Self-consciousness, maybe, is the hallmark of a dying art. Surely it's the case with what eventually became known as "alternative rock," a genre whose tailspin into artistic banality is unprecedented in the history of
popular culture. Back in the day, we called it "indie" or "underground," until such adjectives grew wildly out of
sync with its mainstream embrace. Today, bankrolled by billion-dollar labels and obsessed with little more than its own self-image, alt-rock drones on, a cadre of slicked-up sound-alikes whose smirks and snarls look up from compact discs across the country and around the world.
If I had to choose The Moment upon which I gave up on rock 'n' roll -- and it, perhaps, on itself -- it was probably the day in 1994 when Kurt Cobain shot himself. Peter Jennings was reading an obit during "World News Tonight"; I could vaguely recollect the name until he next said "Nirvana," and then I thought, Oh, right, them. A mainstream outfit as far as I knew; cock-rock stuff, wasn't it? As a kid who'd gone through high school in the early 1980s, strung out on hardcore punk, sure, I'd heard Nirvana's songs. And I hated them. They were everything punk rock had taught me to hate -- mangy, overindulgent and bloated with noisy self-assurance.
The 1980s were an intensely prolific decade for rock, a reality seldom acknowledged anymore. Indeed, one of the most annoying examples of pop-culture revisionism has been the focus on '80s camp. If you ever endured a half-hour of Fox's travesty of reminiscence, "That '80s Show," you'll know what I'm talking about. Rhino Records similarly went bottom-scraping when it gave us "Like, Omigod! The '80s Pop Culture Box (Totally)," showcasing the dregs of those nascent days of MTV -- including Toni Basil's "Mickey" and Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science," as if these artists, in hand with Duran Duran and Kajagoogoo, were the essence of the era's talent. Truth is, we laughed at A Flock of Seagulls as much then as we do now.
Behind the coiffures and kitsch was a far more intriguing and vital scene. The only trick was knowing where to find it. Indie bands of this era, often led by teenagers, perfected the art of creative self-sufficiency. Radio play was solely on college stations, usually late at night. Acts like Minor Threat, Black Flag and the Misfits -- promoted mainly through word-of-mouth advertising and a handful of independently published fanzines -- became legendary. They toured in station wagons, lugged their own equipment from the stage, and slept on the couches and floors of fans. Handbills advertised concerts. Imagine a group of kids from Boston
renting a car and driving to a Grange hall in the western Massachusetts hamlet of Greenfield to see a show. Imagine hundreds of kids. Concerts were never more than a few dollars and musicians mingled with the crowd, holding impromptu interviews with zine writers and breaking down the artist/audience barrier at every level.
And what they played was no longer the proto-punk of Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer. Traditional punk was passé, supplanted by a bolder, faster and thoroughly American incarnation known colloquially as hardcore. If you've ever seen Penelope Spheeris' hilariously awful documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization," you've seen the overripe caricature that was old-school punk by the end of the '70s, and hardcore pushed the movement to the edge of sonic viability, with no limits to how noisy or obnoxious a group could be. Song structures were often brutally minimalist, clocking in at under 20 seconds in a furious, unwrought sub-style known as thrash.
On one hand, it was easy to brush off hardcore as a semi-musical novelty. After all, how much subtlety could be excavated from a half-minute, hundred-decibel onslaught? But lurking beneath, one could sometimes locate complexity and nuance. Hell, the Bad Brains were Rastafarians who broke up their sets with reggae and fusion. Talent could be a dirty word in the hardcore world, a slap against all its egalitarian impudence, but still you'd stumble on it. Listen to Scream's "Still Screaming," for instance, with its acoustic timeouts and cascading refrains, or the clever metaphorical songwriting of Jello Biafra, twitchy frontman of the Dead Kennedys.
For the most part, however, and as in-your-face innovations tend to go, the hardcore framework proved a fast-arcing artistic smother. Successes of the grass-roots ethos aside, it was all coming full circle, the heretofore cutting edge hemmed into a whole new typecast of post-adolescent screamers and I-can-play-it-faster guitarists.
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