No grunge band exploded on impact the way Nirvana and Pearl Jam did, so maybe we should remember the grunge boom not for its eternal crunch but for its politics. Its two biggest, most visible bands parroted liberal politics in the Clinton mainstream, shedding the misogynist skin of 80s hair-metal whose excess matched Reagan's isolationism.

Easily their commercial peak, Pearl Jam's second album Vs. set records in the week and a half it took to sell 1.3 million copies in October 1993, and coupled with Nirvana's feminist-minded In Utero a month earlier, it was the moment where those two bands overlapped most in popularity and political-mindedness, a coincidence not lost on the guys who almost named their album Five Against One.

While Vs. sprawled in all directions thematically and musically, it states its business immediately within the wriggling groove of "Go," which describes an abusive relationship from the villain's perspective. The music uncoils perfectly to match its unreliable narrator, with Eddie Vedder mumbling the tell "Suppose I abused you" over a dodgy riff and only taking front and center on the pleading chorus, "Please please please/ Don't go on me," intentionally louder and more attractive to look sympathetic in the midst of his evil neglect. It's frightening. Similarly weak characters narrate "Glorified G" ("Got a gun, in fact I got two/ That's okay man, cause I love god") and "Dissident" ("When she couldn't hold, she folded: 'A dissident is here!'").

However, just as many songs on the record are sung by the victim: "Daughter," the album's biggest hit, concerns another chilling abuse scenario, where the disabled child in question is made to believe they shouldn't "call me daughter/ Not fit to." "Rearviewmirror" could well be the partner of "Go"'s narrator getting up the guts to hightail it, and "W.M.A." casts Vedder as a bystander screaming "Police stopped my brother again" at the "white male American" of the title, an officer whom Vedder sneers "won the lottery by being born." Those are the "mature" songs, while the epic-chorused "Leash" ("Get out of my f***ing face"), nailbombing "Blood" ("F***ing circus") and get-over-yourself humanity metaphor "Rats" ("They don't s*** where they're not supposed to") are childish enough to ensure the attention doesn't wander.