by Bob Stanley
Mostly Mo’ Wax’s output was instrumental, eliminating the MC from hip hop entirely. Lavelle’s major discovery was Californian Josh Davis, who worked under the name DJ Shadow. Davis said he found lyrics to be ‘confining, too specific’, and his debut album would be made up entirely of samples from his vast record collection; the Guardian described Endtroducing as having ‘chords of such limpid dignity they could have come from Handel’. It finished up in the top ten of almost every 1996 end-of-year poll.
By this point the Bristol sound was everywhere, and had become depressingly formulaic. ‘A lot of people took that record [Blue Lines] and created something of their own,’ reckoned Massive Attack’s Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall. ‘And some of them took it and created something of ours.’ A 1994 DJ Shadow review in Mixmag had tagged his music as ‘trip hop’, which quickly became a term that attracted chancers and the less adventurous.4 The delicacy and refinement of Endtroducing – with its rediscovery of late-sixties orchestral arranger David Axelrod – and Massive Attack’s second album, Protection, much more of a bedroom soundtrack than Blue Lines, were widely, and poorly, imitated. Soon the sound – slo-mo beats, sampled string sections, maybe a harp – was in every bar and restaurant with pretensions, courtesy of Groove Armada, Lemon Jelly, Morcheeba5 and Zero 7. By heavily sampling easy listening, trip hop became a modern muzak, built for the soundtrack of Sex and the City or Top Gear, and compilations with titles like The Chillout Project: A Soundtrack to Modern City Life; this was, effectively, easy listening fifty years on from Mantovani’s ‘Moulin Rouge’ and Les Baxter’s ‘Unchained Melody’. The uneasy chords of Dummy, the unsettling squeaks of ‘Aftermath’ and the sound-system connection were absent. On top of this indignity, the thunderclouds of Blue Lines and Dummy had been blown away as the media’s short attention span switched to a nationalistic, retrograde pop wave. By 1995 Bristol’s brave new sound had been relegated to little more than a post-clubbing soundtrack.
1 Resolutely unfashionable, Hawkwind’s blend of drone rock, synths, drug intake and onstage nudity has remained an unspoken influence. Their single ‘Silver Machine’ (UK no. 3 ’72) continues to give them an unlikely oldies-radio presence.
2 The London club scene of the sixties threw up a bunch of British-based American singers like Geno Washington and Herbie Goins, who became major live attractions without troubling the chart. The Foundations used Brit Building writers Tony Macaulay and John MacLeod’s ‘Baby, Now That I’ve Found You’ to break through, scoring a number one in the autumn of ’67. It presaged a return to a simpler pop, exemplified by the Equals’ relentless riff-based ‘Baby Come Back’, a number one the following summer. Led by Eddie Grant, a solo star of the early eighties, the Equals were an odd group, capable of both whimsical bubblegum (‘Michael and the Slipper Tree’, no. 24 ’69) and flat-out funk rock (‘Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys’, no. 9 ’71).
3 Most extraordinary of their thirty UK hits between 1970 and 1983 was ‘Emma’ (no. 3 ’73). From its swampy rhythm track to the pitch-black string arrangement, it’s clearly informed by US soul, specifically Allen Toussaint and Isaac Hayes, yet Errol Brown sings of a ghetto straight out of a Peter Ackroyd novel. The broken hopes, the girl’s lonely death, the shriek that echoes Levi Stubbs’s cry on ‘Bernadette’, this is Dickensian soul and – unlike other UK seventies soul acts Cymande and the Real Thing – its sound is quite, quite British.
4 The term ‘trip hop’ was so disliked that the first compilation of the genre was called This Ain’t Trip Hop.
5 Morcheeba’s name: ‘mor’ as in MOR, middle of the road, and ‘cheeba’, slang for cannabis.
63
AS A DEFENCE, I’M NEUTERED AND SPAYED: GRUNGE
I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homo sexuals, people of different color or women, please do this one favor for us – leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.
Nirvana, sleevenote to Incesticide
Motörhead, then Metallica, had introduced the concept of nobility to the comic-book world of metal. Both bands had the speed and volume of punk, but nevertheless remained almost unmentioned in the closeted circles of the British music press and American college radio. They were not deemed alternative. When grunge became an international sensation, a teen wave with its own wardrobe, its own language, it felt to many as if it was the first music to breach classic rock with the ethics and attitude of 1977, as if it could be a new future for rock. In reality, it was an endgame.
Though punk’s anger and entry-level energy and metal’s theatrical thunder and lightning had rarely crossed paths before, they had first melded as far back as 1980, on early singles by a Stoke-on-Trent band called Discharge. Theirs was the first name to ever be written in Tippex on the back of a punk’s studded leather jacket;1 guitars dive-bombed, lungs were roared raw, the pace was ferocious, and their titles (‘Realities of War’, ‘Society’s Victim’, ‘Two Monstrous Nuclear Stockpiles’) gave away the fact that their uniform was spiked hair and safety pins, their audience gobbers rather than headbangers. Even though it now seems inconceivable that Discharge hadn’t been listening to Motörhead’s Overkill as much as they had to Never Mind the Bollocks, the music papers missed the connection completely: ‘They conform to the ancient idea that punk music must be a boring unvariable screech,’ reckoned Sounds. In 1980 the concept of punk and metal blending was almost inconceivable.
Though they were innovators, Discharge seemed callow, belligerent, comically dim. Bassist Rainy’s party trick was shitting in people’s beds. ‘I hate the CND, the Anti Nazi League, the NF, religion … all of them,’ sneered singer Cal. ‘All they’re after is your money.’ In 1981, the year they peaked as they topped the UK independent chart with ‘Why’, Discharge supported goth-punk baddies Killing Joke at the Lyceum in London and Cal threw up on stage; the unimpressed and genuinely intimidating Killing Joke made him mop it up before they went on. And yet their intensity, the way their music sounded so compressed and claustrophobic, was hairs-on-neck effective. Fans seemed to have missed their metal influences, too. In 1983, in an attempt to make some musical advances, Discharge ‘came out’ as a metal act at the Clarendon in Hammersmith. Cal wound himself up to sing in a Robert Plant falsetto and was duly bottled off.2
Just as Discharge and their ‘punk’s not dead’ spike-haired allies had found their sound was a cul-de-sac, American hardcore groups were coming to terms with the notion that harder/louder/faster had severe limitations. At least as important as the music had been the setting up of local hardcore scenes, connecting the country like a series of underground tunnels. Each town had its own alternative club, which meant that bands from other locales could put a tour together. In the absence of a national paper like the NME, the newsletter of this underground network was a fanzine called Maximum Rock & Roll; local writers documented each scene, not especially well, but that wasn’t really the point either (sample line: ‘San Jose has long had a very active and dedicated, but a very elusive punk scene’).
Coming out of the Minneapolis punk scene were the Replacements. Paul Westerberg’s gravelly intensity came over like Springsteen with a runny nose. The band were ragged, but tough and melodic, and could have been genuine chart contenders if they hadn’t felt the ‘punk rock’ urge to sabotage every single attempt by Warner Brothers to get their name out there: they remain the textbook example of a post-punk American band tying itself in existential knots – which for many people is their appeal. Also from Minneapolis, Hüsker Dü had released a couple of breakneck, tuneless 45s before their first album, which had the giveaway title Land Speed Record. Still, a group named after a Danish board game that translates as ‘Do you remember?’ were always likely to be rather more intriguing than contemporaries with names like Roach Motel.
Hüsker Dü were a blueprint for a new American rock: they were a power trio, they were fuzzed-out, they used splintering feedback and – while not exactly pin-ups – they were sexually challenging. Thou
gh they came from a metropolis, Hüsker Dü’s songs positioned themselves in Anytown, USA, on the endless plain of misfortune. Reviewing them in 1984, the NME reckoned they were forsaking ‘the easy route of retreading Grandmaster Flash’s glitzy inner city glam grime, instead getting to grips with a far more pervasive greyness’.
‘We’re going to try to do something bigger than anything like rock ’n’ roll and the whole puny touring band idea,’ their singer Bob Mould told Big Black’s Steve Albini. ‘I don’t know what it’s going to be, we have to work that out, but it’s going to go beyond the whole idea of “punk rock” or whatever.’ It turned out to be a double album, and a concept album at that, called Zen Arcade in 1984: ‘the closest hardcore will ever get to an opera,’ said Rolling Stone, ‘a kind of thrash Quadrophenia.’ Hüsker Dü rarely turned down the volume, but the velocity was gradually harnessed, they added harmonies and, crucially, they even wrote love songs. ‘Pink Turns to Blue’ was an astonishing death ballad; ‘Celebrated Summer’ compacted the Moody Blues’ multi-part ‘Question’ and the Beach Boys’ mythology. They signed to Warner Brothers. They appeared on The Joan Rivers Show. And, just as they were on the verge of a commercial breakthrough, they split in 1987.
Hüsker Dü’s dynamic was heavily informed by the platonic relationship between drummer Grant Hart (who was out) and singer Bob Mould (who wasn’t). In the mid-eighties it was still highly unusual to be a gay rock star – even Freddie Mercury was officially in the closet until he died. For Mould and Hart, in the most viscerally macho of all genres, their situation was unique.3 Hardcore had its own ritual dance, with the moshpit and the severe, neo-military self-image; Mould wore the fatigues, Hart grew his hair long. If only they’d got on, they could have been Grammy contenders. Hart later mused, ‘You hear some live bootlegs, and Bob and I are working so hard to outshine each other that it just lifts the whole thing off the ground with peace and wonderfulness.’
Dinosaur Jr were also a trio, but let their adherence to hardcore drift even more dramatically. Singer and guitarist J Mascis looked like a long-haired kid who’d sit on the toilet for forty-five minutes at a time reading Marvel comics, because that’s exactly what he was. He was also greatly fond of Neil Young. If Grant Hart’s long hair was enough to cause a stir in US punk circles, then the extended squalling guitar solos on Dinosaur’s ‘You’re Living All over Me’ (1987) were a total revolution. As Discharge had done in Britain, they blurred hard rock with what had been broadly called ‘alternative’, and introduced a new generation to Neil Young’s clangorous catalogue and simple over-driven guitar style. It harked back to seventies rock, a tradition punk and hardcore were meant to have obliterated, but suddenly, by 1987, it was OK. Hardcore’s obsession with rules and regulations was slowly being relaxed. Boston band Pixies introduced another element to the new rock stew, edging from quiet, almost acoustic verse to punishing power chords on their choruses. It was as if they had taken their cue from the Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout’ – ‘a little bit softer now, a little bit softer now, a little bit louder now, a little bit louder now’ – but dispensed with the caution. In America they were largely ignored but, signing to 4AD in Britain, they scored a string of independent-chart hits (number ones with ‘Gigantic’ and ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’) and – like Hüsker Dü before them – splintered just as the going got good.
Pixies had the style, but – Kim Deal aside – they looked like plumbers. Dinosaur had the tunes, but with the slovenly, moth-eaten Mascis at the helm, they were destined to peak at only number twenty in the UK with their best single, ‘Start Choppin’’. American slacker punk wasn’t destined to be Smash Hits material, at least not until another three-piece emerged and briefly made Seattle, birthplace of Jimi Hendrix, the epicentre of pop.
There is a great pop strain of big men on the brink, tough guys choking back the tears, brought to their knees and reduced to falsetto shrieks. It stretches back to Frankie Laine, and was turned into an art form by Del Shannon. This didn’t happen as much in the eighties in spite of (or because of) the heightened sexual temperature. Kurt Cobain’s best songs erased the blue-collar romanticism beloved of Bruce Springsteen to reveal small-town suffocation and male confusion; Cobain was a different kind of romantic outsider, and he bellowed out his own in securities. The Mascis whine, the Mould holler, neither could stand up to the sheer volume of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Summoning up the hard-rock noise of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Motörhead as a backdrop for their underclass concerns, Nirvana became the biggest alternative group in the world.
My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music. I’m grateful to it, in a way.
Kurt Cobain
Coming from Aberdeen, 180 miles away from Seattle in the Pacific North West, at first Nirvana were just another local scene band on a local label, the shruggingly named Sub Pop. If anything, they seemed late to the party when they released their first album, Bleach, in June ’89. ‘The early songs were really angry,’ Cobain told John Robb of Sounds. ‘But as time goes on the songs are getting poppier and poppier as I get happier and happier. The songs are now about conflicts in relationships, emotional things with other human beings.’
The first gig Cobain ever attended had been a Black Flag show, primal hardcore punk, and it changed his life. From this point on he started to listen to British indie (he was the world’s biggest fan of Scottish duo the Vaselines), as well as Hüsker Dü and Pixies. He formed a band, they covered songs by the Meat Puppets and the Vaselines and, eventually, he made a lot of money for his heroes. Generous to a fault, he talked of his admiration for REM’s integrity as he followed Michael Stipe into beatified rock-star territory. Soon they appeared in the tour documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke; more truthfully it should have been called The Year Grunge Broke, because this was the tag given to Nirvana and a crop of Seattle bands (Mudhoney, Tad, Soundgarden), with their mix of punk ideology and an ever increasing dose of pre-punk hard rock, by Sub Pop’s sloganeering owners, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman.
1991 was also the year riot grrrl broke. At Olympia, Washington’s International Pop Underground convention, there was an all-female event billed ‘Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now’ that included Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy and Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. Formed in 1990, Bikini Kill were the firestarters and, while they played with Nirvana and ex-Runaway Joan Jett, they resolutely refused to toy with the mainstream. Musically riot grrrl was light on melody, heavy on aggression – its real impact was lyrical. Riot grrrl brought the issue of ‘women in pop’ – an unspoken undercurrent since Lesley Gore’s ‘You Don’t Own Me’ (US no. 2 ’64) – into the open.
There were other girl-led alternative-rock bands around. The Lunachicks, L7, Babes in Toyland and Hole all had a sexually conscious aesthetic which didn’t necessarily tickle male fantasy or follow a feminist doctrine; these women hoped to create music and assume an image without being categorised only as ‘women’. Unfortunately, their pursuit of equality also extended to their adopting hoary male rock clichés – the riffs, the drugs, the sulks, the falling out with the major label. The Lunachicks may have sung about non-obvious subject matter like TV’s favourite middle sister Jan Brady, but their music was warmed-over hard rock, largely uninteresting.
Of the girl bands, Hole took the lion’s share of media interest, mainly because singer Courtney Love began dating Kurt Cobain, and also because of her tendency to hang out with Madonna, her urge to spill her guts in public and her desire to be a perennial prom queen. Just as Hole’s debut album, Pretty on the Inside, was released, Kurt and Courtney were spotted by the Village Voice shopping for a wedding ring in Tiffany’s. ‘Perhaps she’ll find infinite and ever more subtle ways to torture herself,’ they wrote. ‘Long may she bleed.’ Ameri
can indie’s screeching, insides-out nature seemed to encourage such baffling comments.
Bikini Kill were much more interesting. While Hole (‘Teenage Whore’) wrote self-centred therapy blow-outs, and Babes in Toyland penned bitchy responses to them (‘Bruise Violet’), Bikini Kill built a creative support network. Their best song, the Joan Jett-produced ‘Rebel Girl’, was like a girl-positive rewrite of Blondie’s ‘Rip Her to Shreds’; they were about unapologetic activism.
Bikini Kill wrote manifestos and slogans: ‘Stop the j-word jealousy from killing girl love’; ‘encourage in the face of insecurity’. Kathleen Hanna had originally been a feminist poet but took encouragement to form a band from Courtney Love, and from Babes in Toyland, who helped Bikini Kill to get their earliest gigs: ‘I just started thinking, like, if fucking Coca Cola has advertisements then feminism should too … Part of my mission was to advertise that feminism didn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain thing.’ Hanna’s best, most succinct slogan was ‘Revolution Girl Style Now!’ It worked. Hundreds of fanzines were photocopied,4 and fliers and cassettes were distributed, often by hand, and often purely within riot-grrrl circles. A British wing developed: Huggy Bear, Blood Sausage, Batfink. There was a two-page spread in Smash Hits. In the States, having been badly misrepresented in the press,5 Hanna and her tight riot-grrrl cohort imposed a media blackout. The scene was incendiary but intentionally underground; no one was about to sign a record deal – why bother when you could do everything yourself? Unsurprisingly, riot grrrl had no chart presence whatsoever.
