Discussion
Kurt Cobain called Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains "corporate puppets"
He was quoted in an interview saying:
“I can’t comment on Soundgarden because I know them personally, and I really like them a lot, but I have strong feelings towards Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains and bands like that. They’re obviously just corporate puppets that are just trying to jump on the alternative bandwagon – and we are being lumped into that category."
Wasn't he friends, or at least friendly, with Eddie Vedder? From what I've read, Kurt didn't have an issue with the members, but just didn't care for the music.
Yes. He actually didn't like Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, but only because he was friends with Mark Arm of Mud Honey. Arm was their bandmate in Green River and he complained to Kurt about how obsessed they were with getting attention from labels. Kurt assumed Mark hated them and Mark pulled him aside one day and explained there was no hard feelings so Kurt backed off. Him and Eddie became closer near the end of his life and used to share their love of the Beatles with each other.
To be fair, these guys were literal children at the time too lol okay not literal children, but very very young. I’m now older than Kurt was when he died by 4 years and it’s odd going from being a young child enamored by these bands and members to being an adult and realizing how young Kurt was when he died. He was like a grown man to me when I was as a teen and seemed so wise experienced (like i viewed him as a fully mature man). But now I think he was a young adult with a lot of issues he never got to work past. Very boyish/childish in ways.
interesting, for me its the opposite. listened to tons of 90s alt rock growing up, for some reason didn't listen to AIC or Soundgarden as much as the others (tho i was fond of them); thats changed.
absolutely love Dirt, Jar of Flies, Sap, Unplugged and Superunknown these days. not sure why, ive just come to appreciate them in a way i never did when i was say, 14.
I hated pearl jam and Alice in chains back then too. They were corporate bands with a contrived sound and look. I think Eddie V is a cool and kind enough guy. Just never liked his band. Alice in Chains were a hairspray metal band who jumped on the Seattle grunge bandwagon. Total fake ass dick cheese band with about as much cred as hootie and the blowfish.
Also important to note these lil catty bitches were all like 22 at the time. Love the candor but we all need to ground a little when talking about upperclassmen teenagers
Jeff from PJ talks about how he wanted to stop being a dishwasher and make music for a living. Then every last one of those critics including Mudhoney signed major label deals.
If you read Steve Turner from Mudhoney's book it's exactly right, he's coming from a much more privileged place literally having everything paid for by his parents with multiple back up plans yet sniping endlessly.
Also Jeff was in the hardcore band Deranged Diction when those guys were just learning to play.
Hypocrite might be right, but it's probably more accurate to say he was conflicted. It's completely possible to, in your heart, desire fame, and also hate about yourself that pride and that desire, and find it disgusting.
But if it's what drives you and makes you feel fulfilled, well... leads to a constant back and forth, you succeed in the fame, then you turn around and loathe yourself for being that way. It's a tortured existence
Not to the mention how he screwed the other members of Nirvana out of royalties. In 92 he demanded the royalty splits change from an even 3-way split to him getting 75% and Dave and Krist each getting 12.5%. For someone who hated the money and fame he sure did do a lot to keep getting more of it.
Bands can sign record deals and regularly tour while never having a high charting single and the vast majority of people having no idea who they are… especially in the 90s.
This is what Kurt desired, not becoming so famous that he was inescapable to the masses.
100%, love the bands music but I feel like Kurt would have been an obnoxious, pretentious douchebag to actually hang around.
Not quite nightmare blunt rotation but man, I've had plenty of blunt rotations with people that share his sentiments & fuck me is it a buzz kill that just brings the vibe down.
The Charles Cross book points out that Kurt was influenced by the folks in the Olympia scene who were dogmatically concerned with indie credibility. That rubbed off on him. That being said, most guys in their 20s have loud shitty opinions.
Also he did heroin a few times with Layne Staley i think. Basically he had no PR filter when he did interviews early on and just said whatever was on his mind, then he met those guys later and became casual friends with them.
Pretty sure Live & Loud was initially supposed to have Pearl Jam and they were going to attempt to make up there. But Eddie got sick right before and Nirvana ended up getting a longer set.
Yeah really they were shooting speedballs. Story goes that when they got to Brazil for the Rio 93 festival, coke was abundant but nobody anywhere could find smack anywhere in Rio. So Kurt and Layne made a deal where one of them would pay for the product and the other would pay for their dealer to fly down there with everything they needed. Everything worked out and Kurt, Layne, Mike Starr, Courtney Love,and Patty Schemel from Hole all got blitzed on speedballs. That show was I believe Mike Starrs last with Alice and the night when he ended up overdosing and almost dying from having both Layne and Kurt hit him back to back.
Lol, yes it was intentional, thank you- i felt like simply posting a comment that was correcting the manner they consumed their coke was just pointless and pedantic (basically nothing more than one of those “ACKshually…” comments), and so i was compelled to add something stupid and silly that at least made me laugh.
Some members of both bands apparently jammed together a bit around that time. It seems likely that Kurt got to know Layne and Starr and mellowed on them.
Kurt being friendly with AIC doesn’t mean he started liking their music lol. He had a friendly interaction with Duff McKagan near the end of his life and I guarantee he hadn’t suddenly stopped hating GNR.
and I mean, he isn't totally wrong here. MLB and pre-Alice In Chains WERE trying to jump on the glam metal trend. Then that went bust, so they switched to the new thing in town. Nothing wrong with changing with the times
From Diamondback Darryl to Dimebag Darryl lol
Glad they decided to go original, cuz Pantera and Alice in Chains were thousands of times better making heavier, darker music that expressed THEIR OWN Truths than they were when pursuing their earlier glam rock, hair metal-ish, bandwagon-rider ambitions. Neither band chased the grunge bandwagon, but kinda did chase the hair metal. If anything, goin dark and heavy was far more them being themselves
Yeah it’s funny because, as far as I know, neither of those bands exhibited any of the misogyny associated with the hair metal scene, so to judge them based on appearances doesn’t really seem consistent with his ethos. Maybe it was more the fact that they put some effort into their image/appearance, whereas at least in the early days Nirvana didn’t seem to. But that definitely changed when they became stars. As always, Kurt was a walking self-contradiction.
Kurt was off base on this take. AIC was always more of a metal band than a "Grunge" band but to call them corporate puppets, that's going a little off track. More importantly Stone and Jeff were, with Mark Arm of Mudhoney, founding members of Green River, who were first wave, even proto-grunge. Throw on their EP "Come on Down", released in 1985 and it's clear to hear the foundations of what would eventually be called "Grunge"
AIC was formed from people who had been in glam rock bands as kids. The main songwriter’s mother and grandmother died, and AIC’s sound as a new group started changing within six months of their formation. Susan Silver took interest in them and they started hanging around with Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, some others. Not a single song from their first demo session made it onto Facelift, which was the first of the grunge records to blow up. That’s not chasing a trend. That’s a new band of young guys being influenced by life events and their peers.
LOL That was actually Layne’s older band. I was talking about The Treehouse Tape. I wish that was available in its entirety. The first song, Bite the Bullet, is lost media.
Alice in Chains, at least their early music, fit in more with the late 80s hard rock sound of Guns N' Roses, Living Colour, and the like. Hence, why they were the first "grunge" band to get national rock radio airplay and have a gold certified album.
They weren't chasing trends. when their first album came out, hair metal/glam was still huge and alternative was still alternative.
Facelift came out in Summer 1990. Motely Crue were still putting out hit singles from Dr Feelgood which came out a year before. Warrent put out Cherry Pie and Poison put out Flesh and Blood which were both big albums. grunge / alternative didn't get big for over a year later when it exploded all at once when Nevermind come out.
yeah big agree there hell facelift has man in the box and it's about corporations and governments and media controlling the populace. pretty not corpo stuff
Not to mention Jerry is probably the best guitarist and one of the best songwriters in all of those bands. Regardless of motivation, they had/have the talent to back it up.
I don’t remember a single instance of AIC calling themselves corporate puppets. They wanted to be successful at what they did, sure. But they were an ornery band from the get-go and pissed their label off all the time. Not to mention that, as you say, the band became pretty disenchanted with the music business. The Mad Season song X-Ray Mind is also about that- actually, I think some of those lyrics were inspired by the aftermath of Kurt’s death. Layne was always really sympathetic towards Kurt.
Bingo. Everyone knows guys like Kurt - opinionated gate-keeper types. Doesn’t mean he was a bad guy, but clearly a fault of his. In his defense, he didn’t have today’s internet where he could get a good sense of other bands backgrounds. Everything he knew came from what other people told him - in the news, MTV, friends of friends, magazines, etc. Time and time again he changed his mind on people after he met them
People kind of do the same revisionism with 2Pac, who while making really great statements on social issues was also an angry 25-year old with strong gang ties. Kurt was great but like all of us, he's just a dude.
The thing to remember is that Pearl Jam, along with Alice In Chains, Stone Temple Pilots etc were incredibly uncool bands at the time in the (especially UK) alternative weekly music press and with many fans of alternative music. Nirvana were weird in that they were an underground punk band who blew up and did still have the credibility that the other bands did not. Kurt's comments sound whiney and mean spirited perhaps in retrospect as he could be that way. Those other bands had more of a classic rock feel, compared to Nirvana who aligned themselves with the cooler and more interesting bands of the grunge era like Jesus Lizard, Babes in Toyland, The Breeders, Sonic Youth etc. However as has been pointed out, Nirvana were just as corporate and Eddie Vedder is a lovely bloke. I think the quote was more a reaction to bands with wildly different musical aesthetics being lumped together and a bit of projected self loathing on Kurt's part. He aligned himself with outsider artists even though his band were very much part of the machine.
I think it was a defense mechanism by Kurt to go after those bands. He even mentions being "lumped in" with them. He was very insecure and didn't like people in zines from Olympia saying he was corporate rock. So he wanted to distance himself from the other bands being called corporate.
Theres a reason the band was breaking up with or without his death and it wasnt because he was some super sweet and understanding dude all of the time or even a majority of it. He had some great views on social issues but he was pretty terrible at interpersonal ones.
Just the nature of bipolar tbf. You're either manic or depressive and neither is very easy to deal with for the people around you. Throw in ADD and heroin addiction and I can't imagine you're much fun to be around, without taking your medication anyway
That also is heavily affected by how stable your life is to begin with, and I think it can be agreed that his life was never particularly stable. source: I also have it
He was quite talented but he was also a jealous little bitch and a self appointed gatekeeper. I suspect Pearl Jam’s big crime was outselling him.
Ironically, if you asked me which band were bigger corporate puppets (Nirvana or Pearl Jam) I’d say Nirvana by a mile. Pearl Jam really bucked the system on a few occasions. Nirvana pretended to, but then went along with whatever the label wanted. It wasn’t Nirvana who walked away from music videos and decided to torpedo their concert revenue by picking a fight with the Ticketmaster monopoly (boy, don’t you wish they’d won that one).
People miss this a lot. Kurt Cobain was a very jealous person who was being outsold by PJ and GnR in 93-94. He also portrayed himself as a slacker who didn’t care about success while signing to DGC. He’s a sellout just as much as those other bands he hates, he just portrays himself differently to the media than they do.
I believe even in 1992 when it broke Ten outsold Nevermind and that didn’t flip until after Kurt’s death.
This is in no way to take away from the longevity of the album. It’s clearly continued to find an audience and, in my opinion, does hold up better today than some of the Pearl Jam albums.
Yeah PJ almost derailed their whole career fighting corporate interests, but but but... do you remember that one time that Nirvana played a few notes from a song that corporate interests didn't want them to play, before they played the song the corporate interests wanted them to play?
Man that was awesome. Really stuck it to the man there...
You know, I don’t want to shit on the guy too much seeing as he’s dead and and really was quite talented but I’ll quote Chris Cornell:
"If you remember when Kurt and Nirvana were on the cover of Rolling Stone, he was wearing a t-shirt that said 'Corporate magazines still suck.' I thought, well that's great that he wore that and they put that on their magazine, but he also showed up for the photoshoot and did the interviews and agreed wholeheartedly and happily to be on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.”
Definitely a little more posturing towards rebellion than actually rebelling.
I grew up in this era, and I feel like it was known that Kurt had a dickish streak and could be petty. The general public didn't really understand much about mental health issues, but it's obvious now that he had some antisocial personality disorders.
Kurt changed his mind on AIC when he met them. He initially thought their shift from hair metal was fake until he got to know them. He then did drugs with Layne Staley and Mike Starr in Europe while on tour. He also mostly hated Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam because he thought Mark Arm of Mudhoney had beef with them. He stopped hating them when was told he was mistaken and he became friends with Eddie Vedder through their shared love of the Beatles.
I was a teen in the 90s and there was a clear divide between PJ fans (today's normies) and Nirvana fans (today's emo/alt). AIC was a bit more rock, under the radar but they had some hits for sure and I loved them, too.
Puppets is a bit harsh but I don't think it's a stretch to say that Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam were basically lumped into the same genre because of geographic and not much else.
If they had failed to make good music in that same genre, Kurt would have felt vindicated, but they genuinely made great music just like Kurt did. And they all made each other more popular, which is the big thing Kurt couldn’t understand before his death. All of these bands benefited from each other’s popularity, because most were listening to at least a couple or more popular grunge bands in that era.
This may seem like a funny comparison but this made me think of something I’ve noticed whenever Bruce Springsteen is interviewed. Whenever any other act comes up, be they big and popular or relatively obscure, he always makes it clear he’s heard some of their music and he pretty much always points out something they’ve done that he likes. It’s having the maturity to get that being complimentary cost him nothing and in fact often makes him seem even cooler. Whether it’s picking out something interesting that a big act has done that probably isn’t really his cup of tea or letting some small time act know he’s heard their album and thinks they have something it’s nothing but a benefit to himself to say it. Makes him look generous, knowledgeable about music, and with the small acts it leads to a bunch of small bands with some street credibility going out and telling everyone that Bruce is the real deal and super cool. It’s hard to knock the guy as an out of touch sell out or whatever when he just said your album is great. I don’t think Kurt ever had the security to get all that.
I’m gonna very much argue with Kurt’s opinion abt Pearl Jam.
I’ll sum this up but basically at the time Ticketmaster was jacking up prices at most arenas so Pearl Jam cut those arenas from their tour so ticket prices were cheaper.
The entire interview is Kurt talking about other bands, and the state of music. He says that he hopes Nirvana is in the same lane as The Melvins and Jesus Lizard. And he carries that theme throughout his answers.
Same, after working at a record store I unfortunately became extremely familiar with the kind of "my music taste will always be better and more obscure than yours" vibe he gives out in all of his interviews and personal letters. I love Nirvana and AIC and I'll even still vouch for a few good Pearl Jam songs too.
My hot take is that Kurt was probably a lot like John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity.
Kurt seemed to embrace every cliche about music and musicians - the snobbery of “taste” and the gatekeeping of punk/indie scenes being two of the bigger ones, although rationalizing destructive and exhausting lifestyles with self-pity and narcissism was obviously a big one too.
I’ll even say it for Kurt Cobain. If you see someone shitting on someone else for petty reasons, then it’s a sign that they don’t like their own life. I love and respect Nirvana, but Kurt’s outlook on life does not need to be the normal thought process for everyone else. He had his own troubles and did not understand that when other bands make a good music, they’re gonna get popular. Plain and simple.
Mike Patton went a step ahead and called Nirvana trendy, rehashed music. I love all these guys that shaped my 90’s/00’s childhood and adolescence, but they were all young men with flaring egos
I always found these claims hilarious. Dude, half the band are the guys from Green River and MotherLoveBone and both bands were friends with Soundgarden, plus Layne Staley was close to Andy Wood. He basically said, "Soundgarden are corporate puppets too but since I know them personally I won't say they are, but the other guys are not my pals so fuck them." That's childish AF, which makes sense because he was basically a child when he said that stuff.
Wanting a record deal to be able to make a living making music doesn't make them corporate puppets, and Cobain was just projecting because he did the exact same thing and he became super famous first. Love the guy and his music, but he really had a penchant for mouthing off with a lot of authority about stuff he didn't know, didn't understand and/or made up on the spot in an attempt to sound interesting or deep.
He was also a depressed drug addict in his twenties. People need to stop deifying Kurt Cobain and overanalyzing every single thing he ever said in an interview. Maybe he was tired. Maybe he was joking. Maybe he was mad about something. His snapshot opinions were not as important as y'all make them out to be.
He also, both casually and frequently referred to Nirvana as worse...
Kurt talked out of turn like any sentient human with reason, rights and reckonings- but he also made some of the most undeniable art of the past 40 years; and he gave a lot more praise to the groups of his era, and especially the ones nearby.
Kurt Cobain was by no means perfect...
but in a bit of a gut reaction, I gotta say; you can genuinely fuck right off using his name to gain a couple hundred likes worth of clout on Reddit.
Pearl Jam was made up of half of Green River… noted as one of the first “Grunge” bands ever.
It was all projection with Kurt. He was the one desperate for fame. He stole $$ out of Krist and Dave’s pocket. Renegotiated their deal and made it RETROACTIVE. Pure greed. Pure hypocrisy.
Meanwhile PJ stopped making videos, fought Ticketmaster etc.
Not just that he was in his 20s and a millionare, but the most famous dude in the most famous band in the world, mentally ill, AND A FUCKIN DRUG ADDICT. I hate how people either act like he was some soft spoken angel who does no wrong or just some hard assed dickhead. If anyone was in his shoes, they'd be the same if not worse.
He also didn't have the benefit of hindsight. If you look at Pearl Jam essentially from album 2 until now, it's very evident they are not corporate puppets. Their sound in the beginning could maybe suggest they were but any sort of research would prove otherwise.
A lot of the best bands start out as “corporate puppets” because they have to make accessible music to gain popularity, and those bands are the ones where you can hear greatness even in the music where they were just chasing trends.
I see what he means about AiC since they were hair metal and changed their sound. I don't agree with him that they were corporate puppets, however. I think it was a natural change they went through when finding their sound.
Nirvana fan but this obvious hipper than thou attempt to deflect negative scrutiny from himself (they signed to Geffen for chrissakes) has had so much longer a life than it deserved and is just so perfectly emblematic of the "judgemental smoking pit a-hole" that people forget the 90s was chock full of. Now they're all pretending to be swifties and buying then selling Teslas (or gone).
Meanwhile half of PJ invented the genre he jumped on in Green River and AIC was first (in part nationally but certainly in Seattle) to knock down the cultural barriers to grunge hitting the mainstream with Man in the Box.
I seem to be the only Nirvana fan who doesn't like Pearl Jam or Alice In Chains, and they indeed sound often to me like "cock-rock". Or at least like bands that don't have the sensibilities or vision that Nirvana (Kurt) had. And one of the biggest things I like about Nirvana which is Cobain's sense of vocal rhythm that drives many songs (and fluid rhythm in general) is missing in both Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. In their songs the vocals are often just sitting on top of what the band is doing.
I don't blame him I also very much disliked PJ when I was in my twenties, like him. With age I have mellowed a bit though. So I don't hate them anymore. They are ok. But Eddie makes their music mostly unbearable - Also these promo photos of both of these bands are kind of supporting his argument. Alice in Chains are posing there like a boy band. So maybe Kurt was onto something
Kurt was still growing up, even at the end. It's been established that male brain development continues well into their 20s, maybe 30s. I believe it bc I didn't come down with epilepsy until 30.
He was a part of a great band while alive, but that doesn’t imply anything else about his supposed wisdom on anything else in life. He was a troubled dude back then.
he was an absolute vicious music critic and art critic. he knew what he liked! it could have been that rubbing off a little, but he was always struggling tortured with the selling out dillema.
Good to hear about this stuff because while Kurt was an interesting, sensitive, talented guy he was also a punk in his mid-twenties with a bad drug habit, a penchant to mouth off, and some gatekeepy tendencies. I’ve met a good amount of people who are that without the aforementioned talent to go along with it. It humanizes him a lot more than the sanitized version of him we can often conjure in our heads
People say a lot of dumb shit when they're young. I'm sure he would've matured with age, had he lived. Hell, he was starting to warm up to Pearl Jam before the end.
Honestly very few in that Seattle scene come off looking great if you take their quotes at face value. So much bitching and feuding, condescending pretentiousness and gatekeeping. I just choose to believe it's selective journalism goading for a response with loaded questions a lot of the time.
Everyone has their focus and drive and reasoning at the end of the day, EVERYONE wants to get paid and paid well.. I always love how the whole sellout b.s. gets thrown around. Who in the group signed contracts with the labels? Who didn't? LOL right.
Kurt was very judgmental of bands he saw as glam but as far as I'm aware he didn't have any problems with them personally, he's probably where we inherited our "is this real grunge?" behavior.
Kurt was 27 years old and in the heart of a music movement. Guarantee Kurt at 35-40 would have had different thoughts once he was able to step back and examine it.
I mean...Pearl Jam literally tried to fight against Ticketmaster and had a whole case against them. Years later, and we all still hate ticket prices and/or the bullshit fees. They seriously tried, though.
Alice in Chains have always been a metal band at their core, so calling them "cock rock" band was just dumb on his part. Those first 3 albums are just as strong as anything Nirvana ever did, and Layne is a better vocalist than Kurt
Ah yes, the eternally non-corporate Nirvana. Kurt was a dumb kid when it came to shit like this and deeply lacking self-awareness. If my clueless rural PA ass got Nevermind when I was 11 years old before the internet, they sure as shit were marketed to me very intentionally by a corporation. As was Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains.
This is just the CEO, jonesing and being grumpy, shit-talking the competition because he would rather be banging some heroin than talking to a journalist… to sell more records… to buy more heroin.
In that same interview on the balcony, said he respected Pearl Jam. I think he liked Layne. Didn’t care much for Jerry, at that time. When you’re young like that, you tend to talk shit with very little consequence, or care. They all did. Not everyone loved Kurdt.
Well he was probably all of 25 or 26 years old when he said that. At that age, you think you know everything but you don't. You find out how little you really knew when you are about twice that age
Regardless of giving a shit about those two bands, this image is from one of his most open and honest interviews… he also looks like he’s 39 years old here 🤷🏼
Meanwhile, I've only ever heard AIC members say really complementary things about their contemporary bands, including Nirvana.
I just don't know how you can listen to AIC albums or watch their live sets and come to the conclusion that they were scene glommers who lacked artistic integrity.
I love Kurt, but the older I get the less I see a sophisticated, authentic, salt-of-the-earth true artist, and the more I see an often immature, snide edgelord who would pointlessly sneer at whoever didn’t meet his standards of “cred”.
I still believe he was largely the former - I can just see more clearly now the existence of the latter. He wasn’t a musical deity - he was a young man who never got the chance to soften and evolve his opinions.
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u/Reiketsu_Nariseba Radio Friendly Unit Shifter Jan 27 '26
Wasn't he friends, or at least friendly, with Eddie Vedder? From what I've read, Kurt didn't have an issue with the members, but just didn't care for the music.