10 WAS SO FUCKN GOOD

Eh, it's okay.

Bursting with intensely personal songs that sound universal by virtue of their oversized, near-operatic emotionalism, Ten was neither subtle nor particularly cool, which helped it communicate better and more profoundly with more people than any other rock record of its time. Along with Metallica’s Black Album and Radiohead’s OK Computer, Pearl Jam’s Ten is easily one of the most influential mainstream rock records of the last 20 years. The power of Ten was so great that it eventually stood apart from Pearl Jam; as Vedder and his increasingly marginalized supporting cast distanced themselves from the record’s gauche chest-thumping by churning out progressively restrained, more “mature,” and less expressive music, Ten was dusted off by other bands and recycled again and again. Today, Pearl Jam is a popular touring band and intermittently successful on the charts; Ten, meanwhile, is still all over modern-rock radio, though only a handful of the songs are actually by Pearl Jam.

...I remember hearing the first single from Ten, the vaguely Skynyrd-esque lighter-waving anthem “Alive,” between Bad Company and Styx songs on my town’s top AOR station, “The Rockin’ Apple” WAPL.

...In the video, which the band insisted be culled from a not-especially-polished live performance, Pearl Jam looks like a glam band in dress-down mode; in other words, just like Tesla. (Except McCready, who’s decked out in full cowboy-and-blouse Stevie Ray gear.)

...“Alive” is one of Pearl Jam’s most famous songs, but it didn’t come close to making the kind of atomic impression that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” did. Ten was more of a slow burn; if memory serves, the next single, “Even Flow,” was played on MTV 57 times an hour during the first half of ’92, an impressive feat considering “Even Flow” was a pretty lousy song that made no fucking sense whatsoever.

...Still, the video for “Even Flow” succeeded in doing for Pearl Jam what the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” video had done for Def Leppard four summers earlier: It made you wish really hard that Pearl Jam would come somewhere near your town very soon.

...Vedder lets out the same epic “whoa!” that Bruce Springsteen should’ve trademarked in 1978 after he released Darkness On The Edge Of Town. The single version of “Jeremy” was remixed to extend Vedder’s climactic “whoa!” for several extra beats, a slight but important change that amped up the song’s dramatic impact. (Vedder’s greatest vocal performances tend to be practically wordless; see Ten’s mush-mouthed closer, “Release,” and the essential “Jeremy” B-side “Yellow Ledbetter,” which fans have been trying to decipher for 18 years.)