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Fri 31 July 2026 23:00, UK
There’s a tribalism to music genres that seems deeply contradictory to the overall spirit of music.
Think back to the 1970s, more specifically 1979, when Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl committed a truly heinous act of musical crime and forced 50,000 rock fans to burn their disco records in the middle of Comiskey Park stadium. It was a defiant and brutal act that claimed one genre’s supremacy over another and thus dampened the liberal spirit of musicians trying to exist between the lines of both.
But despite what looked like the majority that day in Chicago was anything but, for great music fans had been welcoming the worlds of genre fusion long before music’s darkest hour. Miles Davis proved the groundbreaking importance of fusion records with Bitches Brew, while much later down the line, Lauryn Hill proved how hip hop, conscious rap, neo-soul, and reggae could combine to innovate on ‘98’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
All of these fusions felt somewhat natural, though. Davis’ free-form jazz was custom-made to blend with alternative worlds, even heavy rock, while Hill’s masterful narrations knew no sonic bounds and acted as the obvious glue to different musical worlds. However, there were some ideas that didn’t feel as seamless, like grunge and funk.
In the ‘90s, they could have been pitted as the modern-day version of rock and disco, occupying various ends of the musical spectrum. But somehow, bands like Rage Against The Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers saw a pathway within their Venn diagram and began blending these opposing worlds to create rock that had both grit and groove. In ‘96, facing a career crossroads after the success of their early work, Pearl Jam saw an opportunity to follow suit.
On their album No Code, the band welcomed in drummer Jack Irons, who sprinkled some spontaneity into Pearl Jam’s recording process. “There was a lot of jamming going into No Code. We’d get into the studio and start kicking it up,” he remembered. But it was the track ‘Who You Are’ that the band allowed Irons’ new style to take the lead. Leaning into the unpredictability of his jamming, which on this track brought with it some funk influences, they decided not to rein him in but to set him free and guide them into new sonic territory.
Irons continued, “I liked to play that drumbeat a lot, and Stone [Gossard] came in and started kicking something over it. Next thing you know, there’s a fairly loose track. Eddie sort of wrote right over it. I don’t even think there were more than a few hours involved in cutting what became that basic track.”
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While it was seemingly innocuous to him, to Pearl Jam and more specifically Vedder, it was a song of spiritual awakening and ultimately led him to the electric sitar where he laid down a riff that gave the song an Eastern-influenced sound and thrust it into unfamiliar yet funky territory.
“We realised that we had an opportunity to experiment,” Vedder said of the moment Irons came in and laid down that drum beat. It might not have been their most critically acclaimed work, but it was their most ambitious and still sounds as such, 30 years on.
