Nov 22, 2022

Discovering The Stupid Mop


Vitalogy
Pearl Jam (1994)
Vitalogy was released twenty eight years ago today.  It's more experimental than the first two albums that the band released.  On the night that I picked it up, I listened to the entire album from front to back.  When Bugs played, I remember thinking that it was the weirdest Pearl Jam song that I'd ever heard.  That feeling lasted for about 23 minutes until I listened to the last song on the album.


The fourteenth and final song on Vitalogy is called Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me, but it's also known as Stupid Mop.  There's no singing on this track.  It's an instrumental piece with spoken word clips mixed in that sounded to me like they could have been recordings between a psychiatrist and their patients.  It's creepy as hell and it still sends a shiver up my spine when I hear it, but there's no amount of description that can do it justice.  You just have to listen to it for yourself.
Pearl Jam (1994)




I had absolutely no idea what I had just heard when I first listened to Stupid Mop.  In 2022, you can do a Google search to find the lyrics of just about any song in a matter of seconds.  Even if it's a new or obscure song that hasn't been archived by any of the databases, you could quickly find people discussing it on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any other social media platform.  None of this was true in 1994.  The only source of information I had was the liner notes of the album, and the only mention of this song other than the track listing was a brief note which says that it was recorded and mixed by Brett Eliason with Jack Irons on drums.  That's it.

I played this track in my bedroom dozens of times, turning the volume all the way up in certain parts to try to piece together as much of what was being said as I could in an effort to figure out what the hell I was listening to.  Eventually, the song faded to the dark corners of my memory, but I was listening to Vitalogy recently and had the same feelings of curiosity about Stupid Mop that I had as a teenager.


On May 15th, 2000, the band was asked about Stupid Mop during an online chat with fans on Lycos.  This clue kicked off a search for whatever it was that Eddie Vedder taped off of television that was used for the spoken word portions of this track.  Eventually, fans discovered that it was from the May 27th, 1986 episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline.  It's called A Matter Of The Mind.
 

Fast forward to 29:12 to see the part of the show that was used for the start of the song.  They changed the pitch of the audio when it was mixed into the track, but it's clear that this is the source.

The song has become creepy to me once again, but for completely different reasons.  First of all, I wonder what happened to the people in this episode of Frontline.  Did they or their family know that their interviews were used in a Pearl Jam album, and if so, how do they feel about it?  Does anybody care?  Is it fair game to use these clips for artistic expression because they agreed to be interviewed for television?  I don't think that Eddie Vedder is the type of person who would knowingly do something harmful to people who are clearly among society's most vulnerable, but this feels exploitative.  Vitalogy was released less than eight years after these interviews were broadcast on television, so it's certainly plausible that these men and women could have heard this song at some point.  I know even less about how to feel about this song than I did when I first heard it, and I didn't think that was possible.