The Alternative Number Ones: Pearl Jam’s “Daughter”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

They're almost all gone now. The big grunge bands that came out of Seattle in the early '90s all had intense, smoldering, charismatic frontmen, and the vast majority of those frontmen died young. Some of them passed away when the genre still existed at the forefront of popular culture. Others left us decades later, becoming victims of the addiction and depression and hard living that followed them from those peak days. Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Mark Lanegan -- all gone. Stone Temple Pilots weren't even a Seattle grunge band, but Scott Weiland sang like they were, and he's gone, too. So is Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon, who isn't from Seattle and who didn't make grunge but who recorded in Seattle and hung out with the grunge guys.

It's crazy to look over all that carnage and think about what it means. "Seattle grunge frontman" has to be one of the most dangerous career paths that anyone has had in the past 50 years. There weren't that many people who ever held that position, and the people who existed in that role found varying degrees of fame, fortune, and mass adulation. It didn't save them. They might as well have been early Formula 1 drivers. They might as well have served on the front lines in World War I.