To Yield or not to Yield; That is the question.

So I was surfing the internet last night and got completely bored, and as such I did what I usually do when I'm on the computer and bored: type my favorite musical artists into YouTube and see what comes up.  Sometimes I even re-visit old favorites of mine if I'm especially bored, which indeed was the case.  In the midst of this I came across one of my all time favorite music videos, that being the one for Pearl Jam's Do the Evolution (which I have linked to in this post) off of their 1998 album Yield (which, saying a lot for a band that constantly comes out with lyrical masterpieces, is probably their greatest lyrical masterpiece to date and in my opinion some of their finest work, but that's another story.....).

Rather than just being animated and animated excellently, this video is one of my favorites for the majority of reasoning being that it's actually very deep and thought provoking and loaded to the brim with symbolic images.  In watching this video last night I made a few really interesting observances that I never had picked up on before, as you would imagine to be the case with something like this.  One such observance was a shot near the end of the video of a Yield sign getting shot at and carelessly knocked over, as if not only to ignore it's presence and potential meaning but treating it as if it was just simply getting in the way.  This observance comes in light of the fact that the concept of the album is to focus around the idea of "yielding to nature," or as Eddie Vedder says of the matter: "Let's say that hypothetically speaking, the title does mean something...You can fight so much, and then you have to think, 'What are the real battles?' 'What's really important?' You get to a certain point, and it's really hard to remember what music is and to remember what drives you."  Quite a bit of a more positive outlook on life than their earlier works, which while still some of their more excellent and well known, has a lot more general pessimistic approaches.  Also says Vedder on the issue: "What was rage in the past has become reflection. In the past we got really angry and we cried out against many things in our songs, and I think our message reached to people pretty well this way. But where do you go after that? I think when you become an adult you have to express your energy in a different way, more calm. That doesn't mean we forget the bad side of life, because it still appears in our songs. But what it's now exciting, a real challenge, is facing it from a more positive point of view, looking for a way to solve it. In the past we said: what a shit, this stinks, that sucks, everything sucks... Now it's time to say: stop, let's look for a solution, let's be positive."

While most of the songs on this album are more positively deep and reflective, Do the Evolution is one of the ones that very much so focuses on the bad side of life, criticizing mankind's so called "Evolution" as a species today from what we were way back when, arguing that in all actuality we are no more primitive animals than we were as cavemen.  The approach from a more positive point of view/ way to solve it as Vedder suggests in the above quote I think is emphasized quite well in the shot of that Yield sign getting carelessly blown away in the music video: that sometimes we are so caught up in our ambissions and drives in life - to get ahead in life  or keep up with society or whatever - that we not only seldom stop to see the beauty and passion in the bigger picture of things, but sometimes we just ignorantly and carelessly blow them by to the wayside in pursuit of our selfish ambissions.