I think some people are embarrassed because it has this pop element to it, and it is outside the rest of the world’s perception of the band. Reality is they raised a lot of money for refugees repackaging that, and that’s I think worthy of praise. There’s I think this sense that it gets embarrassing when the world at large gets ahold of it, and it becomes a thing of its own, and alters perspectives of what the band is and who their audience should be.guitar_davey wrote:Ms Harmless wrote:that's their own fault, not Pearl Jam's; they recorded that when rifling through old 50s indie records and finding a tragi-pop song to cover was cool and quaint; there's nothing embarrassing about "Last Kiss"Ledbetterdays wrote:In a lot of ways, Last Kiss is the single most embarrassing thing. For some people, it is the only thing they know of modern Pearl Jam and it is a cover.
I don’t want to dig too far into implicit bias, but to say Pearl Jam toes this line, from the get go, of classic rock and someone slightly heavier. Add to that the band’s earlier years were rife with self-consciousness about some level of street cred both self-inflicted but also instigated in part by Kurt Cobain’s commentary on them. This worry about being sell outs or catering to the masses was more or less an embarrassment. So then Last Kiss comes along, a cover tune that is a 50s pop song, and it gains all this momentum, and it’s the furthest thing in some ways from that classic rock/heavier brawny rock thing they were lumped into in the 90s, and the audience that gravitated to it - boomers, teenage girls, etc. turns out to agitate those still self-conscious of Pearl Jam’s street cred, and that’s I think where it stems from. Reality to me is they took a song I heard growing up, and flipped it into a more earnest sounding expression of grief in a pop landscape, and took the proceeds and gave them to refugees. That’s a class A move in my mind.
