Now that Eddie Vedder has decided he wants to be David Byrne and Pearl Jam the Talking Heads, the only question remaining is: When are they gonna break out the big white suit?
Literally every human being I’ve spoken with likes Pearl Jam’s new (wave) single “Dance of the Clairvoyants,” and not a single one of them gives a good once in a lifetime that if you sent a sample of its DNA to Ancestry.com it would come back 100 percent Talking Heads and 0 percent flannel shirt.
It’s not as if people are denying the Head’s influence; a Rolling Stone magazine scribe recently conceded the song’s “obvious debt to the Talking Heads,” but only after calling it Pearl Jam’s “funkiest song in forever.” To which I can only respond there’s a considerable difference between an obvious debt to and wholesale appropriation of, just as there’s a considerable difference between admiring a man’s hat and stealing it.
The analogy that comes to mind is Greta Van Fleet. Fans point to them as the saviors of Classic Rock, when all they’re really doing is cannibalizing your Led Zeppelin favorites and reassembling them, Frankenstein style, into what we’re asked to believe are original songs. They’re a very good Led Zeppelin tribute band hiding behind a woman–or to put it more accurately, a woman’s name.
“Dance of the Clairvoyants” brings to mind the Documentary Now!’s Test Pattern. Both owe their existence to the Talking Heads, but whereas Test Pattern makes me laugh, “Dance of the Clairvoyants” makes me want to sue for plagiarism.
The bottom line is everybody steals from everybody in the music business, but some do it better than others. Pearl Jam sucks at it, as they prove on their 2019 single “I Believe in Miracles,” which is basically the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” on methadone. The only truly miraculous thing about “I Believe in Miracles” is the failure of Lou Reed’s estate to contact an attorney.
“The Dance of the Clairvoyants” is like recycled paper, or one of the 2,000,000 Chuck Berry rips out there. I’ve got nothing against the practice, but you don’t have to be a clairvoyant to pull it off.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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