Who Gave Them The Right To Be Great?

See ma, no pirated cds!

_ Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers: Who gave them the right to be great? Who can measure how much they have shaped the music industry? How many cheap imitators have they spawned?

_ It was in 1991 when I was given the opportunity to experience the phenomenon of one of the two greatest album of the nineties - if not all time: Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Ten.

_ How many in their teens 15 years ago could claimed that they have not heard classics by these two groups? Jeremy, Alive, Black, Under The Bridge, Breaking The Girl and Give It Away were all huge teen anthems of their time.

_ I played them over and over and over. Banged my head hard to their angry, psychedelic and even funky tunes. And even now, I go back to them over and over and over again.

_ Fast forward, 15 years later, after many great albums, after so many cheap imitators, they happened to release their separate latest album in the same month and year, Pearl Jam's self-titled album and RHCP's Stadium Arcadium.

_ Like me, they have grown older through time and lessons learnt from their previous albums.

_ Pearl Jam is no longer as angry and RHCP is no longer a group of druggies. Both albums are all about the confidence and maturity of the authors knowing that they just have to do their thing and they will give the greatest pleasures to their listeners.

_ Jeff Ament, Flea, Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, John Frusciante, Matt Cameron, Chad Smith, Eddie Vedder and Anthony Keidis all masters of their tools. Fighting each other in every track for the listeners' attention. I have to isolate each of them in each listen to truly appreciate their talents and hardwork.

_ So who gave them the right to be great? They did.

Rolling Stone Reviews:
[Pearl Jam]
[Stadium Arcadium]

---
I wrote another totally different entry and deleted it for I thought it looked like a review rather than a personal experience.