I apologize if this has been discussed before, but a lot of times when I'm reading people's thoughts on here about the band, it makes me curious about what people's personal context for Pearl Jam is. It seems like there's probably a lot of different answers on here (as opposed to on the Pit, where I would bet nine out of ten people would reply "FAVORITE BAND. BEST BAND EVER...").

Is Pearl Jam legitimately your favorite band in the world right now? Favorite band of all-time? If not, were they? When? If they never were, where do they fit in, and what's the context for their significance (obviously they've at some point had significance for all of us, or else we wouldn't be here)?

For those who are capable of objectively looking at the band (which I think is probably most people here), what context do you view the band in? Are there really people who honestly believe they're the greatest band ever? Greatest band of their generation/era? Do you view them as a transcendent act who anyone with even a passing interest in music should be able to appreciate? Or do you consider them to be an act who has a specific set of tastes they appeal to, and think they have little to offer for those who aren't specifically into guitar rock of a more traditional nature?

I don't think they are my favorite band anymore though I would be hard pressed to choose an alternative. Who can choose just one? Certainly not the best ever. They have definitely been the most important band in my life though. I've never cared about a band as much as I used to care about them. That sort of thing never goes away completely.

I've been emotionally invested in this band since 1992 so it's too late to quit now. They probably wouldn't be in my top 5 favourite bands, but they are active enough to keep me interested. I follow PJ in the same way one might follow the same sports team they followed as a kid.

pretty much this

The former isn't the sort of thing I give much thought to, but definitely the latter. Or, at least, they're the band with the most personal significance in my life so far: They were my introduction to (then) modern music, and for a decade thereafter they managed to release a string of records that each articulated nearly to the letter where I felt I was at that time in my life. Having already pegged Pearl Jam as my "favorite band" at that point, I suspect there may have been an element of self-fulfilling prophecy to that, but even with the benefit of hindsight I see so many things on every album up through "Riot Act" that was pretty much a mirror image of my life at the time. That's pretty strong relationship-building material. When "S/T" came out I simply wasn't in the frame of mind to receive a Pearl Jam record--I was heavy into jazz and hip-hop that year, and while I was enthusiastic about "S/T" at the time, it definitely lacked the personal resonance for me that their earlier records possessed.

I got into them in a big way again when the "Live at the Gorge" box set came out--for whatever reason that set just really reminded me how much fun I'd had being a fan of the band, and it gave way to probably the biggest "late-era" Pearl Jam binge I've had. I remember getting onto the 2006 bootlegs a year or two late and just loving making my way through their songbook again; every morning at school I would download a new show off the library computer (some site called PJAmerica or something), burn it to disc, and play it on my headphones while I went about my campus business that day. It felt like catching up with an old friend I hadn't seen in years.

I still go on Pearl Jam binges on occasion, but they're shorter and less intense. But unlike a lot of other bands from my youth, I do return to Pearl Jam regularly. While some of the elements of the sound that initially attracted me to them have grown stale, there are still a lot of things in their catalog that cater to my present-day tastes, and I'm often surprised after having gone a long time without listening to them how well their music holds up for me. There are things I would like to see them do differently, from an artistic standpoint, but overall I'm very satisfied with how they've grown over the years and think that, when you take away all the day-to-day minutiae we track and analyze on this board, when their career is over you're going to be left with a body of work that largely makes sense as a unit and reveals a band interested in trying different things and testing with moderation the perimeters of its limitations.



I think anyone who legitimately thinks any one band is the single "greatest band ever" has to be either (a) delusional, or (b) somewhat aware of his own hyperbole. I would say they are probably the best commercial rock band (meaning, a big-name group that did most of their work on a major label and received significant media attention, such that they were a familiar name to people outside of music circles) of their generation, though I realize the competition isn't exactly stiff. I wouldn't necessarily say they're a transcendent group, but I do think they have a much broader repertoire than they're given credit for, and believe they have a fair amount of material that would sit comfortably alongside the more creative guitar rock of its day if the band's baggage didn't follow them around so closely.

Pearl Jam is my favorite band of all time. Best band ever? No. I would say that Pink Floyd is the best band ever. Pearl Jam has BY FAR been the most influential and important band in my life. I really have basically loved all their albums up until Backspacer. The run of albums from Ten through Yield saw me go from 11 years old to 18 years old, from a child to an adult. Now at 32, I still love PJ, but much more for what they were and what they meant to me for 15 years. I still hope they make another great album, and I will always follow them with great anticipation as long as they make music. And to be honest, I really love the legacy that they have left.

They are my favorite band, and have been since i heard them the first few times, which wasn't difficult because i just listened to what ever was popular on the radio. So they are my current favorite and only favorite band, and for me they are the best band ever. Thought they are the best band ever for me, i know there are better bands currently and in the past, but no other band has gotten me the way that they do, and the impact they have had on my life is so much greater then any other band I've ever heard so there is the sentimental attachment that gets them a long leash in my book.

By far my favorite and the only band I've personally connected to. I know they aren't the best from a technical stand point but there was always something about them that clicked for me.

Team these guys

I'm really enjoying reading these replies. I appreciate it.

I'm probably in the minority here in that I've never considered Pearl Jam to be my favorite band. From 1994 till probably 2009/2010 they were never lower than #2, and were realistically more of a 1b for that entire time. There was just always someone else who was my instinctual answer to "Who is your favorite band?" First it was the Beastie Boys, then U2 for a period in the mid-90's, and since 1998 Manic Street Preachers. A big part of them being a 1b is the fact that probably 99% of American music fans aren't familiar with the Manics, so when people would ask what I listened to and I didn't want to get into a "Who the hell is that?" Pearl Jam became my go-to reference in a lot of cases. Also with the Manics having been over here all of twice post-1996, Pearl Jam holds great significance as the live act by which I measure the passing of time. There's something special about enjoying the same band in concert that you did when you were 14 and 16 and 18 and so on.

They shaped a lot of my ideas about how much a person should care about a band (and music) and what a big role it could play in a person's life. They marked the moment in my pre-teens when the outside entities I most tied myself too went from being my favorite sports teams to being my favorite bands, which in retrospect was an unbelievably huge shift in my life.

I have no delusions about them being the greatest band of all-time, and don't even consider them to be the greatest band of their generation. What I do think is that the things they do well (moody, unabashedly earnest, introspective guitar rock) they do unbelievably great. If someone tried to tell me that from 1991-whenever, Pearl Jam maximized what it was they were best at better than any band ever, that'd be an argument you probably get me on board with. In that way the band I most find them to be similar to is The Smiths. Both bands I think have far more to offer the average guitar-based music fan than they get credit for (in large because of the personalities of their frontmen & the way their fans tend to behave), and both bands had a really remarkable period where they put out consistently satisfying, "bookmark your life" records. I don't look at Pearl Jam's prime and think "They definitely left some potential on the table, what a shame" the way I do with almost every other band in the world. That's a really remarkable thing to me. I can see how a lot of people wouldn't enjoy either band, but I have to imagine that anybody who cared about even one or two of the elements they embody would have a hard time not being completely enamored by them.

It seems like a lot of us have a dichotomy between what Pearl Jam has done and what they are doing/will do. As a theoretical scenario, imagine someone tells you you can only listen to ten bands for the rest of your life, and all you can listen to are records they've already made. Pearl Jam is easily one of my very first choices in this case. If the question were changed to be ten bands, but you can only listen to music they'll release in the future, right now I like to think they'd definitely come in at the very end of the ten, but I couldn't be certain. I'd say that from 1994-2010 they would be at the very top of both lists.

Anyways, like I said, I'm really enjoying some of these replies. I actually really like reading others talk about their connections to a band in this nature.

Pearl Jam became my favorite band pretty much the moment I first heard Ten, and have been ever since. That's not to say that they are always the band I most want to listen to (these days that's probably Mark Lanegan). Usually when an artist I care about comes out with new material (which is always an excuse to revisit the back catalog) I'll be into them for months, and pearl jam will recede. But they're always there waiting to return. And really, with the exception of REM, no other band has received anything close to the time I've invested into their music. As a result, Pearl Jam albums are events like nothing else. Minor songs get slotted into a larger story and context that can make them major songs. And to this day no other artists top music is able to move me in quite the same way. I can't say that their music is still the best, but it is able to bypass so many outer layers, so many filters, that it is able to hit me deeper and more fully than pretty much anyone else. That initial connection came from the near untouchable strength of the first few albums, but now it is largely self sustaining. Even though every record from 1996 on has been imperfect in some way (some deeply flawed) I still identify with them so much that it hardly matters. I talked about this a bit when I wrote about the pearl jam documentary. It's not that I relate to the songs (really only two albums spoke to my actual experiences at the time, and neither are among my absolute favorites) or that I look to PJ for answers or anything like that. It's just that at some point their music became not the soundtrack of my life, but the background of my life. Even as my tastes have changed and expanded (amongst my favorite bands there aren't really any others that sound like PJ) they are still the baseline. They shaped my adult understanding of what music is, and what it is supposed to do. And even when artists surpass them, they are still being measured against them.


I would have said PJ was the greatest band of all time years ago. I can't really credit a statement like that anymore (for any band). I do think Pearl Jam are one of the very best American rock bands. I think they probably made the best music of their peers--perhaps not the most complex but the most honest, mature, and empathic music.

In a lot of ways it is hard to think about their historical legacy because I don't think Pearl Jam broke new ground. Nor did they intend to (as compared to bands like REM or U2, for instance, or their classic rock forbears). Instead I think Pearl Jam was, at their best, a near perfect distillation of most of the best traditions in rock music. And it's hard to know how to rank that.

That's a pretty great way of summarizing their strengths.

This is an interesting question. In this scenario I wouldn't even think about including the band on a list. I really have pretty much no interest in their new music at this point. Don't get me wrong, I'll check it out....but I have zero expectation for it to have any stay power at this point. All the things that made them interesting and compelling to me seem to be well in the past at this point

they'd still probably be the band I am most excited to hear new music for, especially since REM is no longer functional.

I got into Pearl Jam roughly 20 years ago, the summer before Vs came out. Still in my teen years they were the hot band of the moment but they stayed my absolute favorite band well past my college days. This was when we'd get a new record every 2-3 years and their live performances were of mythic porportions. I got into bootlegs recordings because of them and retrospect that cemented their status to me.
They're still the band that I listen to the most but I don't have the same level of awe I had even 10 years ago. But I do hold them over their 90s peers as the best of the grunge era in what in retrospect was Rock's last real stand. And I certainly have maintained a high level of respect for them and I'd single Ed out as my favorite rock star.
A lot of things have come and gone since I discovered Pearl Jam. Girls, cars, jobs, living arrangements, friends. I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago but to paraphrase Michael Stipe why should I expect them to be? Pearl Jam has been a constant in my life for a long time and after a while it just becomes a part of you. It's a long term relationship now and it doesn't have to burn hot and heavy like it did in the early days. Yeah there's a big nostalga element to them now but so what? As long as they are together, or at least as Vedder is doing solo material, I'm not able to quit them now.

team stroke victim

here's my personal context for Pearl Jam


this was the band that was so thrilling back then, and they were my contemporaries so i knew just where they were coming from.
I'd have to admit they were the biggest influence in my life for a long time musically... but I don't even listen to them anymore , I think for the same reason - that music is too intimately connected to that time.

the context for their significance was that connection to my generation - their weren't enough of us to make any true shifts in the society, so for me, it was somewhat awe inducing to have a band like Pearl Jam giving a voice, any voice really, to those frustrations. intentional or not, that's what they did.

anyway, they were a spectacular band

Pearl Jam occupy a strange place in my life.

I'm intimately acquainted with their history, trivia and minutiae.
I spend more time discussing said minutiae than that of any other single musician I listen to.
I follow their news and announcements and keep track of silly shit like concert relays.
And yet... I rarely ever listen to them these days.
And when I do, it's only to a specific 40% of their catalogue.
They have several albums that I downright dislike.
I went to see them live a few months ago and didn't feel much of the passion, the excitement that I should feel when seeing "one of my favorite bands ever".

They made a few albums that I really enjoy, and every once in a while I'll zero in on a specific song and listen to it over and over and marvel at how amazing it is (happened with "Strangest Tribe" a couple weeks ago), but overall I don't get a whole lot out of them right now. I certainly don't have the interest to listen to multiple bootlegs every tour like a lot of posters here. Honestly, if RM didn't exist, I wonder if I'd ever even check in on PJ anymore.

They used to be my favorite-omg-best-band-in-the-world. That was 20 years ago. Even at the peak of my fandom I've never been as obsessed as some of the people here, but that has to do living in a place where the band wasn't as big as in the USA and in a time where there was no way to download every b-side or bootleg or whatever. At the same time it was easier back then to be heavily into a band because there was less options, less ways to discover other music. Pearl Jam resonated with the teen I was then so I stuck with them and grew up with them and a handful of other artists, loved every album they put out up to Riot Act (included).

Then Avocado came out and as much as I wanted to like it, because that's what you do when you're into a band, I had to admit it wasn't the case. I even downright hated some of their new stuff. It was time for me to move on, so I started exploring the rest of the musical world. I don't think there has been a band that has meant to me as much as PJ did at some point, but it's hard to compare as it's a completely different kind of relationship today, I'm no longer a teen and I don't need models or idols anymore. There has been some music that meant that much though. Music that makes you realize that you're no longer who who were and that makes you realize what you now want, not just in music but in life.

I still like a good part of their catalog and I don't know whether it's nostalgia or else but Binaural, Yield and Vitalogy are still some of my favorite albums. As for their new/recent output, I don't care about it and I have no expectation about it, but I'm not ruling out a good surprise (although I might have to after this one if it sucks). If I had to choose 10 bands whose new output I could only listen to from now on, they definitely wouldn't be on it. And it's unlikely they'd be on it even if I could pick 100, to be honest.

I definitely don't think they're one of the greatest bands in the world or anything like that, but then again I don't think about that at all, best bands, greatest bands, most important band, best albums, these are stupid notions to me, it doesn't mean anything at all.