth year of high school. Back then, it was called O.A.C. (don’t ask me what it stood for) but it was also known as grade 13. I had been getting into ‘alternative’ music over the previous few years and was in pretty deep by then. I remember first hearing “Smells like teen spirit” and watching the video for the first time and being pretty invigorated by it all. And I remember shortly afterwards, a bunch of us driving around in my friend Tim’s car, late on the night of the year’s first snowfall, and going to the local mall parking lot to do donuts, while this song played on the car’s tape deck. I also remember ‘moshing’* about to the song at a high school dance shortly after that.

But then, I started to get turned off by it – the constant airplay, how commercial it got, and how all these young kids were talking about Nirvana, ‘alternative’ music, and how the first had invented the second. It got so that each successive single from “Nevermind” (and “In utero” afterwards) turned me off a little bit more.

I got (and I still get) the song’s importance and its influence on alternative rock. The problem was that with “Smells like teen spirit” and Nirvana’s emergence, suddenly every ‘alternative’ band was supposed to sound like that and the other bands from Seattle’s ‘grunge’ scene, effectively narrowing the scope of American (and with it, Canadian) music for a number of years. It’s no wonder then that I turned my ears to England’s music through most of the 90s.

Many years have since passed, however, and my angst towards the band has faded. I can now listen to their songs without the animosity I had garnered towards it in my youth and actually enjoy some of them. I even have their self-titled, ‘best of’ compilation in my iTunes library. And though I still don’t think “Smells like teen spirit” was as original as everyone saw it (Kurt Cobain, himself, admitted he was trying to emulate the Pixies when he wrote it), I look at it as a good song that was at the right place, at the right time. I can really appreciate the raw energy that Krist Novoselic, a pre-Foo Dave Grohl, and of course, Cobain poured into the song. The now famous intro guitar line that carries its way through the chorus and the juxtaposition of its rage against the relative calm of the verses. It is loud and raucous and now iconic. And though I’m sure it’s still getting overplayed on alternative radio stations everywhere, I no longer listen to them with any regularity so that when I do chance upon “Teen Spirit”, it reminds me of the first time all over again. I tap my foot and nod my head ever so slightly, re-enacting an adult version of my teenaged ‘moshing’.

All that being said, don’t look for this song (or any by Nirvana) when I start posting my favourite songs from 1991 in the next week or two. It won’t be there. But that doesn’t mean I won’t understand those of you who will disagree with it not being included. To those, I salute you and recommend you press play below and bang your head along with Kurt. Happy Friday!

* I put the word ‘moshing’ in quotes throughout this post because I wasn’t really… just flailing about in a similar approximation thereof.