Guns.

mace1229 said:

BF25394 said:

Lerxst1992 said:

josevolution said:

Like Ed said last night paraphrasing here 
This is the 1st week of school! 

Pathetic that lots of folks got upset with him calling this issue out! I’m embarrassed to have been there in the building with them! 

Ed should not forget, although the garden is in a solid blue state, some of the suburbs are solid trumplandia

Hey, it got us glorified g and gimme some truth (my interpretation)

There is a tension between the fact that the rock audience skews white and male, and the fact that white men skew conservative, especially as they age. So you end up with liberal rock artists playing for audiences that are disproportionately conservative (disproportionate to the population of New York City and New Jersey, in this case), and some of the people in that audience chafe at the disconnect. The classic example is Chris Christie being a diehard Springsteen fan. Christie loves Bruce but hates Bruce's politics. I think there are a lot of middle-aged white male Pearl Jam fans who became fans when they were 17 or 18 and didn't pay much attention to politics or political issues, who just connected with the feelings of angst and alienation in the music and who didn't flinch at Pearl Jam's transparently political songs like "W.M.A." and "Glorified G," to name two, but now they're caught in between their established love for the band, whose politics haven't changed, and their own embrace of conservative politics as they've gotten older.

I've leaned conservative my whole life. I don't care about the band's politics at all. With only a few exceptions like the ones you mentioned, most of their songs are free from politics, especially in their early years.
With songs like Release, RVM, Corduroy, Betterman, Dissident, Alive, Yellow Led, Breathe, Immortality, etc, I'm not going to stop listening to them because I don't like the message in WMA, a song I've never really cared for anyway. 
Even still, I've always loved Glorfied G, even though I own guns. Its a good and fun song.

BF25394 said:

mace1229 said:

BF25394 said:

Lerxst1992 said:

josevolution said:

Like Ed said last night paraphrasing here 
This is the 1st week of school! 

Pathetic that lots of folks got upset with him calling this issue out! I’m embarrassed to have been there in the building with them! 

Ed should not forget, although the garden is in a solid blue state, some of the suburbs are solid trumplandia

Hey, it got us glorified g and gimme some truth (my interpretation)

There is a tension between the fact that the rock audience skews white and male, and the fact that white men skew conservative, especially as they age. So you end up with liberal rock artists playing for audiences that are disproportionately conservative (disproportionate to the population of New York City and New Jersey, in this case), and some of the people in that audience chafe at the disconnect. The classic example is Chris Christie being a diehard Springsteen fan. Christie loves Bruce but hates Bruce's politics. I think there are a lot of middle-aged white male Pearl Jam fans who became fans when they were 17 or 18 and didn't pay much attention to politics or political issues, who just connected with the feelings of angst and alienation in the music and who didn't flinch at Pearl Jam's transparently political songs like "W.M.A." and "Glorified G," to name two, but now they're caught in between their established love for the band, whose politics haven't changed, and their own embrace of conservative politics as they've gotten older.

I've leaned conservative my whole life. I don't care about the band's politics at all. With only a few exceptions like the ones you mentioned, most of their songs are free from politics, especially in their early years.
With songs like Release, RVM, Corduroy, Betterman, Dissident, Alive, Yellow Led, Breathe, Immortality, etc, I'm not going to stop listening to them because I don't like the message in WMA, a song I've never really cared for anyway. 
Even still, I've always loved Glorfied G, even though I own guns. Its a good and fun song.

Just so I'm not misunderstood, I'm not saying that what I described is universal or that it applies to every fan or every conservative fan. I'm just saying that this dynamic exists within the rock fanbase and it creates some tension. The artists (who are also mostly white and male) are more liberal than the average white male American (to coin a phrase), and the audience, mostly white and male, is more conservative than the artists.

I suspect that some of the earlier songs that I didn't mention, including some of the ones you did mention, are more political than you (or I) realize. "Yellow Ledbetter" is a commentary on the Gulf War and the tension between paeans to service and the way veterans are actually treated when they come home, especially if they don't conform to societal norms. "Better Man" covers themes of domestic emotional abuse, if not violence. "Dissident" is forthrightly about a political dissident. Eddie has been covering political and social themes from the beginning. The songs that don't have political themes are the exceptions.

Gern Blansten said:

dbanthony said:

Attaway77 said:

I’m tired of people blaming guns killing people.. I don’t even like guns, but I don’t use that as an excuse like people today. I’m willing to bet if somebody broke into your home you wouldn’t mind putting a bullet inside somebody to protect your family or self.. People think guns were just invented.. how do you think you are here today complaining about them? They won wars for centuries/decades for you to exist today. Don't blame the weapon, blame the human...

I don't think the equivalency between guns used for wars and guns used by citizens. From fhe historical end, funs used during the Revolutionary War share no resemblance with the ones today. Even in modern wars, military personnel don't just get to do whatever they want with them at any time. That's not how it works. 

This is like saying "Doctors used to cure people with opium so what's the issue with the opiod crisis today?" Just because something has historical precedent doesn't mean it's the same today as it was then or that rules, laws, and orecedents don't change as time goes on. 

Yeah and the entire argument about guns being necessary to fend off "tyranny" is so mind blowingly stupid I can hardly stand it.

There is clearly an advantage that the gov't has with weaponry that makes anything the public can use to fight tyranny completely useless. The US soldiers could take out an entire army of Meal Team Six with a tactical nuke without even leaving their base.

https://youtu.be/WOSqCjMRXWA?si=ZCd15VtoDoJJzFkr

BF25394 said:

mace1229 said:

BF25394 said:

mace1229 said:

BF25394 said:

Lerxst1992 said:

josevolution said:

Like Ed said last night paraphrasing here 
This is the 1st week of school! 

Pathetic that lots of folks got upset with him calling this issue out! I’m embarrassed to have been there in the building with them! 

Ed should not forget, although the garden is in a solid blue state, some of the suburbs are solid trumplandia

Hey, it got us glorified g and gimme some truth (my interpretation)

There is a tension between the fact that the rock audience skews white and male, and the fact that white men skew conservative, especially as they age. So you end up with liberal rock artists playing for audiences that are disproportionately conservative (disproportionate to the population of New York City and New Jersey, in this case), and some of the people in that audience chafe at the disconnect. The classic example is Chris Christie being a diehard Springsteen fan. Christie loves Bruce but hates Bruce's politics. I think there are a lot of middle-aged white male Pearl Jam fans who became fans when they were 17 or 18 and didn't pay much attention to politics or political issues, who just connected with the feelings of angst and alienation in the music and who didn't flinch at Pearl Jam's transparently political songs like "W.M.A." and "Glorified G," to name two, but now they're caught in between their established love for the band, whose politics haven't changed, and their own embrace of conservative politics as they've gotten older.

I've leaned conservative my whole life. I don't care about the band's politics at all. With only a few exceptions like the ones you mentioned, most of their songs are free from politics, especially in their early years.
With songs like Release, RVM, Corduroy, Betterman, Dissident, Alive, Yellow Led, Breathe, Immortality, etc, I'm not going to stop listening to them because I don't like the message in WMA, a song I've never really cared for anyway. 
Even still, I've always loved Glorfied G, even though I own guns. Its a good and fun song.

Just so I'm not misunderstood, I'm not saying that what I described is universal or that it applies to every fan or every conservative fan. I'm just saying that this dynamic exists within the rock fanbase and it creates some tension. The artists (who are also mostly white and male) are more liberal than the average white male American (to coin a phrase), and the audience, mostly white and male, is more conservative than the artists.

I suspect that some of the earlier songs that I didn't mention, including some of the ones you did mention, are more political than you (or I) realize. "Yellow Ledbetter" is a commentary on the Gulf War and the tension between paeans to service and the way veterans are actually treated when they come home, especially if they don't conform to societal norms. "Better Man" covers themes of domestic emotional abuse, if not violence. "Dissident" is forthrightly about a political dissident. Eddie has been covering political and social themes from the beginning. The songs that don't have political themes are the exceptions.

I agree that there's probably more politics in the lyrics than we realize. I thought I said something along those lines, but I guess not. Most people probably had no idea Even Flow was about a homeless guy when it was out.
But even those political lyrics you pointed out aren't one-sided.
No one wants domestic violence. Everyone hates seeing veterans treated poorly, etc. Most of it is not one-sided, conservative vs liberal. Anyway, you're probably right in your first comment that "Pearl Jam fans who became fans when they were 17 or 18 and didn't pay much attention to politics or political issues, who just connected with the feelings of angst and alienation." 
I'm just saying it didn't matter, most of their songs are not overly political anyway. If you stayed off social media and only listened to the first 5 albums, you may not know PJ is a liberal band with the exception of just a couple songs. 

I think the songs are not overtly political, but it's not so clear as to whether they're overly political. I suspect that Ed intended these songs to have a message and that he would have a different view about the one-sidedness of these lyrics. I am an independent and always have been, but I can see that the parties' attitudes about homelessness and what to do about it are quite different. I can also see that there is a segment of the conservative base that subscribes to religious beliefs that hold that women should subjugate themselves to their husbands. That doesn't necessarily mean that there will be domestic violence, or that all of those people would accept domestic violence, or that only conservatives engage in acts of domestic violence, but there's a direct line from a belief that the man is the head of the household not to be questioned to domestic violence (recognizing that women can also commit domestic violence-- like every time my wife asks me take out the trash, amirite, fellas? -- and that it also occurs in same-sex households, but it's mostly committed by men against women). No one wants veterans to be treated poorly but, again, the parties don't take the same positions on having the government spend money to improve veterans' lives. Remember when Jon Stewart (someone who I find very annoying on television) had to go to Congress to beg them to fund healthcare for 9/11 first responders? The holdouts he was there to convince were not Democrats.

dbanthony said:

I know it's pointless to call put the hypocrisy here, but after seeing a guy at Wrigley in a MAGA hat worn backwards to presumably "trigger" the people behind him (he was in the first row, for the record) it has been on my mind. It's cool if he wants to wear that and express his opinion, but you can't get mad when it comes back around on you. 

gimmesometruth27 said:

so i was at a local church carnival last night and shots rang out twice.

we got there at 6:15 pm and went to hang out in the beer garden. we do it every year and it is kind of a mini high school reunion where we see people we went to school with and we just hang out and have a few beers. the band started at 7:00 in the beer garden. the crowd was massive. it was the biggest turnout i have seen at this carnival in at least 10 years. there were a lot of police walking around and lots of crowds of teenagers in the carnival area. we had no interest in riding rides or getting cotton candy or anything like that so we stayed in the beer garden.

where we were standing we could see groups of kids fighting and then they would stop. as time went on more and more police would show up and then kids would start fighting again. at 8:45 an announcement was made that they were shutting down the carnival at 9 pm due to fighting and violence. they were shutting it down for everyone's safety. to us, since the beer garden was safe, this meant we better go get as many beers as we can in the next 15 minutes before they shut everything down. my friend came back with 4 more beers, so we were going to hang out there and let the crowd disperse before we went to go find our car.

about 9:15 of 9:20 another fight broke out by the exit and a whole swarm of people ran towards the church buildings to our right. this was running the opposite way from the exits. lots of kids just totally frightened. then a minute later they all ran back to our left towards the exits. at that moment we heard 3 loud pops in quick succession. my friend and i looked at each other like "that's gunshots!". we got down underneath our table. the adults in the beer garden started to freak out. the teenagers ran into the beer garden fleeing the shots. they actually had to tell adults what to do in a shooter situation, get down, stay low, and crawl towards safety. many people fled. we did not know which way to go, so we just stayed where we were. then a few minutes later police helicopter began to circle shining it's spotlight looking for suspects. it circled for at least 15 minutes. then police in body armor with long guns ready to go began to enter into the area and secure it. then about 9:45 another burst of 3 shots rang out. these sounded further away like in the surrounding neighborhood. it was in the opposite way of where we needed to go so we made our way to the exit and across the street in between the police cars. at that time we heard more pops, but this was fireworks from the neighborhood being shot into the air. presumably to distract the police copter that was still flying around. it just added to the craziness. if that had happened while the kids were fleeing it would have been pandemonium because everyone was already freaked out and on edge.

by the time we got out of there there were at least 60 or 70 police cars there. cops everywhere. the response time was great. we ended up getting out of there and going to a bar to wind down a bit. it was the craziest thing i have witnessed in a long time. i am glad nobody was hit. there were social media posts saying 2 people were dead. i had to get on there and squash that because we were among the last ones in there and unequivocally we did not see any ambulances or medivac helicopters or anything like that. the police came in like a military unit and cleared the area. i have a lot of pics and video of the aftermath but did not catch the shots. 

here is a news clip about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBuWjLpykjg