I keep missing entire musical movements. It could be a product of
age and its accompanying time compression—I don't know. Lo-fi, emo,
neo- new wave, post post-punk, electro-crunk—what happened?
Anyway—zoom—now they're gone. I guess. It could also be that I'm not
looking hard enough.
Grunge was the last big scene that I can remember. It was the kind
of musical movement so huge and obnoxious and out of hand that even the
TV morning show Florence Henderson-types were dropping the G-word and
chirping about "the Pearl Jam" and "the Nirvana." And like all big
scenes, once exploded, it was doomed to end in a fiery ball of scorn
and ridicule.
I wasn't the biggest fan of grunge—a bit of a problem since I was
living in Seattle at the time. The streets were paved with it. It was a
relentless soundtrack, a never-ending theme, like a jukebox stuck on
the same song. A few years of that can really get to you. And as a
Canadian I was particularly baffled by the aesthetic—a quaint throwback
to the doofus stoner look of my high school days, minus the hockey
crap.
The pop culture pundits called it an antidote to the eighties, to
the happy pop poop of MTV and its multicoloured world of corporate
manufacturing and image consciousness, in much the same way that punk
was an antidote to bloated arena rock and droopy mustaches.
Everything's an antidote, a tonic, a salve, an ointment to whatever
came before it. If it weren't for all of these antidotes, we'd still be
infected with a bad case of Fabian.
Grunge had a good run, but I knew it was all over the day I saw Gap
window displays full of plaid flannel shirts and jeans preripped at the
knee.
And there's always the question: is it possible to maintain your
grungy indie cred when you're getting rich off of being an alleged
miserable loser? As the wheels came off the bandwagon, Seattle started
to feel like a bar after all the lights go up at closing time.
Breakups, heroin, death, and Courtney Love really didn't help either.
"If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm about getting
rid of grunge," Blur front man Damon Albarn declared in 1993, just
before his band and the Britpop scene would face extinction themselves.
Behold, the cycle of life.
Well, not exactly life—more like mutation. Somewhere right now
there's probably some spotty guitar-slingin' garage rat discovering the
delights of loud-quiet-loud dynamics and thrilling to the ancient,
obscure sounds of Soundgarden, and then melding it somehow with his
love of 80's MTV bands, Britpop, and emo.
Or not. Things may be too fractured now, too wildly democratic. The
Seattle scene was born of its off-the-radar insularity. Today, thanks
to our wondrous digital age, everything is on the radar—a billion blips
beeping for our attention. Movements come and go like slice joints,
hype-fests peak and crest over a lunchtime. And we're left with a large
steaming load of beard-and-scarf music and the insipid nursery rhymes
of Feist—ready-made margarine commercial soundtracks, tasteful,
non-threatening iPod filler.
To paraphrase Travis Bickle, one day a real antidote will come. Who
knows? It could be rockabilly. It could be grunge-a-billy. Or
electro-crunk-a-billy. Whatever it is, it could be the next big
thing—except smaller. Keep your peepers peeled; blink and you might
miss it.
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Straight Blog.
