I just think it’s funny that Kurt Cobain and his biographer were so vehemently opposed to Pearl Jam’s existence, and then who is it but them closing out the movie Hype! Take a look at Mike McCready’s face during this performance and you’ll find that damn building block of happiness — pride, leaving the impression of little chance of heroin overdose anytime in the future.
Pride, they say, is a deadly sin. On a theoretically unrelated, but, more likely, very much related, note, Pope Benedict XVI referred to music as the “new pornography,” hence spawning the name of The New Pornographers. And I guess it’s a good thing they don’t have Straight Pride Parades, because it would result like the Rolling Stones’ performance at Altamont.
Anyway, on a lighter note, I’d always wondered how I could write a post about Pearl Jam and Green Day together, and it looks like I’ve stumbled upon it. Green Day make quintessential pop/punk, and we may call “No Pride” from Insomniac the quintessential pop/punk song. I used to take it literally, but I think it’s actually ironic, the way all pop music is supposed to be perfectly universal. A prime earlier example of this Billie Joe lyrical irony would be “Chump.”
Anyway, I think Billie Joe just looked around and saw no pride on the west coast, and, gathering the storm of momentum from The Replacements, The Minutemen, Lagwagon or anyone else, came into his own with rock music as his basic means of expression. The zeal and moxie of even American Idiot tracks like “Homecoming” and new singles like “Oh, Love” certainly show that he burns with a pride indeed, he just couldn’t put it into words. He strikes me as the shy type, awkward, perceiving dead ends.