“I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life”: Pearl Jam’s Ten and the Road to Authenticity

Abstract

Pearl Jam’s debut album is a special and important record in the context of both the ‘grunge’ alternative music phenomenon of the 1990s and the band’s own subsequent growth as important rock musicians and artists in the subsequent twenty years. Representing the coming together of the ‘Seattle sound’ of seminal Seattle bands Green River and the recently dissolved Mother Love Bone, and a more classic blues-rock with the dark, Morrisonesque angst of its front man Eddie Vedder and his haunting autobiographical lyrics, the album became the quintessential sound of the grunge movement’s explosion in the early nineties. Ten sold over 10 million copies and marking the way for their second album Vs, which broke all first-week sales records and put Vedder on the cover of Time magazine. Whilst the sound provided the blueprint for mid-late nineties alternative rock and nu-metal bands, for Pearl Jam, it became a benchmark against which they progressively sought to distance themselves. Their later albums Vitalogy and No Code deliberately marked themselves as more proto-punk, anti-materialist and anti-commercial, refusing to develop Ten’s initial sound. They stopped making videos, refused interviews, took on Ticketmaster, released live bootlegs of their shows, released their last album independently and work tirelessly for charitable causes. With Ten, lies the paradox of Pearl Jam: the band created the archetypal era-defining rock/grunge album, breathtaking in its musicianship and depth of emotional intensity, only to spend the rest of their careers working against it. For that reason, it remains a most intriguing debut album.