Can we get some love for No Code?
Easily my favorite album of theirs!
I go back and forth between No Code and Vitalogy.
I don't often participate in "Facebook lists," but when they involve music I'm a sucker. Last year I posted ten personally influential albums in ten days and this was what I said about Vitalogy:
Album #8: Pearl Jam, Vitalogy
Okay. Hold on, kids. This is gonna be a looooooong post.
So if you really know me you know that this band is a part of me more than probably any other band I've ever loved. I'm not sure there's a better way to explain it then by starting with the enneagram. If you don't know the enneagram, you can fast-forward this part. If you do, all I need to tell you is that I'm a type four with a three wing. I have never been able to feel like I belong (where my fours at?). I am just now, at forty-something-or-other, starting to become aware of this and it has honestly been transformational.
YOU CAN COME BACK IN THE ROOM, UN-ENNEAGRAMMED FRIENDS!!!
So, at the height of my awkward teenage, I-don't-belong best, this band happened... and when it hit me, it hit me hard. As hinted at in the Rubber Soul edition of whatever this is, I was a huge SNL nerd. I wanted to be on SNL. That was my life's ambition in high school. This band was the musical guest on an episode hosted by Sharon Stone in 1992. They played two songs from their debut, Ten: "Alive" and "Porch." In some small way, it changed my life. This was my band and I didn't care if you liked them or didn't. I would never hide my allegiance to this band.
Fast-forward to my freshman year of college. I didn't know what I was doing there. I was homesick. I was lonely. I had one friend on campus. It's like I didn't know how to be a person. I didn't know who I was. A couple months later, just before Thanksgiving, I walked to the Discount Den (where years later my friends and I would purchase bigass fountain sodas just to throw them into the air and watch them explode on the ground... but I digress.) Early in the morning I popped into the Den, the day that this record was released (ON VINYL ONLY, BTW) and purchased what had to be the only copy that they had. I swear I had to be the only human living on campus to own a turntable in 1994. This record was my band evolving and getting weird and I loved every minute of it.
I have a hard time picking a favorite album by this band, it's often No Code, sometimes it's Yield, but it's probably this one. I've been lonely a lot, but at my loneliest this band has always made me feel something.
What's that??
"Stupid Mop"???
I don't know what that is.