Black

Well, a friend of mine has done it again. This time, he's got me hooked on Pearl Jam. I heard One, their first album, in his car and got so hooked on it that I went out and bought their greatest hits album. Now I'm a believer.

Black is an amazing song. It start off on an acoustic, almost bluesy, and then the discordance kicks in...and before you know it, the tempo is somewhere else all together. Take this excerpt:

Now my bitter hands
cradle broken glass
Of what was everything...

Grunge definitely was something, wasn't it? There was a raw power to it that felt like being socked in the gut. Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam...all of them were grunge gurus, creating masterpiece upon masterpiece. The pinnacle of grunge came in the 90's, and then pretty much just died out, eerily similar to the way some of grunge's main frontmen did (Kurt Cobain shot himself...I believe the lead singer of Alice in Chains also decided it was better to burn than to fade away).

But enough of that...lemme tell you from a musical standpoint why grunge is so awesome.

Grunge is awesome because it has discordance. In the chords and notes of the song themselves.

Most traditional rock songs might have blazing guitar riffs and screaming vocals, but from a musical standpoint, they mostly play it safe, staying within a key, or shifting keys in sometimes almost textbook ways. Things harmonize together in traditional rock. With grunge, things are different. Grunge is rebellion...rebellion against tradition, and against the technical brilliance but at times emotional barrenness of rock shredding. Nothing about grunge is proper, and yet everything is. It defies existence, but continues to exist.

That's what I mean when I say that grunge has discordance within it. Different parts of the song push at each other, and are strung together only by the tight cord of emotion that runs through the song, so tight it almost thrums. That's what gives grunge such power...emotion begets the song and keeps its heart beating, cradling it from falling apart. Of course, this means that the composer had better know what in hell he's doing, or the song won't instill any emotion apart from the urge to roll down the window, throw the cd out, and watch in the rearview with satisfaction as the cd get shattered beneath the tyres of the car behind.

If you fold your arms and say no to grunge, it might be because you find it depressing. I won't try and argue with your there. All that discordance, that emotion is definitely going to take its toll if one becomes a grunge junkie, so listening to such music should definitely be a once-in-a-while thing. Like at the gym, where you can use the aggression instead of letting it build up.

But if it's because you've never given it a chance, don't be so hard on it. Give a listen to some mainstream hits. Black or Jeremy by Pearl Jam. Rooster by Alice in Chains. Plush by Stone Temple Pilots. No matter what you think of it, methinks you won't deem it empty....