Mookie Blalock

"You must be older than Pearl Jam's Ten to drink in this establishment."

That's the whole album there.  I had gone back and forth between "Once," "Jeremy," "Black," and "Garden" as the representative track, but---and this is clued right at once, with the fade-in in the beginning---it really is an album that's meant to be listened to in its entirety, that works as a whole really much more than do all its individual songs.  There's a few other examples of albums that work symphonically in this way---U2's Boy certainly, and The Joshua Tree, at least once you skip the first three tracks; The Cure's Disintegration is a better example even than Ten; and Sgt. Pepper's and Good Vibrations and the others even casual music fans can name.

(Funny how, in the age of the iPod shuffle feature, one has to remind the reader that music can be listened to that way.)

This blog's intended audience remembers all of these events and groans when reminded that they're twenty-one years old, so I needn't highlight the significance of this album---and its counterpart, about a month away, now---but for anyone actually close to the age of Pearl Jam's first appearance, it might be necessary to highlight just how bad pop and rock music was.  Before this, certainly, but also after.  Pearl Jam arrived and blew apart a radio landscape that had been completely devoted to just utter schlock, Milli Vanilli and the New Kids and Roxette, not that there's anything wrong with Roxette but if that's the highlight of the year in music? things must have been terrifically shitty the other 51 weeks, and indeed they were.  The arrival of rap as a popular format was incipient, but it certainly hadn't yet changed what was on the dial, other than "Ice Ice Baby."  Mariah Carey, sure, she was just starting, and you can't discount her success, but it's not at all the music I listen to, nor what I'm talking about.

And then for one brief shining moment---was it over in a summer? in a season? did it last a year?---two dozen kids from Seattle in five, six different bands just rewrote the entire game.  Excellent, excellent music had arrived, and the studio-assembled vanity projects just couldn't maintain their grip on the airwaves, and rock and roll radio actually had rock and roll on it again.

Again, this wouldn't last.  By the end of the nineties, "modern rock" had replaced grunge and alternative, and the studios were once again in control.  Third Eye Blind was doing its Eddie Vedder impersonation---and it was a good one, or at least it would have fooled Helen Keller---and the folks making money were the ones who always had.  (The mp3 was right on the horizon, then, and that really would overturn the order of the biz permanently, the way alternative music had tried to.)

But man.  For that summer, or season, or year...  Hey, you know what, I'll add "Jeremy" to this, too.