Vitalogy - The actual review (not for the squeamish)

 

            It’s weird to read about Pearl Jam because everyone involved seems to have a completely different experience. The one consistent thread is that the band is at war with the business that surrounds making music. It’s much bigger than that, though. Everything about Pearl Jam rages against the fake corporate Disneyland version of life. That was the original name for this album, Life.

            Some critics say this third album is their best, some say its experimental aspects are a failure, everyone avoids the actual subject matter at all costs, including me. I can’t review Ten, I could barely describe the aesthetic of Vs., and now we’re literally wrapping actual life in the shroud of bullshit propaganda “polite” society demands in the form of medical authority (sell me immortality). I even went so far as to create a whole story so I didn’t actually have to publish this on facebook. Fuck that. Pearl Jam sings about the severe psychological trauma of actual life. Incest, racially motivated murder, addiction, exhibitionist suicide, abusive relationships, you name it. Having also devoted my life to really observing and contemplating that soft white underbelly, I’m impressed Eddie even gets out of bed some days. I know there are days I don’t want to, and the ghosts of very real friends who didn’t walk around in my head exactly like Uncle Cyrus planned. Love ain’t gonna fix that like in the movie or the Des’ree album, I have to lock every one of those cells up tight and redraw the incantations myself.

            Brenden O’Brien says they were imploding on this album. Dave felt like he couldn’t communicate with anyone else in the band, and they fired him near the end. Stone Gossard refused to be everybody’s mediator. Everyone felt like Eddie was being domineering, and they weren’t happy about most of the tracks being jam tracks. Guys, that’s the exact opposite of everything you said about the first two albums. Lack of communication? Vedder sounds more alone than ever? No shit. I think we can all recognize and understand the HEAVY, but not many people understand what it’s like to carry the source of all that around in your head while being forced to have coherent conversations about which parts of the book you bought at a garage sale are still under copyright protection with the guy whose money you’re spending and the band’s lawyer. Most people say “oh, man I get it” and let it evaporate because they don’t actually have to deal with it. Eddie, though, he must have a spectacular collection of bottles. I bet it’s even more impressive than mine. Boycotting Ticketmaster venues is like the most miniscule attempt to get your brain right I can think of in that situation. The band was legitimately worried some of these songs were too “accessible.”

            Which brings us to Whipping. You know that my perspective is that people in general are bad at interpreting things because of confirmation bias. There are two parts to this song, the lyrics and the piece of paper on which they are written. You can’t just interpret the two as a conglomeration, you have to interpret each one separately then watch what happens when you conjoin them. The piece of paper is a petition to President Clinton asking the federal government to intervene in the social issue of abortion. The petition states that we the undersigned understand there is a very important difference of opinion on this issue, but the pro-life side of the argument has crossed the line into actually condoning the murder of doctors and women who are deciding to terminate a pregnancy.

            Lyrically speaking, the chorus (arguably the most important part of any song because it is designed to be the most memorable hook) is just the phrase “they’re whipping.” I like to think of myself as somewhat well-educated on the subject of lyrical interpretation, but even I can only think of two plausible scenarios to which this phrase refers. The first is BDSM, which I think we can all agree is not the intended context of the phrase as used in this song. The second is slavery, specifically a slave owner whipping a slave as both a punishment to the person being whipped and a moral lesson to the people witnessing the whipping.

            Understanding that context of the chorus, it is quite difficult to avoid interpreting the first verse as anything other than a depiction of the mentality of a rapist. Consequently, the second voice seems most likely the voice of the victim. Thus, we end up back at the chorus as Eddie Vedder’s commentary on the situation.

            Average hospital cost of childbirth in 2015 was $4,500 with or without insurance. Average cost of raising that same child to age 18 was over $230, 000. That’s more than I owe in student loan debt that I can’t pay back, and wrote an entire fucking book about, after a decade of bankruptcy caused by losing a shitty adjunct teaching position while I was a dissertation away from earning a PhD! Dear conservative America, you’ve created and defend a world where having children is a financial burden, and you should be more ashamed of that than anything. Please remember, I say this as a happily married man with two well fed children, take a good look in the mirror and tell yourself to go fuck yourself.