Red Mosquito

Porch vs. Nothingman

Nothingman is such a better song but I know it will lose hard because you fools hold your high school memories so tightly

they were both high school memories, and my senior year was the better year. Still Porch, though both phenomenal songs

Lol yeah I guess they were both junior high/high school memories. Still though.

Nothingman is probably the better song, but that Porch outro is just one of my all time favorite Pearl Jam moments.

Pearl Jam hadn’t released anything when I was still in high school.

The point I was clumsily trying to make was:

More than perhaps any other song, Porch still gets by on its nostalgia. But for 20 years, the live version has felt like a meandering slog. And the studio version is fairly unremarkable, because everything that made the early live versions soar just isn’t there in the studio.

Nothingman continues to be magical.

In past tourneys, I’ve leaned heavily into nostalgia, but I’m over it. What do I want to listen to these days? It feels authentic to say yeah, I’d much rather listen to Parachutes instead of Alive, and the sentiment is increased exponentially for Nothingman vs Porch.

If you guys had never heard either song in your life, and in 2022 I gave you the two studio cuts, I’m fairly confident Nothingman would come out way ahead, because the studio take is loaded with fragility and emotion, while Porch sounds like fairly generic cock-grunge wankery.

Nothingman by the lightest of snare ghost strokes.

I hate to say this but trag is right.

This is hard. Two classics that patrol entirely different sonic territories.

But I think if I went through the super-long song-ranker exercise of preferring this to that and this to that and this to that, when the dust settled I think Porch would probably come out ahead, even if if I can't be certain of that when they're sitting here side by side.

Nothingman and to me it’s not remotely close.

tragabigzanda wrote:The point I was clumsily trying to make was:

More than perhaps any other song, Porch still gets by on its nostalgia. But for 20 years, the live version has felt like a meandering slog. And the studio version is fairly unremarkable, because everything that made the early live versions soar just isn’t there in the studio.

Nothingman continues to be magical.

In past tourneys, I’ve leaned heavily into nostalgia, but I’m over it. What do I want to listen to these days? It feels authentic to say yeah, I’d much rather listen to Parachutes instead of Alive, and the sentiment is increased exponentially for Nothingman vs Porch.

If you guys had never heard either song in your life, and in 2022 I gave you the two studio cuts, I’m fairly confident Nothingman would come out way ahead, because the studio take is loaded with fragility and emotion, while Porch sounds like fairly generic cock-grunge wankery.

I prefer the studio porch. Nothingman is a magical song and if I heard them both today for the first time it is easily nothingman. And yet porch has stayed a top 10/occasional top 5 long after nothing man took a dip

Also if you want to make a nostalgia point I’d think ten/vs/vitalogy are all nostalgia albums

Ban trag

nothingman (non Springsteen version)

Easily Porch

I mean I think if you are going to rag on the live versions of Porch over the past twenty years, you HAVE to rag on Nothingman live. Eddie has quite literally changed his inflection on the song, rid himself of the fragility, so he can breath it into a singalong. There’s value in all that, but we ought not pretend Porch has been neutered and nothing changed with Nothingman.

In any event, while I agree Porch jams aren’t as intense as the 90s, I still think they bring it on this song pretty consistently.

Nothing man is still beautiful live and if you disagree then you should die

Also “slog” is rms new word

I think we used “banger” for a while but we didn’t use “slaps.”