Fluxblog 439: all Vs. everything

I wrote about all the songs on Pearl Jam's 1993 sophomore album

I took a break from my usual routine this week to write about Pearl Jam’s second album Vs., which came out 30 years ago as of October 12th. As far as I can recall this was the first album I went out of my way to acquire on the day it came out. (I can clearly remember begging my mom to drive me to the mall.) This album was a very formative record for me, and I decided to write about the full record because I think the songs are all very well built and Eddie Vedder’s lyrical concerns were ahead of the curve in ways the band does not get much credit for today. Also it’s just fun to challenge myself to see what I can come up with when tasked with writing about music I’ve known so well for the vast majority of my life. I kinda figure a lot of you will tune out because it’s Pearl Jam, but if I get enough positive feedback I’ll consider doing this again for some other record.

Anyway, let’s get back to 1993…

Listen to Vs.: [Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube | Pearl Jam Store]

GO
 
There was a lot of athleticism in early Pearl Jam, some of it on display in their highly animated and occasionally death-defying live shows, but it was also something that came through in the recordings. The band members, most especially bassist Jeff Ament and singer Eddie Vedder, were athletically inclined men and I think they were all in some way trying to communicate something about the thrill of aggressive, focused, fully embodied physical movement in the music.
 
The main guitar riffs in “Go” are all about bombast and impact, which makes some sense as they were written by drummer Dave Abbruzzese. The verses sound like a fight-or-flight sprint; the refrain before the chorus sounds like it was made to be the soundtrack of a slam dunk montage. The actual chorus is all velocity, Vedder’s voice seeming to zoom past you like you’re hearing it through the Doppler effect.
 
Vs. is in a lot of ways a record about what we’d now call toxic masculinity, and the many ways it damages the lives of men who buy into it and everyone else around them, most especially women. “Go” sets this up by throwing us in the deep end, putting us in the mind of a man who’s behaved horribly in a relationship and is flustered and stunned that he’s being dumped. A lot of Vedder’s lyrics in “Go” are deliberately inarticulate, he’s just screaming out words like SUCK, BLOOD, and TOUCH and begging “please don’t go on me.” He’s sputtering, acting out, and ultimately just collapses as the song seems to crash full speed into a wall at the end.
 
ANIMAL
 
The lyrics of “Animal” are left intentionally vague, with Vedder giving you just enough to catch the gist of some monstrous activity going down – gay bashing? gang rape? lynching? – but leave it up to you to fill in the blanks. The song is more intense and scary this way, like Vedder is witnessing a ritualistic evil so terrible he can’t even name it. His disdain for this act of group brutality sets up a theme that carries through to “Rats” and “W.M.A.” later in the record – the notion that people often become worse and less civilized when they’re part of a group in a “bad apple spoils the bunch” sort of way. The sound is aggressive and overwhelming, with guitars seeming to beat down vertically and slashing at diagonals while Ament’s busy bass line seems to dodge and bounce around like a boxer in the ring. It’s hard to tell whether this violent sound is meant to symbolize what Vedder is seeing, or the fantasy of responding in kind.
 
DAUGHTER
 
Stone Gossard’s strummed acoustic chords in “Daughter” initially sound very bright and wholesome but that impression shifts as a creeping tension in the accompaniment becomes more pronounced as the song moves towards an elliptical conclusion that typically extends out in live performance. Vedder runs with that tension in the lyrics, sketching out the story of a little girl with some kind of disability who is abused by her frustrated parents behind closed doors. The subject matter isn’t far off from 10,000 Maniac’s “What’s the Matter Here,” but with a layer of abstraction and not much in the way of editorializing. It’s a dark scene but Vedder is remarkably optimistic about it, declaring that she will rise up and overcome this situation at the dramatic peak of the song. This is one of the earliest examples of a theme that will carry through the rest of Vedder’s work with and without Pearl Jam – deep empathy for troubled women and rooting for them to get out the traps they’re placed in by a patriarchal society.
 
GLORIFIED G
 
“Glorified G” is probably the biggest sophomore album swing on Vs.: light and goofy and mildly funky, with lyrics satirizing clueless American gun nuts. Vedder goes very broad, making the guy in this song sound as much like a patriotic early 90s yokel as possible while making the character speak the parts that are usually left to subtext, like “I feel so manly when armed!”

It wouldn’t take much for this song to go wrong but the melody and grooves are very strong, and ultimately this is a showcase for the band’s instincts as pop songwriters. Brendan O’Brien’s sleek production doesn’t do much to obscure this song’s musical similarities to the likes of the Spin Doctors, but given that the song is a satire the squeaky clean sound is a useful musical hint that they’re going for irony here.

Also worth noting that this song was apparently inspired by an episode in which Abbruzzese was excitedly talking about buying some guns, so this is basically Vedder mercilessly mocking his own bandmate. No wonder Abbruzzese was fired a little over a year after this album came out – it’s pretty clear from most accounts that Vedder could not stand the guy.
 
DISSIDENT
 
I’ve always been curious how Vedder approached this composition, which basically sounds like a brighter and tighter variation on “Alive,” and decided that the lyrics should be about a woman who takes in and then ultimately betrays a political dissident. It’s not exactly an intuitive connection, but I suspect the creative decision came out of noticing the music has an arc that signals a big dramatic turn from the bridge into the last round of choruses and he reverse engineered it from there. Vedder writes about this woman with a lot of sympathy despite her betraying the dissident, placing the emphasis on her kindness rather than in her caving to authority. I think Vedder was asking the listener to think of how they’d act in a similar situation, and to keep in mind how even the best of us can sell other people out if our safety and comfort is threatened. She’s not a villain at all; the song is a tragedy.

W.M.A.
 
“W.M.A.” stands for white male American, the demographic of 100% of Pearl Jam in 1993, as well as a majority of their fans to this day. The latter is important, particularly when you consider how young a lot of the Pearl Jam audience was at the time. Thanks to the extreme success of Ten, Vs. was a record with a massive built-in audience of mostly very young white people, and to confront that audience with a song that tells them straight-up “you won the lottery when you were born and entered the world with privilege and you benefit from a system that makes other people suffer” is a very bold move.

The lyrics start with this premise but focus on police brutality directed at Black people, drawing a line from the average white Pearl Jam listener to events like the highly publicized beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991. This is basically an ACAB/Black Lives Matter song written and recorded nearly 30 years in advance, and frankly, I think encountering this song at 14 had a significant impact on me and my perspective on the police in particular. It’s not didactic, but even with a few ironic lines like “Jesus greets me, looks just like me” the message is clear and reinforced by the nauseous dread and paranoia that comes through in Ament’s creeping bass line, Abbruzzese’s busy percussion, and that subtle, sinister keyboard part. They really make you feel their disgust and frustration in your gut.
 
BLOOD
 
For the longest time I took this as a song about heroin with the “stab it down, one-way needle” line, but a lot of people read this as Vedder expressing extreme paranoia about becoming a rock star. Now I think it’s more of a “why not both?” situation, since in the context of alt-rock in 1993 these two things overlapped quite a bit and that conflation is pretty interesting now. In either case this funk-thrash hybrid is an expression of undiluted rage and anxiety, Vedder lashing out as he feels everyone and everything around him stripping away his autonomy and mutating him into someone else – “paint Ed big, turn Ed into one of his enemies.” He’s thinking like a maniac and very much sounding like one; Vedder’s screaming on this recording are about as unhinged as he gets.

REARVIEWMIRROR
 
“Rearviewmirror” is essentially the “she said” to the “he said” of “Go,” a song about a woman breaking away from an abusive relationship and the reality of that situation coming into focus as she gets further away from it both physically and emotionally. It’s a sharp contrast musically and lyrically. Whereas “Go” is largely incoherent drywall-punching anger that ends in a dramatic collapse, “Rearviewmirror” is clear-headed and insightful as it zooms off into the horizon. The guitar and vocal melodies are particularly strong but the most memorable aspect of the song is the way the band conveys forward momentum, particularly as the song reaches a dramatic break point before the climax where it seems like the character has gotten far enough away to sense the sheer number of possibilities ahead of them before committing to one direction in particular. The lyrics are about the character’s dawning clarity about what they’ve experienced, but the music in the end is all about the thrill of realizing you’ve attained some measure of freedom.
 
RATS
 
“Rats” may be the most dated song on Vs. in the sense that it’s firmly rooted in an alt-funk moment that was beginning to fade around the time the record came out – think Fishbone, pre-ballads Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, some Fugazi. But this is no bad thing, since as time goes by history gets flattened and it’s easier to take this song at face value now than it was in the ’90s. I’ve never felt convinced by Vedder’s argument that rats may be inherently better than humans in this song – some of the claims about what rats don’t do seems easy to disprove – but I do appreciate the way this song echoes the sentiment of “Animal” from earlier in the record. It’s probably just a coincidence resulting from his fixations at the time, but it’s fun that the album sequencing eventually answers the question “what kind of animal would you rather be with, Eddie?”
 
ELDERLY WOMAN BEHIND THE COUNTER IN A SMALL TOWN
 
Pearl Jam’s setlists tend to shorten this song’s title to just “Small Town,” which I think shows where Vedder wants the emphasis to be in how people understand it. The elderly woman is the specific and the small town is the universal, it’s a song about what happens when one keeps their life small and don’t stray far from what they know. Making the protagonist of the song an elderly woman makes it more poignant, but also swerves the song away from being judgmental and more of a generous character study of someone suddenly recognizing an old love who has moved on with their life while she’s stayed put. She’s too shy to talk to them, she’s embarrassed about her lack of worldliness, she’s ashamed of being “stuck up on the shelf.” The big climax of the song – “I just want to scream hello!” – is always cathartic at their shows with a whole arena full of people bellowing along, but in context it’s a thwarted desire. She can’t bring herself to do it, so the “but now here you are, and here I am” stings a little. She’s defeated by her timidity.
 
LEASH
 
The characters on Vs. all seem very lonely, isolated, and at the mercy of outside forces. This is true for the narrator of “Leash” too, except for that they’re actively trying to connect with people and find a true community to escape and/or rebel against an abusive authority. Vedder goes full anthem mode on this one, from the opening declaration “troubled souls unite, we’ve got ourselves tonight” to the big scream-along chorus. The second half of the verse is rhythmically rocky but gives some space for Vedder to express doubt – “I am lost, I am no guide, but I’m by your side” – that contrasts the declarative certainty of most of the song.

The word is that “Leash” is written about the same woman who was institutionalized in “Why Go,” and this one tells her story once she’s returned to her life. This doesn’t quite make sense to me as the “it was their idea, I proved to be a man” suggests this is written from a masculine perspective, but in any case I like this song as the answer to the question “why go home?” Well, you may get hassled by your family and other people who need to get outta your fuckin’ face, but you also get to find your people and “delight in your youth.” Not a bad deal.

INDIFFERENCE
 
The character in “Indifference” is a Sisyphean figure who’s resigned to the limitations placed on him in life and so beaten down by circumstances that he can’t imagine escaping them. This song would be unbearably bleak if not for the heroic quality of Vedder’s voice, which shifts the tone from despondent to defiant. This is not a song about a man who’s given up, it’s a song about a man who’s staring down some higher power and saying “is that all you got?” Set against a backdrop of stand-up bass, droning organ, and an overtly bluesy lead guitar part by Mike McCready, Vedder mostly sings from the bottom of his register, biding his time until he unleashes his full intensity for the bridge: “I will scream my lungs out til it feels this room.” On a musical level it wouldn’t make sense to put this song anywhere but the end of the record, but I like that on a lyrical level it’s the perfect ending to this record fixated on conflict and anger. This is the guy who won’t stop fighting, the guy who righteously will never back down.