Can't Find a Better Band

If there is one happy consequence of the COVID pandemic (and there aren't many), it is the proliferation of bands currently getting on the road and touring. Having had their livelihood shredded both by the shutting of music venues for the best part of two years and the emergence of streaming services like Spotify, a lot of groups nowadays need to earn their keep predominantly from doing live shows. 

Gratifyingly, this applies not just to young bands trying to make a name for themselves but to international acts in my age group's hitting zone. In the last few months we've had Devo, the Dandy Warhols and many others come through town, with the Dirty Three, Boney M and The The all visiting later this year. Perhaps best of all though, in November Pearl Jam are back in the country for the first time in 10 years. As I was about to go on-line and get tickets, I went through the motions of asking my spouse if she wanted to tag along, and got the expected prompt rejection. What surprised me however was our son, who was in earshot, piping up and saying "I'll come".

This was unexpected for a couple of reasons. First, this was not the sort of exchange I would ever have had with my own father. Dad seemed to regard any form of music as an acoustic sensation somewhere on the scale between fingernails scraping on a chalkboard and a cat howling after it had been dropped in a swimming pool. Plus once a balding white bloke from Michigan called Bill Haley started singing in the mid 1950s about Rocking Around the Clock, it was clear to him that society had gone to hell in a hand basket, so the prospects of us ever going to a concert together were somewhere on the scale between none and Buckleys.

Secondly, I had no idea that he might have been into Pearl Jam. After all, this was a band that emerged in about 1990, roughly 10 years before he was born. That would be like someone my age being into Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis, or Bill Haley for that matter, who were all fine in their own right I suppose, but I'm happy to leave them to the octogenarians to enjoy. However, when I thought about it at more length and considered the state of the world now to how things were when I was his age in the early 1990s, it kind of made sense.

As anyone who lived through the early 1990s would agree, it was a quite anxious and unsettling time. The recession we had to have was in full swing, unemployment in Australia hit 11% at the same time official interest rates were at 18% - both numbers that would be unthinkable today. To top that off, the Soviet Union had just collapsed leaving a reckless drunk called Boris Yeltsin in charge of Russia's nuclear arsenal and Saddam Hussein decided to waltz over the border and annex Kuwait, triggering the first Gulf War.

So when grunge started to emerge not long after, I totally got it. Somehow all of a sudden the music in vogue such as Kylie Minogue singing about being "lucky lucky lucky" or Rick Astley wanting to tell you how he's feeling just didn't cut it any more and reflecting the zeitgeist, things became a lot more gritty and real world. Along with Nirvana, Pearl Jam were at the forefront of this change, with songs about mental illness ("Even Flow"), domestic abuse ("Daughter", "Better Man"), gun enthusiasts ("Glorified G") and dysfunctional families ("Alive", "Jeremy") - topics no artist in the Stock Aitken Waterman pop stable would have touched with a 10 foot bargepole.

While grunge came along too late to be part of my formative years, nonetheless songs from that era  still feature prominently in my playlist and they always serve to evoke my memories of what was a fairly difficult and confronting time. Not dissimilar, I imagine, to how young adults are finding the present.

Often its the practice of older generations to complain about and criticise those following about having it easy, but to my mind younger Millenials or Generation Z have every right to be angry about their circumstances. Not only have they just had to sacrifice 2 years of their precious youth locked down for their parents and grandparents benefit, but decades of failed housing policy in this country means that many of them will never be able to afford to own their own home, and to add insult to injury, if they want to undertake tertiary study then they have to spend years paying off a HECS debt for an education that their parents were able to get basically for free. Plus the world's geopolitical situation in 2024 is arguably worse than it was in 1991.

Which then begs the question, where is their generation's musical response to all this? In the manner of grunge in the early 1990s and punk in the late 1970s, we should be expecting the current times to give rise to a new trend which knocks the likes of Taylor Swift off their perch. However, aside from a few acts such as local band Amyl and the Sniffers (who I'd hoped might get the gig supporting Pearl Jam, as they'd be a great fit), the Viagra Boys and one or two others, there does not seem to be an international groundswell yet. Which may be why younger people like my son need to look to the music of their parents' generation to find expression for their angst.  

Whatever the reason for his interest, it promises to be a fantastic show and I look forward to dressing up in black, and railing against shitty times past and present while singing along to some classic tracks.