But there is a reason that people loved, and still love, grunge, and there is a reason that those groups blew up the pop charts and MTV’s video rotations in the ’90s. In fact, of the four most well-known grunge bands, three of their front men would die prematurely either of heroin addiction, with the 2002 death of Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, or suicide, both Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, in 1994, and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, in 2017. While today the genre is well-regarded as an important part of the history of popular music, it is also generally associated with a lot of pain and, famously, angst. To briefly recap, grunge was the last major, American-born, rock ‘n’ roll movement (coming right before Britpop took off). “Black” provides a blueprint of sorts for navigating the challenges that so many are facing today. This is especially true with the live MTV Unplugged performance of this heavy and, yes, quite dark song. Saying that a song can change your life is often a cliché, but Pearl Jam’s “Black” can probably help change some lives. This may be a perfect time to look back to one particularly remarkable song from the early 1990s and a time when the so-called Seattle grunge scene ruled popular music. What to do with our feelings of intense disappointment, existential crisis, and rage? Do we ignore them, suck it up, and move on as best we can? Do we turn inward, and punish ourselves for not handling things better? Do we lash out at our transgressors, real or perceived? Or are there other options?
Given the realities of life in 2022, many have had to address some tough questions. Anxiety levels have shot up and depression rates tripled during the first year of COVID, alone. Issues of mental health have perhaps never been more at the forefront of American life than during these bizarro-world, COVID/lockdown/BLM/MAGA-years of 2020 to the present.
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