As Vedder wrote it, the song’s oft-repeated line “I’m still alive” is the narrator’s way of expressing that he is cursed.Īs Vedder wrote it, “Alive” is a rejection of the narrative “whatever doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”. Thematically, it’s one of the darker songs on an album that also sinks its teeth into depression, suicide, and murder. The debut single from their 1991 debut album, Ten, “Alive” tells the story of a boy who finds out his father is not really his father, and whose mother initiates a sexual relationship with him because of how he resembles his deceased “real daddy”. It’s impossible to talk about Vedder’s allegiance to his fans, and his insistence on being intimately connected to them, without considering the metamorphosis of the underlying meaning of Pearl Jam’s 1991 heartbreaker “Alive”. While Cobain’s distaste coincided with his infamous personal demons and seemingly made him allergic to fame in any packaging, Vedder’s repulsion had a specific target: he wanted nothing to do with the sort of fame that distanced him from his fans.
While there were certainly exceptions, grunge on the whole was much more suspicious of mass adoration than ’80s favorites like glam rock and hair metal. In fact, to the extent that Pearl Jam and Nirvana vied for grunge dominance, and to the extent that grunge defined a decade of rock, Kurt Cobain’s and Eddie Vedder’s rejection of fame could be said to signify a larger shift away from the fame clamoring of the ’80s. The thing they had in common apart from falling under the grunge umbrella was, it appeared, some sort of aversion to fame. The rivalry boiled down to a contest between cool, dangerous outsiders Nirvana and overexposed, safe mainstreamers Pearl Jam. As outlined in Steven Hyden’s entertaining 2016 book on musical rivalries, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, the two bands were largely pitted against each other as opponents. If you automatically reject that idea, it’s likely because when you think “biggest” you think “best” or “most legendary”, and you’re objecting because that biggest band is clearly Nirvana. The band’s attempt to keep things low-key didn’t keep things low-key – they went on to be remembered as the biggest US rock band of the ’90s. The fact that Pearl Jam often worked against their fame (refusing to make music videos, turning down TV appearances, suing Ticketmaster, not living the “rock star life”) may not be up for debate, but why they would act so self-defeating is.
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