Pearl Jam - Merkinball

27 years later, i think i've changed my mind. It can't be coincidence that i picked up and actually listened to Merkinball with fresh ears. Pearl Jam and Neil Young decided to make an album together after playing at an abortion rights benefit. That's not at all why i picked it off the shelf and decided to review it, but we can't unrecognize it after it has already happened. Times like these i just acknowledge that my subconscious works 24/7 and muddle through as best i can. 

My original thought was "what are you supposed to actually do with this EP? Can you even really call it an EP when it's actually structured like a one off non-album single? Are the songs as mediocre as i remember? What do arrowheads and pubic wigs have to do with anything?" Plus, it's easy to say "Pearl Jam and Neil Young made an album in 4 days over 2 months," but you have to include the fact that Eddie Vedder was hiding from a stalker for 2 or 3 of those, and these are specifically tracks that didn't make the album. So, what is it? Is it a joke? Is it the only way Pearl Jam could get around label conflicts that kept their name off Mirrorball altogether? Is Neil Young a Pump Organ virtuoso? So many questions. 

I guess you kind of have to take their word for it and accept the inscription on the back at face value. "This piece accompanies Neil Young's Mirrorball." 

So it's 2 songs that form 1 piece that accompanies a Neil Young album i've never listened to. Ok, definitely not going to listen to Mirrorball to clarify, so we're listening to the disassociated coda of an album we've never heard. That's fun. 

Whaddawe get? 1) some truely raunchy guitar bashing, and 2) a slow ballad dedicated to Clayton E., whoever he is. I have to be honest, these are mediocre Pearl Jam songs. Still way more enjoyable than mediocre Poison or MGK or something, but the first 3 Pearl Jam albums are an epoch unto themselves. They're 3 of my 4 dozen top 5 albums. Of the rest of their career, i've listened to exactly No Code and Gigaton, and everything in between does not interest me. Doesn't mean any of it's bad, just that i don't care. It's music for someone else to love. That's not really surprising, i said exactly the same thing about Green Day and STP and Coldplay. Hell, the only Radiohead albums i like are The Bends, OK Computer, and In Rainbows, so i'm just as biased as anybody. 

I guess what i'm really trying to say is that even though this 2-track epilogue to a Neil Young album doesn't affect me in any way, i can completely understand the circumstances surrounding it and i don't think it lessens the value of Pearl Jam or Neil Young, and it certainly doesn't deserve some kind of fake moral outrage on my part. I'm completely happy that they had the opportunity to live their lives and careers the way they chose to live them. 

I mean, you're totally allowed to be a right-wing conservative alt-nazi-supremysogynist as long as you don't act that way in public or expect me to agree/hang out with you, or not call your ideology garbage. Your ideology is garbage and i'm an unwaveringly honest person. I'm merely using the established precedent of "i'm rubber, you're glue..." to highlight the double standard you're trying to exploit. It's offensive, certainly, but i think you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that i'm not being fair and balanced in acknowledging that offense. Merkinball doesn't suck at all, i just don't like it that much, and that is definitely my own problem, not anyone else's.