I am no longer hip. The agency of my discovery was a radio station that specializes in “alternative” rock: An abrasive song by some angry grunge band came on during a drive, and I immediately punched to a classical-music station. Only a few years earlier I had been on the rock ‘n’ roll cutting edge, but now I prefer soul, classical jazz, zydeco, even big band — anything but the sound of screeching young men with their flying guitars.
On the way home, I stopped at a bookstore and picked up The Spin Alternative Record Guide by the writers and editors of Spin magazine. If I was going to give up the hipster ghost, I needed a sign that “alternative” music, the music that defines 90s cool, no longer spoke to me. Reading the $ ISpin guide makes it obvious that “alternative” rock isn’t really about music at all. The editors claim that “just as, generationally, baby busters have found it difficult to distinguish their identities from boomers — no war protests, no indisputable defining experiences — alternative rock lacks the proud boundaries that rock’s original tradition kept so well guarded.” Despite this disclaimer, the editors nonetheless make a stab at a definition by way of comparison with baby-boomer, or “old-style,” rock:
More than jazz, blues, country, or any other musical genre, old-style rock was defined by a mass appeal you didn’t have to sneer at, the mythic popularity of the universal youth music that turned the repressed fifties into the rebellious sixties. . . . Alternative rock, on the other hand, is anti- generationally dystopian, subculturally, presuming fragmentation: it’s built on an often neurotic discomfort over massified culture, takes as its archetype bohemia far more than youth, and never expects that its popular appeal, such as it is, will have much of a social impact.
“Anti-generationally dystopian”? “‘Subculturally presuming fragmentation”? This is the kind of pseudo-academic drivel that has been the stock of rock critics since the birth of rock criticism in the 1960s. It’s an attempt to both legitimize and romanticize rock, make it a psychologically and socially vibrant art form, and maintain the appropriate posture of rebellion against the plastic middle-class culture.
It’s also appallingly ignorant. If any music is anti-generationally dystopian, presumes fragmentation, and expresses discomfort over massified culture — in other words, expresses feelings of fear, hopelessness, and alienation that transcend generational, economic, and racial barriers — it’s not alternative rock idols Hole, the Nine Inch Nails, or the Butthole Surfers, but blues, jazz, and country traditions that the Spin guide never mentions. But unlike alternative rock, these genres also express joy, spiritual ecstasy, and lovestruck jubilation, which is probably why the Spin guide banishes them to the dustbin of history If music that expresses happiness is the meat of most “mainstream” music tans, it’s poison tot what MTV calls “Alternative Nation.”
According to Spin, “alternative rock came into being in the 1960s, with the first “dissenters from the rock norm.” The movement included iconoclast Frank Zappa and heavy metal godfather Iggy Pop. But the real rounding fathers were the Velvet Underground, four art school disciples of New York pop-art guru Andy Warhol, who, the guide says, broke new ground by addressing topics like heroin and homosexuality that “even the [Rolling] Stones were only comfortable hinting at.” The Velvets were the antithesis of the upbeat pop of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, with live shows featuring bizarre “happenings” influenced by absurdist, nihilistic movements like Dadaism.
The Velvets paved the way for the punk bands that sprouted in New York in the 1970s, artists like the Ra mones, Television, Talking Heads, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Many of these bands played songs that were fast, loud, and antisocial, a reaction to what the musicians perceived as rock’s bloat and pretension. In the 1970s, the English discovered punk and presented their own, uglier version of the Ramones: the notorious Sex Pistols. The Pistols were the brainchild of Malcolm McLaren, a one-time fashion designer. For McLaren punk was not about music — he kicked a musician out of the band to make room for Sid Vicious, who could barely hold, much less play, his bass — but about tweaking moral sensibilities through bizarre dress, vulgarity, and other forms of confrontational “art.”
Although the Velvets never sold many albums and the Pistols went down in a blaze after Sid Vicious killed himself, punk’s influence on rock has been enormous. There is a famous adage in rock circles that while the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, everyone who bought one formed a band. Punk paved the way for a legion of English artists like Elvis Costello, Generation X, and the Cure, who were steeped in the punk culture’s irony, sarcasm, and cynicism, as well as groups like Duran Duran, the Police, and Culture Club, whose musical sensibility was soft pop but whose attitude of shocking the public-remember the androgynous cross-dressing heroin addict Boy George? — was punk. It also inspired the anti-commercial independent scene that thrived in America in the 1980s and produced a host of bands like the late Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana, whose 1991 breakthrough album Nevermind launched the neo-punk aesthetic into the orbit of the mainstream.
Today, punk disciples like Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Rancid, and Green Day sell millions of albums, and punk fashion is seen everywhere from movies (Seven) to Burger King to fashion runways in Milan and Paris. Indeed, punk’s confrontational sneer has become so commonplace that the guide claims “this may be the last moment in time when alternative rock can be summed up as a musical genre apart.”
Not two pages alter this dire pronouncement, Spin offers its first entry in the guide: ABBA, one of the largest-selling pop groups in history. Justifying the inclusion of the Swedish foursome responsible for cosmically vapid 70s tracks like “Dancing Queen” and “Waterloo,” critic Barry Walters writes, “The fact that [ABBA] was able to [be popular] and remain innately strange, oddly detached from the sources it so obviously mastered, civilized to the nth degree but overflowing with operatic adult emotions that don’t match the teen-beat sounds of kiddie-talk lyrics, heroes to grannies and gay men — is one of pop’s greatest miracles.”
Couldn’t he have just said he liked the songs? Actually, ABBA’s inclusion in the guide is a sign of how steeped in irony the alternative culture is. Popularity, in the guise of commercial success, means selling out, pure and simple. Therefore, the only success the alternative world approves of is the kitschy type, the kind that can be enjoyed with a knowing smirk. Tony Bennett in concert on MTV, anyone?
To Alternative Nation, music is like literature to politically correct college professors — not something to lose yourself in, but to consume at arm’s length and with an eye on race, class, gender, and what’s considered appropriate iconoclasm. Sure, it’s fine to listen to ABBA — just as long as you’re aware that the group was strange and appealed to gay men. This explains why Madonna’s “Immaculate Collection,” a greatest-hits package, ranks number 11 on the “Top 100 Alternative Albums” at the back of the guide. Madonna’s clunky, forgettable dance tracks are here transformed into an “adventurous” sound, her lapsed Catholicism “delivering the rock ‘n’ roll answer to [Martin Scorsese’s movie] Mean Streets that Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel only promised.” Lucky girl — if she had kept her top on and written some great songs, she never would have made the list.
This finger-in-the-eye-of-bourgeois-respectability stuff gets pretty tiring, and the irony is that the critics who think this attitude is the key to understanding rock ‘n’ roll have it all backwards. The finger in the eye came later; originally rock ‘n’ roll was merely the extension of its predecessors, inescapably part of the 20th-century tradition of pop music. In the remarkable book Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in Popular Music, critic Martha Bayles argues that the ethic of contempt in current popular music has nothing to do with the traditions that spawned rock ‘n’ roll. According to Bayles, 1950s rock ‘n’ roll was simply swing music under a different name, an obvious fact to anyone who’s done the jitterbug to Benny Goodman, Louis Jordan, Lionel Hampton, Bill Haley, and Elvis at the same wedding.
Bayles claims that rock’s current stature as envelope-pusher began when 60s g roups like the Velvet Underground discovered “the antisocial, anti-art impulses of the Europ ean avant-garde.” As a result, many rock ‘n’ roll groups today inspired by the Velvets are antagonistic towards the very things that former pop music giants lived for — expertise on your instrument, giving the audience what it wants, and making a few bucks. The punk Do It Yourself ethic dictates that anyone with two arms can play guitar; members of grunge group Pearl Jam wring their hands over their popularity, refusing to play crowd favorites in concert, and neo-punks Green Day and other groups are pilloried as sellouts for signing to a major label. Even R.E.M.’s Mike Stipe, lauded as a model of decency by the music press, balls up sheets of paper with his lyrics written on them and throws them at the audience — a gesture of profound contempt for fans who complain they can’t understand the words when he sings.
These days the only groups who seem to care about pleasing the people — the imperative of pop musicians from Count Basie through Sinatra and the Beatles — are artists whose constituencies would ostensibly be the most receptive to grunge’s and punk’s confrontational message. Soul, blues, zydeco, and jazz are enjoyed mostly by working-class people, who, at least economically, have the most to complain about. But to these fans, music is a means of escape, or at least of collectively coping with emotional turmoil, not a vehicle for celebrating rage. The music highlights dance, showmanship, competence, and capitalism. (Rap strays from this formula by debasing its subject and the audience, which is why it made it into the guide.)
After reading the last page of the guide — on John Zorn, whose “recordings don’t sound all that appealing [but are] often organized or conceived in a way that makes them far more fascinating than better-sounding [expletive] that emanates from a more banal source” — I felt liberated, free at last from the paralyzing irony, politics, and cliquish, cutthroat outcooling that has become the sine qua non of contemporary rock ‘n’ roll.
This doesn’t mean I’m abandoning pop music. The 60s gave us the pseudo-art of Velvet Underground and snotty sarcasm of Frank Zappa, but also Motown, the Beach Boys, and the Hollies. Modern grunge is still dishing up a steady diet of anger, debasement, and confrontation, but there are signs of life in artists like Van Morrison, Luther Allison, C.J. Chenier, and Eric Matthews.
And I can always fall back on the staggeringly rich American pop music tradition that gave the world Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, and what Martha Baylcs refers to as “the resilient, affirmative spirituality” of the blues. Now that’s an alternative.
By Mark Gaureau Judge;
