I have a problem with familiar this week. It seems like every time I go to a place where people collect and where there is loud music playing (many cultures call these things “parties”), the loud music in question tends to be the same loud music. Over and over. Because listening to a song once is never enough, you have to listen to it until you are good and tired of it. And then once more for good measure. In many cases, the loud music is of the recent nostalgia variety. This year’s nostalgia kick (and really that of the last several years) is 80s music. Everything 80s is A-OK right now, even if you wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to it in the actual 80s. All that matters is that it’s familiar. So it’s even possible to appreciate hair metal, as long as you are wearing your irony ears*. The music does have to be familiar, though. As a DJ, you wouldn’t want to play something that was even remotely obscure in the 80s, so don’t go thinking you could slip in some Minutemen or pre-Document REM. This familiarity thing is a disease, really. Allah help you if happen upon a really popular 80s song because then you will have to suffer the two facets of this disease simultaneously: hearing, say, “With or Without You” several times in the span of a few hours. Which reminds me…
I’ll take you now on a different nostalgia trip, back to the first high school party where I heard “With or Without You.” I had heard the song many times before going to this party, but never with a group of people, so I didn’t know how other people were reacting to it. My personal reaction was something like “interesting, but not necessarily groundbreaking” (yes, I was even like this in high school). The reaction of the people at this party, who were watching the black and white video on MTV**, was much more enthusiastic***. My reaction to their reaction: Really? I shouldn’t have been so surprised, though. U2 was rocking 60s nostalgia full on. Half of them had grown their hair long. The Edge had facial hair and a hat that made him look like an anemic Billy Jack****
My recollection of the way people looked in the 80s looks a lot like the cast of Saved by the Bell. Nobody had long hair and a mustache. The years since 1969 had made those things safe, though–at least for pop culture icons. So U2 appropriated rebellion from Peter Fonda in the form of fringe jackets. That meant they were cool.
As I said, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Or I wouldn’t have been, had I not refused to see what was right in front of me. I had recently gotten into a discussion with several friends about the 20 year pop culture cycle. One of these friends was sure it was happening and that the future would see a 70s revival. The rest of us were sure there would never be such a thing. We had, in fact, made a long list of the things that we hated about the 70s (bell bottoms, feathered hair), so it was unimaginable that any of that stuff would ever be in fashion again. Needless to say, the popularity of Dazed and Confused and That 70s Show***** proved me wrong. That guy does research now, while I write ill supported opinions on a weekly music blog.
So we did, indeed, get 70s nostalgia and now 80s nostalgia. And up next, as Matthew pointed out in one of his comments, we’ll be seeing neo-grunge. And this will be an entirely new phenomenon because that will be nostalgia about nostalgia. Youth culture didn’t really exist before the 50s, when marketers created it from whole cloth. Then in the 70s there was American Graffiti and its TV cousin, Happy Days. Since he directed American Graffiti, is nostalgia marketing George Lucas’ fault? That’s certainly a tempting thought. We can then blame him when the 70s nostalgia of grunge returns and the world as we know it collapses in an Escher-like feedback loop. It’s just a matter of days now. Kiss your loved ones goodbye.
I should stop complaining. The loud party music could have been worse. It could have been jam bands. That’s repetition of an entirely different and more insidious sort. I’m not sure I would have survived that. As it is, I lived to complain another day.
*I’m not sure there was a time when hair metal was appreciated any other way.
**It’s become cliche to point out that MTV used to play videos, but it seems necessary here. During this time, MTV was sometimes a stand-in for another music source.
***At this same gatthering, I put on a mix tape of some of the out there Bay Area stuff I was listening to at the time, like Tuxedomoon and the Residents, which got me the gas face right away.
****You HAVE to go to the official website and read Tom “Billy Jack” Laughlin’s position paper on an Iraq exit strategy. Power to the people, man.
*****That 70s Show gets some 70s nostalgia right, but the use of the work “like” in the like totally modern fashion has always bothered me. I don’t remember hearing “like” used that way until the 80s–and I lived in L.A. in the 70s, the epicenter of valleyspeak.
It’s worth pointing out that Lucas can’t be held totally accountable for the 50s craze in the 70s, since Sha Na Na were around since 1969…
C
This is a good point, C. No trends ever come from one place. They seem to build from lots of places at once. All the same, I want to blame Lucas.
I loved that scene in “Billy Jack” the second movie, where he is helping the hippie kids defend the school. A little girl reads the board members this quote, and asks them if they liked it. They said something like, “yes, thats a very nice quote little girl.” And then she spits at them, “Hitler wrote that, you nazi trash” or something to that effect… Also cool, how Billy Jack would tell people, “I’m going to take this foot and kick you in the face right there, and there’s nothing you can do about it…” (sigh.. ALL MAN.)
Your mail art is in the mail, but we had some 10 feet of snow dumped on us and no telling when a plane will come pick up our outgoing mail.
I hate U2, solely to offset the amount of lovers of U2… though they do remind me of my first crush on a boy named Barney who wore creepers… Ghastly memories. Agreed… Can we please move to the future at some point. I promise to play virtually unknown music at my next three parties (6 attendees) if you do.
“Be seeing neo-grunge”? Try, are seeing it. Check out Nickelback, Three Doors Down, Godsmack, Puddle of Douchebags, and of course, Creed (whose ex lead singer is now backed by a criminally horrible local Houston band, which might I add, proves once again in awful fashion that Houston is in fact on the national map, for better or worse). It barely went away. Even Borges couldn’t predict the faddish rehash of a cultural phenomenon before it died the first time around. Creepy…
I don’t think the return of grunge is a phenomenon by any stretch. You could also say that 50s revivalism started in 1960 because doo wop groups never went away completely. They were still around, but nobody cared.
Speaking of Scott Stapp, if you haven’t read this, then you should go there now. You might consider beginning to laugh before you click, though, because otherwise you might not be able to keep up.
Wow the Creed thing was awesome!!!!
Maybe its because I am sicker than shit, but that Creed story lacked everything a good story should have. The whole supposed ruse was that so many kids had shown up to punk S.S. looking for some Vajayjay. While reading the account it was pretty pathetic to see that the kids were actually blowing themselves with excitement to be close to the famed rocker in whatever capacity.. more than embarrassing him. The whole world is stupid. I give the tale a thumbs down. It was gay.
Tonight.. Thanks for choosing Metal.
Wow…where to begin. I have to say that John is probably right: Grunge never really went away, so it’s not really making a comeback, I guess…I suppose these Stained Puddles were probably getting their driver’s licenses about the time that Alice In Chains were becoming the most influential band in the last 15 years, so along with the rest of the planet, they rushed to Guitar Center, and now…here we are. I was trying to make the argument that Cinderella and Poison, et al had won the war, but perhaps I was being a bit shortsighted. I was of the opinion that the grunge records were just aging horribly, which I still think they are, but I ignored the fact that I never really liked them in the first place, so…It’s interesting to me, though, that I am tolerating a lot of music now, that I used to not enjoy at all. But I think that’s because I was never really rabid in my hatred for Howard Jones, or Flock Of Seagulls, the Fixx, etc…it just wasn’t really my thing, but it never really drove me crazy with rage, so it doesn’t bother me now, either. If it comes on in a bar, yeah, I guess I sorta smile, and sing along…it’s harmless. I can’t imagine that ever happening with The Arcade Fire, Death Cab For Cutie, the Raconteurs, Franz Ferdinand, etc…I just hate that music so much, I can’t ever see myself going soft on it. But the thing that really gets me…it’s not the nostalgia about nostalgia…it’s the point of reference that reviews are using when they are completely off of the mark, and I can’t figure out what are they hearing that I’m not? For instance: I’ve read a million reviews for a band like Wolfmother, where the article compares their music to Sabbath, or Grand Funk…or Secret Machines are compared to Pink Floyd, and then I listen to these records and it just sounds like the same mid 90′s indie stuff that I can’t stand. Where are these comparisons coming from? I just can’t figure it.
Grunge can’t return if it never left in the first place.
There’s a vaguely interesting song by a vaguely interesting artist which mocks the faddish bullshit ubiquity of grunge and of the whole flash-in-the-pan type of musical explosion. It’s by a formerly decent honky-tonkish country artist named Todd Snider. It’s called Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues. Yeah. I know.
I have now written a comment twice and then mistakenly closed the browser, losing my incredibly perceptive and incisive comment both times. So fuck it. No music ever leaves anymore. The universe is accelerating. Time events are closer and closer together. They’ll be having shows about the 2000 probably starting this year. I have a friend who knows the words to any flash-in-the-pan grunge single imaginible and he’s 23. No one can ever say about anything, that it will never come back (like we used to say about tie-dies then bell bottoms then parachute pants) unless you are trying to make it come back right away. I think that was sort of it, or maybe it was the opposite of that. I promise it made total sense the first two times.
At least the Fixx, Flock of seagals and Howard jones were interesting at the least. Grunge, to me anyway, was always boring. All the bands, to me anyway, sounded all alike. I totally missed what was so ground breaking about Nirvana. Nothing special to me. That type genre of music seemed so limited. No peaks and vally’s, just the same angry sounding shit. My opinion.
I have a question. You guys are musicians. What compels a particular group in the genre of grunge, disco or some other sort to keep making that type of music even it’s not fashionable anymore? Why not change to keep up with the times? Is it stuborness? Is it they love it so much that they stick to it? Doesn’t that effect their bottom line? I mean we all try to keep up with the times whether it be clothes or cars or hair styles. Why should music be any different? I know it all goes underground, but why not be relevant with the times? Ramon, when you and the other members go into the studio, do you ever find yourselves asking if anything you do will sound too dated? I’m just reminded of a Metallica documentary I watched and the guitarist was asked to do an over the top solo, but commented that he didn’t want to because it would sound to eighties and then the lead singer came back and said that if he didn’t he would be dating himself to the present. I thought the whole thing was stupid.
Dear anon,
That’s a good question and one I will address in my blog next week.
Thanks for the topic.
Bonus is that will give me another week to tighten up my review of the new Jonx CD which I’v been rockin’ out to for about two weeks.
What compels a particular group in the genre of grunge, disco or some other sort to keep making that type of music even it’s not fashionable anymore?
I’d reverse the question: what compels a group to make music in the first place based on fashion?
I mean, I know there are some that are, but I think most that arise out of a genre aren’t doing it because of “fashion” but because it’s the style of music that spoke to them enough to make them want to start a band. And usually that love of that style endures beyond the fashion.
I love that Metallica documentary.