Controversy in the world of music is nothing new and the stellar reporters here at The Hard Times are always on top of the latest kerfuffle. Except in this case when we accidentally interviewed John Mellencamp instead of Jason Aldean over their respective small town songs. Whoops!
The Hard Times: John, thank you for sitting down with us today. Let’s be frank, you really stepped in it this time.
John Mellencamp: What the hell are you talking about? What did I do?
Oh don’t play dumb with us, Mellencamp. Be honest, why do you hate people of color?
What did I do to make you think that’s the case?
I mean your small town song is just brimming with racist dog whistles. Like when you wrote, “But I’ve seen it all in a small town/Had myself a ball in a small town.” How do you explain that?
In what way is that lyric racist?
Yeah I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure either. Most of the lyrics seemed pretty inoffensive. But our editor told us to cover the “Try That in A Small Town” controversy.
You idiot. That’s Jason Aldean’s song, not mine.
Oh. So you don’t advocate for shooting protesters?
I’m literally a gun control activist.
And your thoughts on the BLM protests?
I left Columbia Records when the president of the company made a racist remark. How do you think I feel about BLM?
So you don’t hate anyone?
I hate stupid-ass reporters who try to infer that I’m a racist.
And there you have it, folks. While he may not be a racist, John Mellencamp confirms that he does, in fact, hate the concept of the free press. #CancelJCM
Photo By Chitrapa
P!ATD swan song 2022 LP “Viva Las Vengeance” caused the band to let the light go out like a sad clown having make-up sex in the middle of a breakup. Say that sentence out loud all by yourself. Long live punishment! While we wish that this wasn’t the band’s final album statement, we have no doubt that a comeback LP will hit the streets in 2032 just in time for Donald Trump Jr.’s snowy white and hopefully laughably unsuccessful Presidential campaign. Also, we don’t think that this record will hold up in about ten years, but stranger things have happened: Because of government-issued sites like Tik-Tok and Parlor, affirmative may be justified and the glorious Creed is bigger now than ever.
Despite the fact that 2018’s “Pray for the Wicked” contains their highest charting and rabidly infectious single “High Hopes,” with notes so jaw-dropping off the deep end it hurts our vocal register without even singing, this pop AF record just isn’t as consistent as the five that came before it. Maybe looser-fitting JNCO jeans and a lower number of co-writers may have made this acrobatic effort a tad more listenable, but what the hell do we know? This album likely bought Brendon the island from the cleverly named Scarlett Johansson 2005 film “The Island.”
While this 2013 effort contains without question P!ATD’s worst record title and actual album cover, it is definitely the first LP mentioned here to flow seamlessly and effortlessly through all of its tracks from song 1-10. Don’t judge a book by its cover and don’t judge things in general unless you are assigned a casual affair in the form of an album ranking article! Anyway, the band was very smart in making a ten-song release sans saturated fats and liquid nitrogen at just under thirty-three minutes for the short attention span theater known as our world, and would you like some jello? Back to the girl that you love: Next to the next album to be mentioned, this one has their second-best album song opener, “This Is Gospel,” which was luckily not locked away in permanent slumber. Oh woah-oh.
After the yet-to-be-mentioned-and-yet-to-offend-in-its-dumb-dumb-slot-here sophomore LP “Pretty. Odd.,” P!ATD created their third LP that exemplified more of a back-to-basics debut album vibe called “Vices & Virtues,” and whilst doing so triumphantly reclaimed its exclamation point to a hurricane of memories. Like entry number five above, this is another ten-track banger and a consistent and underrated one at that. Produced by the Freak of the Week Butch Walker of Marvelous 3, and John “Superman” Feldmann of Goldfinger, this record will make you singalong in your car like you’re 17 again, and it reintroduced the band to a completely new audience, especially when its second single “Ready to Go (Get Me Out of My Mind)” was featured in the ending credits of “The Smurfs,” proving that you hate us cause you ain’t us. Get that bag, Urie.
FYI: This album would’ve been ranked number one on this perfect list if track four, the band’s most superior single “Emperor’s New Clothes,” replaced tracks 1-3 and 5-11 and became an eleven-track repetitive yet lavish mansion of brilliance; it both feels good AND tastes good. However, the band fucked up royally by not doing so, and thus its two Ryan Ross records shine brighter here; if you can’t stop shaking, lean back. Still, the other ten songs on this record are a healthy combination of crazy and genius, and from a songwriting standpoint, 2016’s “Death of a Bachelor” combines Queen, Frank Sinatra, The B-52s, a post-Bachelor Party toilet bowl conference, and more in a very respectable fashion. It’s a hell of a feeling though, it’s a hell of a feeling though; oozin’ aahs.
You know this one. You love this one. We’re wrong about the placement of this one. This is their first album, making it record number one. This one’s biggest single WON MTV’s “Video Of The Year” at the 2006 VMAs to the surprise of just about everyONE. One song on this album is called “London BeckONEd Songs About mONEy Written By Machines” and another one is called “There’s A Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered hONEy, You Just Haven’t Thought of It Yet,” so let’s end this piece with entry number one. One singular sensation.
P is for “Panic,” “Pretty (Odd),” “Pas de Cheval,” and “polarizing,” so imagine the band dropped acid given to them by Bob Dylan backstage at a Boys Like Girls Royal Variety Performance, listened to “Rubber Soul” over and over 1965 times, commandeered strange and dated clothes from your creepy uncle, and you’ve got the band’s grower-but-not-a-shower 2008 LP “Pretty. Odd.” Like we alluded to above, main songwriter Ryan Ross left after this one along with the band’s exclamation point, but we still think if their third record “Vices & Virtues” flip-flopped its release dates with this sophomore LP, the Ross-Urie-feeling-as-good-lovers-can duo would still be flopping around together mad as rabbits. And everybody gets there, everybody gets their and everybody gets their way.
Pearl Jam has a tendency to open their live shows with a softer song, which is a terrible thing to do. Even worse is to open a rock album with a song like “Sometimes,” a melancholy ode to some times. By the time “Hail, Hail” gets the party started you’ve probably gone home, and the record doesn’t ever bother to invite you back.
“Gigaton” is a Pearl Jam album the same way that Papa John’s is pizza – it technically is, but it sure as goddamn hell is not. Maybe that’s not fair, maybe having “Even Flow” floating in your head for most of your life causes a bias. You can’t fault them for seeming a little more somber in 2020, and Eddie Vedder sounds less like an Adam Sandler character than ever, but it would be easier to fuck to “Wind Beneath My Wings” than anything here.
There’s a running gag in “This is Spinal Tap” where the band just keeps losing drummers, which was reportedly based on Pearl Jam’s real-life percussionist problems. Their fifth and apparently still-functioning drummer joined in 1998, and he’s a dead ringer for Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron. Shame that his first album with the band isn’t a dead ringer for “Badmotorfinger.”
There are many awesome things going on at this very moment within the cells of your body. The nucleus is protecting your personal DNA info, lysosomes are repairing and digesting, ribosomes are making proteins. None of this would be possible without an energy source – the mitochondria that contain, pound-for-pound, the same amount of energy as a bolt of lightning! There’s also a lot of goopy cytoplasm sitting around doing fucking nothing.
If you’re going to make a visual statement, your instinct is to go big. Lead single “Life Wasted” marks the return of Pearl Jam to the MTV world, and the resulting video is grosser than Tool’s old stop-motion disgustoramas. Seeing the band’s dismembered heads covered in ants or invaded by snakes or consumed in flames is much easier to take if you pretend they’re all human traffickers or terrorists or your landlord.
Pearl Jam have reacted to loss and tragedy admirably, and they’ve had to face more than their fair share. The bursts of anger and love are welcome and appreciated, but these are five men at their sexual peak – they shouldn’t be lamenting or wailing, they should be singing about love in elevators and shaking someone all night long. In a perfect world, Pearl Jam would fucking suck.
Post-Bush and pre-joyless hellhole full of Nazis, this could be the happiest Pearl Jam has ever sounded. Of course, there’s got to be a line in A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood stories which is the happiest Eeyore ever sounded. Framed that way, happiness doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Let’s just enjoy the brief burst of sun as PJ fully let out their inner Who for the first time.
If you attended a public high school in 1992, you remember the unspoken but highly enforced rule that at least 30% of the student body must be wearing the Pearl Jam “Alive” t-shirt at all times. This particular album isn’t really what Pearl Jam sound like, and shows off hardly any of the range that will become a signature – those aren’t surprising notes for a band in its infancy – what’s surprising are the songs, massive songs that moved the earth.
Funny how the untold number of Pearl Jam imitators always seemed to stop at “Ten.”
This is the band firing on all cylinders, and the fact that the cylinders are misshapen, rusted, cracking – that just makes it better, man. You won’t find better loud Pearl Jam than “Spin the Black Circle” or better quiet Pearl Jam than “Nothingman.” Producer Brendan O’Brien, who has spent more time with the band than most of their drummers, says that recording “Vitalogy” was tense. If tense sessions deliver albums like this, we urge each member of Pearl Jam to drop what they’re doing and start texting each others’ wives.
Stock and stone, blood and bone. If “Vitalogy” was made of firing cylinders, what we have here is made of the very mountains and gorges from which the metal was mined. “Yield” is a physical experience, like a triathlon, only it’s better to start this with two drinks or an edible inside you. It also makes you feel like there’s a villain to defeat at the end. Maybe triathlons should end with mortal combat, to really separate the strong from the weak. It’s evolution, baby.