SOMEWHERE I HAVE HEARD THIS BEFORE, IN A DREAM MY MEMORY HAS STORED: In an essay for Slate, Simon Reynolds suggests that the current twentieth-anniversary revivalism for
Nevermind and the alternative/grunge movement is actually
nostalgia for a pre-Internet era in which a single cultural movement could be said to be era-defining:
... [T]he media organs of the analog system generated what you might call the "Epochal Self-Image": a sense of a particular stretch of years as constituting an era, a period with a distinct "feel" and spirit. That sense is always constructed, always entails the suppression of the countless disparate other things going on in any given stretch of time, through the focus on a select bunch of artists, styles, recordings, events, deemed to "define the times." If we date the takeoff point of the Internet as a dominant force in music culture to the turn of the millennium (the point at which broadband enabled the explosive growth of filesharing, blogging, et al.), it is striking that the decade that followed is characterized by the absence of epochal character. It's not that nothing happened ... it's that so many little things happened, a bustle of microtrends and niche scenes that all got documented and debated, with the result that nothing was ever able to dominant and define the era....
That is why it is so hard to see what, from the last dozen years or so of rock, could be the focus for future commemorative or revivalist impulses. Can you envisage the 20th anniversary of the Strokes' debut album, or the White Stripes's breakthrough LP, White Blood Cells, being celebrated? Spin will not be able to put either group on the cover under the legend "The Album That Changed Everything," because neither record came close to Nevermind's paradigm-shift.... When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.
As
we've discussed before, it's a bit awkward and weird for those of us who are no longer part of Youth Culture to make any kind of grand pronouncements as to how today's youth are experiencing and understanding their world. And it's also a bit solipsistic to even define the grunge/alternative era as being such a transcendent, epoch-defining thing—because that's really only the case if you were of the right age, and generally white, when it was going down in the first place. I don't know that the culture is in fact more niche-y now than it was then inasmuch as the Internet makes the niches more evident and able to self-connect, so let's just let today's kids figure out, twenty years from now, what they're pining for while my generation is paying $250 general admission seats to see Eddie Vedder's latest ukelele tour.
Nevermind was a great album, but the whole voice of the generation thing was a throwback to Dylan. I suspect half of the marketing was built around the knowledge that this is the last time we can call a single album epochal and nearly get away with it. Where youth popular music might have once been a single entity, the rock, country, pop and R&B elements had largely split by 1991, and of artists who tried to bridge the gap, Kurt Cobain, for all his talents, wasn't one of them. The success even then was mostly the music (which can't have mattered that much to people who'd been buying hair metal before moving ton rap/rock fusion), but it also didn't hurt that A&R people could see in Kurt a good looking hard rock frontman and be nostalgic for Axl Rose who was clearly on his way down, and rock critics could hear his music and be nostalgic for the MC5. Reynolds diagnoses the situation but is 20 years late.
ReplyDeleteBack in 1991, you had MTV/Rolling Stone/Spin to create the appearnace of an epochal consensus, papering over the fact that it didn't really exist. There are no cultural arbiters anymore which have that kind of cross-niche clout, are there?
ReplyDeleteI also suspect that, for a lot of people, nostalgia for grunge is simply nostalgia for a different musical world. These days, a guitar-driven band like Nirvana struggles to get any airplay, regardless of how good it is. It's hard for a rock band to get play on pop radio, and a lot of rock radio is pretty closed to new bands. (Not entirely closed, but fairly closed.)
ReplyDeleteNot really, though within genres there's power -- some idiot is clearly behind all the awful country music these days. Rolling stone can't even sell rock anymore, and I'm not certain spin still exists. That's not sarcasm. I really have no idea.
ReplyDeleteBut even then, I still feel nirvana was a nostalgia act before it's time. That's a stronger claim than your argument of what do you mean we, white man, wrt grunge. Gen x exists as a concept out of a desire to speak of a demographic phenomenon like the baby boom, its very name a refutation of any significance (gen y they stopped even trying. Its like naming hurricaines, thougg mellenials has a nice ring if you overlook the round number bias.) and into the pigeon holes everyone goes. (kurt was miscast as dylan, he should have been Lennon. Lets give eddie vedder neil young, since he wants it so badly.) Rolling stone and spin are probably filling the role of, well, hypothetically relevant rolling stone. Maybe without these arbiters, Cobain would still be alive. Probably not.
I can only look at the culture of teens through my three teen age daughters eyes, but I would fathom a guess that game creators and web masters are their rock stars, anonymous that they are. Most of their and their male peers time is spent online or gaming (Wii, Playstation2). The males seem to get excited about the release of an upcoming new game or updated game at about the same level I used to get about album releases when i was their age. Where as we defined ourselves by our musical tastes, they define themselves by their tumblr page and their social network.
ReplyDeleteLooking at Wiki--the year-end Hot 100 Top 40 and applying a generous definition of "rock" gives us:
ReplyDelete2010: Two quasi-rock songs--"Hey, Soul Sister," and "Breakeven"
2009: Four rock songs--"Gives You Hell," "You Found Me," "Use Somebody," "Second Chance"
2008: Two rock songs--"Viva LA Vida," "Paralyzer"
2007: "It's Not Over," "Home," "What I've Done," "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race," "Rockstar," and "Thnks fr the Mmrs" are rock songs for sure, but there's a bunch of tougher calls--"Hey There Delilah," "Makes Me Wonder," "Girlfriend," and "How To Save A Life" all have rock elements.
Most of the rest is hip-hop or pop, though some of that gets tricky--a lot of Pink's stuff has a strong rock influence despite being pop.
To be fair, Pitchfork wields undue power when it comes to indie/less than mainstream music.
ReplyDeleteSure, but that's a subset. Similarly, does getting 5 mics in The Source still matter?
ReplyDeleteI actually think that Nevermind was a defining moment of my college years. I remember hearing Smells Like Tean Spirit the first time, telling my friends about the band, hearing the local bands learn to cover them. etc. When I llisten to other seminal albums released around the same time, Actung Baby and Ten come to mind, I may like them more (and listen to them more often even today), but they do not instantly take me to the same place as Nevermind.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, I think the really interesting piece of this is whether the old style of marketing "anniversary" products will hold up in today's world. While my physical copy of Nevermind sits on shelf, it was burned onto a hard drive many years ago and I have no interest in hearing (or buying) 4 CDs worth of extras. My mom would buy endless Elvis memorbelia, but I will just cue up Nevermind and Unplugged and turn the stereo up to 11.