yeah. that's right. grunge. everyone's favorite marketing term slash genre slash fashion statement slash meaningless buzzword from the early 90's. even cars were grunge! (sadly, the car commercial which called it's subject grunge seems to be unlocateable on the interwebs).
so i got the new Mojo, and the main feature is on the history of grunge, particularly sub pop records which turns 20 this year and how... umm.. important it was...
ummm...
sure. why not.
i'm not going to pick at the article. it's mostly published history, old friends getting together, some reminiscing, some complaining about the "fall of grunge" and some talk of sub pop's current status...
so okay, i was sort of a "Grunge" person back in middle school/freshman year of high school. i don't deny it. hell, i even had a history of grunge poster from melody maker on my wall - hell, in knew my stuff. but it lost me fast, aside from a few bands who i still like today and a few who i can pick an album or two i think is good (soundgarden only got really shitty after the tour with metallica and guns and roses; pearl jam became listenable to eventually; alice in chains don't count because they were just a glam band wearing flannel...) i still like mudhoney, nirvana, ummm.... ummm.... so it's tough trying to define grunge beyond a few bands that were idnetified with the "genre," since most of the bands labeled as grunge were second generation knock offs of combinations of the aformentioned bands -- yeah, there were a lot of bands from seattle: the melvins, tad, etc etc etc who certainly were "grunge" but... eh... anyway... grunge was the closest thing to a music "phase" i had. while many of my friends and classmates went from metal to hip hop to grunge back to hip hop (snoop and dre, specifically) to "Alternative" i quickly saw through the flannel and realized that "grunge" was as meaningless a word as "punk" or "soul" or, hell, even "alternative."
then we had bands like bush. and stone temple pilots. hell, even ugly kid joe - who were basically a 1978 van halen knock off that wore flannel - were labeled as grunge. it became a joke, something mudhoney satirized in videos and in song (putting a song about how grunge was overblown on a soundtrack for a movie that sort of represented the height of "grunge" as a commercial commodity is kind of genius, really... hmm... no wonder they were never really all that popular...)
anyway. hmm. memories...
so the magazine has a top 20 sub pop releases as well as a nifty cd covering their history... which seems woefully incomplete to me though i can't really say off hand what's missing... maybe i'm mad that there was no velocity girl included (still probably my favorite band to ever have anything to do with sub pop, and not "grunge" in the slightest.). but does Earth's "Earth2" - 3 songs, 73 minutes - really count as essential? i will agree, though the dwarves are entirely un-listenable to me for the most part, with a lot of their list. (interesting seeing a magazine talk about sunny day real estate's "Diary" that doesn't use the word term emo - yet another meaningless "genre" term - though i guess that owes in some part to it being a british magazine).
the cd, titles Sub Pop 300 does a pretty good job of covering the label's history, starting off with green river - who i only ever really had any interest in because they covered bowie's queen bitch and had members of mudhoney in them. then the b-side to mudhoney's most famous single, touch me i'm sick (though sweet young thing ain't sweet no more is a fine song, i don't see why they didn't go for broke with the more famous song...) then Tad's "Wood Goblins." I never really cared for Tad, and this song kind of proves why. L7's "shove" (was that released on sub pop? apparently it was... huh... )still, not a great song by any stretch, and for a band who really didn't have a lot of "great" songs, well, yeah. my favorite L7 moment is their appearance in John Waters' "serial mom" (as "camel lips"). screaming trees... mark lanegan has done some much more interesting stuff since then that it's weird hearing his old band. kind of dull, honestly. afghan whigs... another off choice, with "retarded" from Up In It instead of anything from Congregation (which was the album of theirs picked in the 20 best releases). the whigs were never really "grunge" and are kind of placed at the turning point of the cd's chronological view. red red meat's braindead (who? i have a christmas 7" they did where they cover the who's christmas song from how the grinch stole christmas. umm... obligatory inclusion of postal service (such great heights) and the shins (new slang), the two bands who really saved Sub Pop in this century. and then pissed jeans and eraser, who are in a lot of ways - pissed jeans, especially - a call back to sub pop's roots, with a nice bit of fast, loud, noisy rock.
it also includes the brilliant flight of the concords "bowie" which is such a brilliant parody of both bowie's music, and of the man himself (though i doubt when he travels in space, his nipples really do become antennae...)
the cd also made me feel old. nostalgia for my early teen years is just weird...
