by Bob Stanley
Nirvana left Sub Pop in ’91 and signed to Geffen; the cover of their major-label debut, Nevermind, showed an innocent just about to grasp a dollar bill. Produced by Butch Vig,6 it had a radio-friendly sheen and was purpose-built to take the underground overground. The Replacements had ended up as drunken embarrassments, singing about selling out over a hi-gloss production, but Nirvana’s rise to the top was so rapid they didn’t have time to lose themselves in semantics.
‘With its oscillation between rage and resignation, its lust for revolution that’s immediately crippled by bitter irony, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is an “Anarchy in the UK” for the twenty-something generation,’ said Melody Maker. The major difference was that ‘Anarchy in the UK’ stalled at number thirty-eight in the UK chart and wasn’t even released in most countries. At the end of 1991 ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ went to number seven in the UK, number six in the US, number one in New Zealand, number one in France. Eighteen months earlier Cobain had said, ‘If we hadn’t done this band thing, we would have been doing what everyone else does back home, which is chopping down trees, drinking, having sex and drinking, talking about sex and drinking some more …’ Now they were in a whole other world, winning two best-video awards from MTV and being touted as the spokesmen for Generation X.
‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took the Pixies’ quiet/loud aesthetic and nailed it to something that sounded like Hüsker Dü covering ‘More than a Feeling’; it was, in the space of three minutes, the climax (and downfall) of an eighties outsider music and the beginning of a new, nineties corporate rock.
Kurt Cobain was both a role model for disaffected boys and the kind of shy kid that girls wanted to mother as well as sleep with – as fragile as Billy Fury. It only took one look at Nirvana on MTV, one listen to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and you knew he was a real star. Simon Reynolds saw them at the Kilburn National and ‘got the sense that Nirvana, wary of their sudden enormity, feel perversely driven to deflate their own importance. At the moment they’re uncomfortably poised between their Sub Pop slob-rock past and their future rock godhood. They seem embarrassed and bemused, it’s like their boots are too big for them. Did they seize the time with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or did the time seize them?’
He couldn’t have been more right. Cobain was heard to talk about the ‘B’ word – Beatles, Beach Boys, Byrds, Big Star – and he wondered out loud, hadn’t it all been done? Who the hell did Nirvana think they were? What they were was a gateway for the full re-emergence of guitar-based hard rock after the fripperies of the hi-tech eighties. A former Nirvana member called Jason Everman was the first to benefit from Seattle’s grunge windfall when he pitched up as bassist in Soundgarden, a heavy gothic act who went on to score a US number nine with the remorselessly grim stoner-rock ‘Black Hole Sun’ in ’94. Then there was Pearl Jam, born from Washington-state bands Green River and Mother Love Bone. Their sound veered even closer to American rock’s riffs and roots than their Seattle forebears, all post-punk ideals abandoned, and singer Eddie Vedder’s voice was reminiscent of Blood, Sweat and Tears’ David Clayton-Thomas with its actorly, stentorian tones (more likely he was going for Jim Morrison, but you can’t win them all). Pearl Jam were seen as a commercial-rock behemoth by the fanzine writers, a rockist sell-out by Cobain, though – constantly trying to prove otherwise – they spent the next ten years fighting Ticketmaster to keep concert prices down, refusing to do videos for MTV, and releasing records for Kosovan refugees. Very good boys they turned out to be, then, but entirely joyless nonetheless.
Neither Soundgarden nor Pearl Jam could be called Nirvana copyists, but soon a caravan of lank-haired whiners pitched up on the doorsteps of Geffen, Warner and EMI. The band that summed up the real horrors of grunge turned out to be British. Bush were from Shepherd’s Bush, and could barely get third billing in a local pub at home. They started off sounding like INXS, then heard a Pixies album and changed their tune. ‘Three million albums, five hit singles, why won’t anyone take Bush seriously?’ read the words on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1996; these were placed, possibly not by chance, alongside a topless picture of singer Gavin Rossdale, exactly as the magazine had shot weightless teen dream David Cassidy in 1972. Inside, the magazine declared Bush ‘genetically-engineered bubble-grungers … REM, Sonic Youth and the Pixies did not slog around the eighties college circuit in unheated vans to make the world safe for a bunch of MTV confections like Bush.’ You wanted to warm to them simply because they were so despised as also-rans at best, grave-robbing chancers at worst. Rossdale defended himself like a kid caught by the teacher with fags in his pockets: ‘In some of the songs I complain a bit, but I’d do that anyway – I’m from England.’ Their breakthrough single was ‘Everything Zen’, a composite of Nirvana’s volume levels and some of the worst lyrics – ‘Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow, Dave’s on sale again. We kissy kiss in the rear view, we’re so bored, you’re to blame’ – to ever grace a million-seller. But with a six-times platinum album on his wall, Rossdale felt able to defend himself. ‘We’re a real fucking band,’ he railed at Rolling Stone. ‘We live a crazy, crazy life.’
At a New York industry showcase gig in August ’93, Nirvana refused to conform to the crazy, crazy rock ’n’ roll stereotype. They stood stock still, played acoustic numbers, mumbled, and brought on a female cellist for the rape-themed ‘Polly’. Right at the end, they played the song everybody wanted to hear, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and then Cobain sat crouched, alone, producing a wail of feedback for ten solid minutes.
In Britain such contrary behaviour would have still caused an outrage, but we might have taken their gender-bending more lightly. Machismo isn’t central to British culture. In America, though, trashing male gender codes was unheard of. Nirvana played pro-gay benefit shows, kissed each other on the networked Saturday Night Live and wore dresses in the video for ‘In Bloom’. At the MTV awards, they smashed up their equipment and mocked Guns n’ Roses.
Yet Cobain knew he had unleashed a monster by the time of their third album, In Utero, in ’93. He felt part of the corporate sausage machine, just as compromised as the Replacements before him, but with the added pressure of being the flannel-shirted spokesman for a generation, and with a multi-million-selling album to follow up. He struggled to see a way forward.
Staying true to punk’s school while moving into fresh fields was a recurring problem. The Clash sounded silly making white rap. Discharge had found no salvation in switching to pure metal. The Replacements had gone round in circles trying to prove they were ‘4 Real’. One of the sad ironies of Nirvana’s short existence is that their Unplugged in New York album, released posthumously in 1994, was not only their best and most influential record but showed how easy it would have been for Kurt Cobain to continue, as John Lydon had done after the Sex Pistols imploded, as Elvis had done once his Hollywood contract was up. He sings Leadbelly’s ‘In the Pines (Where Did You Sleep Last Night)’ and here is as distinct an American voice as Brian Wilson’s or Bob Dylan’s, one that needs none of Butch Vig’s production gloss or Nirvana’s quiet/loud constructs. It is quite intense enough already.
After Kurt Cobain committed suicide in April ’94, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder was inconsolable – he said that he’d always thought he’d be the first to go. Even in death, it seemed, grunge one-upmanship was rife, and Nirvana’s anti-macho, anti-corporate stance had counted for little. A grunge song and a grunge band purpose-built for a Levi’s ad – ‘Inside’ by Stiltskin – was a UK number one just weeks after Cobain’s death. Grunge soon fed into new crossbreeds – rap metal, nu metal – and led indirectly to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with their ultra-masculine mix of funk, hip hop and metal, becoming the biggest-selling rock group in the world. Meanwhile, Kurt Cobain’s love of punk – once filtered down to their millions of fans, and watered down by an industry sensing a gold rush – opened the door for stereotypical old-school punk revivalists like Green Day and Blink 182. A few years later came another sub-lev
el of pre-teen punk: Busted and McFly owed plenty to Nirvana.
Like Public Enemy, Bikini Kill – and the forward thrust of riot grrrl – would splinter in a confusion of minutiae, qualifications and recriminations. Wasn’t race an issue? Wasn’t it all too middle class? Kathleen Hanna eventually formed Le Tigre in 1998, who channelled the Go Go’s, the Red Bird sound and lo-fidelity electro leanings on ‘Deceptacon’. They wrote zippy, catchy songs about feminist icons like Shulamith Firestone and fellow riot-grrrl act Sleater-Kinney. Their songs got played at Boston Red Sox games. By 2013 you could buy a not-for-profit, fundraising Bikini Kill chapstick.
Hole’s profile soared in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death. Courtney Love eventually channelled her attention away from media-baiting, until 1998’s Celebrity Skin felt like a proper record rather than just a vehicle for her problems: ‘Boys on the Radio’ was a song about falling in love with pop; ‘Heaven Tonight’ was closer to the Bangles than the Pixies; the title track (UK no. 19 ’98) and ‘Malibu’ (UK no. 22 ’99) were genuine, radio-friendly hit singles. You had to admire her powers of recovery.
While grunge had turned out to be a cul-de-sac, musically and philosophically (an astonishing number of its practitioners were left dead or incapacitated by drug habits), NYU’s Fales Library steadily amassed a riot-grrrl archive. It had little impact on the chart but, like first-wave punk rock, its influence stretched well beyond alternative rock; without it Shampoo, the Spice Girls and the Gossip wouldn’t have existed, groups where nobody wondered or cared whether men were holding the strings. ‘The future of rock belongs to women,’ Kurt Cobain had said, and, looking at the state of guitar bands in the early 2010s, you hope he was right.
Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York reached number one in the US album chart and sold five million copies. It effectively brought out into the open another new American music: alt country, which would become the dominant sound of the indie world over the next decade. The marriage of hardcore ideals to what Greil Marcus called ‘old, weird America’, combined with the kind of middling success enjoyed by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Smog or Lambchop, would have suited Cobain’s temperament to a tee. If he’d lived, he would have been curating festivals like All Tomorrow’s Parties, and the Vaselines’ re union – largely a result of his patronage – would have been his proudest moment. Though Kurt Cobain’s talent had created his own prison, it had also provided him with a means to escape, and it really is a shame that he didn’t stay around to work that out.
1 The sleeve of Discharge’s first single, ‘Realities of War’ (no. 5, and forty-four weeks on the independent chart), features a jacket exactly like this. It sold fifty thousand copies, and a large proportion of the fans who bought the record seem to have aped the sleeve. In fact, Discharge were as aesthetically inspiring as they were musically: in the 2010 video for ‘Telephone’ by Lady Gaga, she sported a spiked leather jacket with the painted-on logo of late-eighties anarcho-punk/thrash-metal band Doom, disciples of Discharge.
2 By this point they had been the single biggest influence on Scandinavian punk, where acts copying the Discharge sound had become a genre of their own, tagged D-beat: there were Rattus, Bastards and Tampere SS in Finland, closely followed by Swedish bands such as Mob 47, Asocial and, ultimately, Anti Cimex, whose extraordinarily intense ‘Raped Ass’ took D-beat about as far as it could go – which didn’t involve the shelves of Woolworths.
3 It’s almost too good to be true that bassist Greg Norton, with his outrageous Mercuryesque moustache, was the only straight member of the band.
4 Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail had been publishing her Jigsaw fanzine since 1988, which read like an advance riot-grrrl manifesto: ‘First of all, I would like to inform you that the Go-Go’s don’t suck so stop putting them down. YES that means you mr/ms rock journalist … they were five women who wrote some cool pop songs and got famous on a fluke … and they rock. Check out the first LP if you don’t believe me … Girls + guitars is equal to sex + power … which is something that is not supposed to be associated with women in our culture … Young Marble Giants, Kleenex, Delta 5, Raincoats, Slits. And then there’s the Marine Girls and Pylon. And Poly Styrene from X Ray Spex was so fucking cool. All that stuff was so punk rock and revolutionary. It doesn’t deserve to be obscure. So what if it was ten years ago? It’s amazing. Girls rock. Do you wanna trade tapes?’
5 The Washington Post claimed that ‘Kathleen Hanna accused her father of abusing her when she was young’, which she denied.
6 Smashing Pumpkins producer Butch Vig’s status was elevated hugely by his work on Nevermind. He later formed his own band, Garbage, who had five Top 10 hits in the UK between 1996 and 1999.
64
EVER DECREASING CIRCLES: BLUR, SUEDE AND BRITPOP
You interview a band now and the big cliché is that they can’t think of more than a handful of current bands that they dig, everyone is going into the past to dig out reference points … the semi-fossilised moments of magic from the past that seem more contemporary in today’s mishmash of pop culture than at any other time.
John Robb, 1992
The government had fought to contain the energy and collective will surrounding dance music in 1992, when it seemed clear that the future of modern pop was electronic. Within three years, though, guitar music – and an explicitly nostalgic version – would be back on magazine covers. Bootcut Levi’s were in the shops, and the Union Jack would become an acceptable fashion accessory for the first time since the sixties. When Labour finally won the election in ’97, Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Blur’s Damon Albarn would be invited to meet new prime minister Tony Blair. It felt a very long way from the vilification of rave: Britpop would prove to be the last time there was a British consensus on pop music.
It rose as Britain attempted to redefine itself after more than a decade of Tory rule. Tony Blair became Labour leader in the summer of 1994, as Four Weddings and a Funeral became the cinema hit of the year – the most successful British-made film in years – and Oasis’s first album Definitely Maybe was released: until the ’97 election Blair was regarded as a leader in waiting, and this pre-honeymoon period imbued the country with a new confidence. Almost in tandem with the rise of Britpop came the Britart movement, and there were several parallels.
Colonising parts of East London, the YBAs – Young British Artists – shunned, like post-indie Britpop, the traditional artistic stance of self-sacrifice, opposition and exclusion. They were loud and trashy; their exhibitions had names like Minky Manky, Zombie Golf, Cocaine Orgasm and Sick; they wanted to be rich and famous, like pop stars. A decade earlier, C86 indie had defined itself in opposition to the major labels and had a hair-trigger reaction to anything that suggested ‘selling out’. By 1995 Blur and Oasis were in competition with each other for the number-one position in the singles chart, and the tabloid press was courted and accepted as a promotional tool. Art and commerce had never mixed quite like this before. Another common denominator of Britpop and Britart was their revelling in the pleasures of popular culture – specifically drug consumption, pornography and cheap TV. Britart would reach a peak with the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, the same year Noel Gallagher was welcomed into 10 Downing Street. The video for Blur’s ‘Country House’ featured cameos from page 3 pin-up Jo Guest and comedian Matt Lucas. It was directed by Britart’s most famous son, Damien Hirst, who, according to the Sensation catalogue, ‘was as good and skilful a publicist for his art and his contemporaries as he was a maker of art himself’.
Initially, no one seemed embarrassed to be given the Britpop tag – there was even a BBC show in 1995 called Britpop Now, presented by the scene’s self-appointed leader, Damon Albarn. It started as a collective will to power, from the music press as well as the bands involved. In the wake of baggy in 1989, the rock-based music press had been desperately casting around for new movements, launching their own half-baked tags – shoegazing, fraggle, new wave of new wave1 – to see if anything would stick,
and to be seen to be ahead of the game. Nothing stuck. Then along came Suede – an unassuming, skinny, not unattractive group from London who played melodic indie with slightly saucy lyrics – and suddenly there was a frisson. The Independent’s William Leith described Suede’s press reviews as ‘florid, poetic, half-crazed; they express the almost lascivious delight of journalists hungry for something to pin their hopes on’. With the bit between their teeth, journalists wouldn’t be stopping at Suede; the music press didn’t create Britpop, but they certainly wanted it to happen.2
It would end up as an extraordinarily tribal affair: Blur versus Suede, Blur versus Oasis, north versus south, grammar versus secondary. Enmity in the sixties had been reserved for non-rock acts like Ken Dodd. Mostly groups got on fine – everyone from Cream to Herman’s Hermits politely sang the praises of the Beatles. In the seventies Patti Smith gave Debbie Harry a hard stare, but no more; in the eighties Liverpool acts Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah! Heat and the Teardrop Explodes bitched about each other, but they were basically family, so that was OK too. In Britpop, everything seemed to be about one-upmanship: Blur got Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier to sing on one of their singles, so Suede tried to trump them with the sexier, more famous Jane Birkin; Blur spitefully released a single, ‘Country House’, on the same day as Oasis’s ‘Roll with It’, just to beat them to the number-one spot.
In 1990 Brett Anderson was a humble town-planning student from the Sussex town of Haywards Heath who sang in a group called Suede. His girlfriend was Suede’s bassist, Justine Frischmann, who made him packed lunches for his college field trips to Milton Keynes. This cosy domesticity was shattered when Frischmann left Anderson for a handsome lad who had been hassling her for months, Blur’s Damon Albarn. When Frischmann started turning up late for Suede rehearsals, Anderson kicked her out – he was convinced she was only dating Albarn because he was famous. He was consumed with jealousy and spite – suddenly he had real motivation. Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, Suede’s quietly spoken teenage guitarist, set their hearts on becoming not just bigger than Blur, but the most acclaimed songwriting team in the country, the new Morrissey/Marr.
