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| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: 1991 |
| Date | Fri, 02 Mar 2007 02:28:35 -0500 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "William Rabeneck" <largro13@yahoo.com>
> Nirvana were also kind of a curse, because after them, most bands
> seemed to feel that everything had to be so damn serious. Hell,
> look what it did to Cobain! Give me a cocky old live fool, trying
> to recapture his glory, like David Lee Roth, over a dead Kurt Cobain
> any day.
>
> The move away from the previous music, toward the Grunge thing, is
> also just emblematic of the way the music industry has usually been
> run. You've got suits gambling on what the kids are going to like,
> and putting all of their eggs, usually in just one or two baskets
> genre-wise. If the suits (radio and recorded music industry) ever
> got wise, and promoted more variety at the same time, I think that
> they'd actually be pleasantly surprised with their sales. In
> general, radio is probably gonna have a better play list, if they
> promote the ten best songs from five Rock sub-genres, rather than
> the twenty-five best songs from two Rock sub-genres.
I see what you're saying, and that's probably how the history books
are likely to shape that era, but that's certainly not how I remember
it!
My personal background of 1991 is that I was 21 years old and stuck in
a small town on the Texas/New Mexico border (quite literally stuck,
actually, because my mom had had a massive stroke the previous year
and I'd had to quit school temporarily and become her in-home health
care provider) where the closest record store was the Hastings in
Clovis, 30 miles away, and the closest decent record store was in
Lubbock, 100 miles in the opposite direction. My only musical
lifeline at the time was a college radio station out of Amarillo,
KACV, that was very much on the commercial end of alternative, but way
the hell better than the other options. So I listened to this station
(and KTXT, Lubbock's college station) constantly in '91 and '92, and
my memory of these stations is that NEVERMIND definitely had a *huge*
impact on the playlists, but it was in no way an overnight change from
pre-grunge into grunge. It wasn't suddenly all Pearl Jam,
Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and the increasingly crap imitations
of same.
No, my memory is that NEVERMIND was roughly equivalent, in an industry
sense, to the explosion of MTV nearly a decade before. It caught the
big labels by surprise, and for at least a couple of years, they had
no idea what exactly The Kidz were responding to or why, and whenever
that happens, their first instinct is to basically throw everything at
the wall and see what sticks.
So yeah, there was the po-faced post-Nirvana crowd in one corner, but
think back at what else suddenly emerged over the next few years
(roughly the period between, say, NEVERMIND and the Apples In Stereo's
FUN TRICK NOISEMAKER, to pick a totally arbitrary end point that
demarcates the rise of "indie" as opposed to "alternative")!
Think about it -- all these records were not only released on major
labels, I remember hearing them on the radio and seeing the artists in
magazines and on MTV:
Teenage Fanclub's BANDWAGONESQUE (remember when they were on SNL in
'92, doing "The Concept" and that mash-up of "What You Do To Me" and
"Satan"?)
The Pooh Sticks' THE GREAT WHITE WONDER and MILLION SELLER
Juliana Hatfield's BECOME WHAT YOU ARE
Letters To Cleo's AURORA GORY ALICE
American Music Club's MERCURY
The Wedding Present's HIT PARADE 1 and 2
Barenaked Ladies' GORDON
Beastie Boys' CHECK YOUR HEAD and ILL COMMUNICATION
Eugenius' OOMALAMA and MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
Green Day's DOOKIE
PJ Harvey's DRY and RID OF ME
The High Llamas' GIDEON GAYE
Stereolab's TRANSIENT RANDOM NOISE BURSTS WITH ANNOUNCEMENTS and MARS
AUDIAC QUINTET
The Lemonheads' IT'S A SHAME ABOUT RAY
Luna's LUNAPARK
Shonen Knife's LET'S KNIFE
Sloan's SMEARED and TWICE REMOVED
The Spent Poets' THE SPENT POETS
The Breeders' LAST SPLASH
Lisa Germano's HAPPINESS
Kirsty MacColl's TITANIC DAYS
Mazzy Star's SO TONIGHT THAT I MAY SEE
The Muffs' THE MUFFS
Redd Kross' PHASESHIFTER
Liz Phair's EXILE IN GUYVILLE and WHIP-SMART
Saint Etienne's FOXBASE ALPHA and SO TOUGH
The Ass Ponys' ELECTRIC ROCK MUSIC
Beck's MELLOW GOLD
Massive Attack's PROTECTION
Portishead's DUMMY
Sonic Youth's DIRTY and EXPERIMENTAL JET SET TRASH AND NO STAR
That Dog's THAT DOG and TOTALLY CRUSHED OUT
Matthew Sweet's 100% FUN
Elastica's ELASTICA
Ben Folds Five's BEN FOLDS FIVE
Aimee Mann's WHATEVER and I'M WITH STUPID
The Sixths' WASPS NESTS
This was actually a period of surprising vitality and variety for the
big labels: the shutdown that you're talking about, when "alternative"
started to mean only "flannel-clad dick-swinging," didn't really
happen until well after. My theory is that when Kurt Cobain died, the
A&R lemmings decided that the primary search was for a "new" KC, a
search that they got entirely wrong, as they're wont to do.
S
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