The best revenge? Getting on with everything

“The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.”
— Eddie Vedder

Something of a voice for Gen X kids like myself, Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder’s quote above has been dished up around the internet for many years. It seems to age as well as Vedder himself has, from the stringy kid with the baritone growl to the greying sage with a predilection for acoustic guitars and heartbreak.

The full context of the quote — spoken while Vedder was appearing with bandmate Jeff Ament on the syndicated call-in show Rockline in October 1993 — is worth noting.

At the time, Pearl Jam were riding high from the success of their album Ten, and the 1992 single, Jeremy, which was inspired by a small newspaper story that Vedder had read about how a teenage boy shot and killed himself in front of classmates.

During the show, a caller named Juanita from Florida called in. From the transcript of that program, here’s her question, and Vedder’s answer.

Caller: Uh, yeah. There was this kid on Headbanger’s Ball that took this school hostage and the parents were blaming the video, ‘Jeremy’ and stuff. I was wondering how they felt about parents blaming the music for violence and stuff?

Eddie: Wow! I didn’t even hear about that. Now, uh, I remember one night in this basement when I was writing that … that I thought, man … I guess they can’t sue us for this one because I’m writing about it after it happened, you know? Some kid did this. I didn’t make that up and that’s a fact. It came from a small paragraph in a paper which means you kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. That all you’re gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. Sixty-three degrees and cloudy in a suburban neighborhood. That’s the beginning of the video and that’s the same thing is that in the end, it does nothing … nothing changes. The world goes on and you’re gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself. Be stronger then [sic] those people. And then you can come back. That’s kinda what I did. Now all those people who were my enemies want to be my friends. They don’t understand why, uh, I don’t respond to them.

Eddie Vedder would explore mental health and mortality in other songs, especially Just Breathe, which he rerecorded by himself during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an extra layer of meaning.

Here’s a version Pearl Jam performed for the TV show Austin City Limits: