Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Picture a thirteen-year-old18 boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV … A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents … In short, life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy.

  Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1993

  I saw a documentary19 on World War Two, and somebody was saying that a nervous breakdown is the reasonable response of a sane man to an insane situation. I think rock and roll still has to be the sound of the nervous breakdown. Because that scream, from Howlin’ Wolf to Nine Inch Nails, is part of it.

  Bono, 1992

  If an unwavering computerised beat could arouse official condemnation for its ability to inspire ecstatic emotional release in large crowds of young people, how much more dangerous would it be if the same beat induced violent self-hatred? As the West’s financial system staggered into one of its periodic spasms of panic-stricken decline at the start of the 1990s, many American teenagers immersed themselves in the comforting nightmare of music darker than reality.

  In Los Angeles, a city beset by riots in 1992, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails purchased the house in which Charles Manson’s followers had murdered five people, including the actress Sharon Tate, twenty-three years earlier. That year, he commissioned a video for his frenzied account of sadomasochist domination, ‘Happiness in Slavery’. The clip featured a naked performance artist trapped in an infernal torture machine which he has entered of his own free will, and from which he emerges only as gore and sludge, pouring out of the machine like meat from a mincer. Reznor was able to transform the darkest reaches of sexuality, violence and pain – the landscape of the eternal outsider – into genuinely popular culture. Nine Inch Nails’ best-selling record was The Downward Spiral, described by journalist Gavin Baddeley as ‘a blizzard of suicidal self-loathing20’. The same audience relished the equally extreme sonic landscapes of Ministry, whose music Baddeley called ‘an audio horror movie21 of epic proportions’.

  Nine Inch Nails and Ministry have each been credited as practitioners of industrial techno, although both elements of that description have been disputed by those whose self-identity depends on strict adherence to a musical genre. However it is described, this music marries computerised beats (usually a symbol of dancing pleasure) with the aural assault of industrial metal. It’s intended to be abrasive, vicious, torturous: all words that could be applied with equal veracity to the central device in Reznor’s banned 1992 video. It also represented the final, vertiginous descent of a downward spiral, indeed, transforming playful decadence into an enactment of the agonies of hell.

  The romanticism and eroticism of death fuelled the Gothic literary tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, entranced Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s and 50s, and was rekindled by the decadent writers and illustrators of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Thereafter its fantasies were eclipsed by the realities of twentieth-century carnage; then reproduced as farce in the horror films of the 1950s, whence it seeped into popular music via the exaggerated scenarios of Screaming Jay Hawkins and Lord Sutch. The colour of Gothic fantasy was black, which in pop culture was also the shade of motorcycle machismo and hipster artiness. In the aftermath of punk, however, black was reunited with its trappings of lace and garish make-up, as Siouxsie Sioux and, soon afterwards, Robert Smith of the Cure led an adolescent generation into a gloriously noir portrayal of glamour: black lipstick, black nail varnish, black lace sleeves, spiked black hair, set off against the pale skin of imminent death. While Siouxsie & the Banshees extended their Gothicism into a near-psychedelic flirtation with exotic rhythms and cultures, Smith recognised a more primal need to retain his slightly batty air of darkness. ‘If I hadn’t written those songs22,’ he recalled, ‘I would have become a fat, useless bastard. I went through a period of thinking everyone was fucked, and then I started to write these songs. I channelled all the self-destructive elements of my personality into doing something.’

  Smith’s whimsical, ironic lyrics and ability to conjure up pop hooks ensured the Cure an enduring career. Less predictable was that his quintessentially English band would become major stars in the United States; or that Depeche Mode, lightest and least enigmatic of Britain’s early 1980s synth-pop outfits, would simultaneously be greeted in America as chroniclers of mental disintegration (to borrow the title of a Cure album), with music that was, on the surface, no more harrowing than their early hits. (Violator from 1990 was the first of a series of Top 10 US albums.)

  Depeche Mode were certainly not considered to be part of Britain’s goth movement of the 1980s, which can be traced back musically to Bauhaus’s ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ from 1979 or, in more troubled mode, to the brief career of Joy Division; and visually to London clubs such as the Batcave. There the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Nick Cave and Marc Almond painted the flamboyance of David Bowie and the New Romantics in bleaker hues. Cave (an Australian obsessed with the American South) filled his Gothic legends with ghostly visions of souls haunted and cursed by fate and blood. Britain’s goth bands, such as the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission and Fields of the Nephilim, preferred to explore the boundaries of sexual identity. Like the Cure, they offered a home to anyone who felt alien from their surroundings or their psyches. Arguably no musical movement has ever been more welcoming to those who were confused about their sexual orientation or indeed the gender of the body they inhabited; or to women, so often confined as the passive consumers of male libido.

  The emergence of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry diverted music towards the nihilistic excess of the Marquis de Sade, severing the Gothic tradition from its playful self-discovery. While these adult male protagonists, aggressive in their victimhood, eviscerated themselves for public entertainment, the gentler, more feminine instincts of 1980s goth re-emerged in different media and art forms. From a musical cult with a penchant for dressing up in black, the Gothic turned into an all-pervasive culture. It spread from fashion into literature, in the form of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, and from there into television and film – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, True Blood, all targeting that moment of adolescence when the child feels itself an outsider, full of knowledge but restlessly adrift from adulthood. Beyond the American evangelical right, adults have regarded these tales as harmless entertainment. Music still has the potency to disturb parents and politicians, however; and to provide a medium for both lacerating self-examination and cartoon outrage. This combination would turn Marilyn Manson into the most hated figure in 1990s American rock, blamed for school shootings and suicides, self-harm and drug use.

  Maintaining the punk rock23 ethos is more important to me than anything.

  Kurt Cobain, 1990

  I don’t feel the least bit guilty24 for commercially exploiting a completely exhausted Rock Youth Culture, because at this point in rock history, Punk Rock is, to me, dead and gone.

  Kurt Cobain, 1992

  In his 1994 suicide note, Kurt Cobain declared: ‘The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.’ It is doubtful that even the most deluded of his fans was under that misconception. So entrenched was his image as a rock star on the verge of psychological disintegration that his band Nirvana contributed a self-mocking song entitled ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die’ to a 1993 compilation album.fn2 His eventual demise, a month after a failed attempt on his own life, was as inescapable as gravity. It ensured that the most emblematic rock star of the 1990s would be a man worshipped as a victim rather than a survivor; on his own harsh terms, a failure for having committed exactly the sins against his beloved punk rock that he regarded as most heinous.

  Cobain’s appalling death, and his all too public descent into addiction and despair, spoke volumes for the changing role of rock in modern culture. Once a naïve symbol of optimism and l
iberation, it had slowly and inexorably been turned inside out by a succession of ruptures in youth culture – metal, punk, goth, now the unappealingly named grunge. (Jonathan Poneman of the Seattle indie label Sub Pop is often credited with naming this unfocused genre. ‘It could have been sludge25, grime, crud, any word like that’, he noted later.) There was still hedonism to be found in the rock canon of the grunge era, but only from bands who were bent entirely on entertainment, rather than chronicling the dysfunctional psyches of a wounded generation of adolescents. The closest that the so-called Seattle scene came to reckless pleasure was the frenetic desolation of Mudhoney’s punky thrash, ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick’ – a phrase that might have been coined as a grunge manifesto. Pearl Jam, despised by Cobain as corporate beasts, may have launched their career with a single called ‘Alive’, but its lyrics revealed a complex tale of betrayal and incest. Grunge, like the industrial techno it shadowed, was intended to validate the agonies of growing up, not relieve them.

  Cobain’s depression was heightened by his ambivalence about his band’s rapid ascent to fame. Like the Sex Pistols before them, Nirvana were a band who preached punk-rock spontaneity and then delivered a record (Nevermind) of exquisite studio perfection. They inherited a tradition which the music industry had named alternative rock, and rendered that description redundant by releasing one of the best-selling American albums of all time. ‘Alternative’ was a blanket description for everything in US post-punk which was not explicitly designed to appeal to MTV, from the hardcore-pop hybrid of Hüsker Dü and the experimental guitar tunings of Sonic Youth, to the traditional pop structures and quiet/loud dynamic switches of Cobain’s most obvious influence, the Pixies. (In fact, there was another industry definition of ‘alternative’, which ranged wider still, encompassing everyone from Elvis Costello to U2.) When Nevermind succeeded Michael Jackson’s erroneously titled Dangerous at the top of the American album charts, it had a symbolic resonance – even if Nirvana’s reign lasted no longer than seven days.

  Their brief career was the squeezed heart of the Seattle grunge scene, which existed before them in the shape of Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone and Green River, and survived to deliver chart-topping albums in the mid-1990s for both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Yet death cemented an image of Cobain which would – like those of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison before him – become more familiar than it was in his lifetime. Those earlier icons, celebrated on T-shirts by people born after their deaths, appeared wild and seductive, alien and magnetic. Cobain’s face, by comparison, passed into history with a blank, mesmerised glare: a casualty who could never be rescued. Teenagers of the twenty-first century proudly sport the Nirvana shirt with the acid house ‘smiley’ logo twisted by Cobain’s own pen into a wobbly grimace, part amused, part disturbed. A casual doodle from 1991 was transformed into a fashion statement, alongside the Ramones, Run-DMC and even Sonic Youth T-shirts which adorned the bodies of thousands who did not know, or care, what they signified. (Miniature versions of all these designs and many more, featuring artists from Bob Dylan to the Clash, were available for those desperate to treat their babies as style accessories.)

  In an era where self-harm could become the stuff of legend, the MTV-friendly hard rock of power ballads, permed hair and bubblegum refrains was perversely out of step with the times. Just as hardcore had jettisoned all the facets of punk which could be assimilated into pop, the plethora of fiercely guarded metal subdivisions which surfaced in the early 1980s were a deliberate step away from commercial appeal. Thrash metal, death metal, black metal and their offspring were designed to alienate the masses, and identify their followers as a misunderstood elite. Of these styles, thrash was the simplest to quantify: it was punk-fast, metal-heavy, relentlessly unyielding until it stopped.fn3 Death and black metal – the latter a particular favourite among the pale white musicians of Norway, for climate-related reasons – prioritised gloom over speed, preferably while considering eviscerated corpses and bleeding wounds. Two archetypal band names: Dismember and Carcass (who should perhaps have combined forces to form the ideal death-metal supergroup).

  Despite being the very stuff of cult appeal, thrash metal mutated into a major commercial force, to the extent that Metallica’s 1988 album … And Justice For All sold 1.5 million copies within three months of its US release, without the benefit of radio airplay or promotional videos. Its landscape of self-harm, alienation and drug addiction – set to music which was resolutely stripped of all reference to rock’s roots in black music – reflected the isolation of its white teenage audience. Over the next decade, Metallica would edge themselves towards a broader acceptance of rock’s traditions, via the more direct song structures of their self-titled 1991 album and the daringly (for a thrash band) blues-tinged metal of 1996’s Load. This would become a familiar path: Megadeth abandoned the politically cynical thrash of their mid-1980s albums to achieve their biggest success with Countdown to Extinction (1992), alarming long-term fans with its comparative accessibility. The Brazilianfn4 band Sepultura, brutally monotoned in 1987, had varied their tempos by 1993’s Chaos AD. Even Anthrax, who in the 1980s maintained a ferocious intensity leavened only by frat-boy jesting, betrayed the hints of a melodic sensibility on 1993’s Sound of White Noise – demonstrating how influential Nirvana’s success had been.

  In 1994, the year Kurt Cobain committed suicide, one of America’s best-selling books was Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir of adolescent depression, Prozac Nation. Around 2.5 million prescriptions for the mood-altering drug were written in America during 1988; by 2002, the New York Times reported, the number had risen to more than 33 million. Between 5% and 10% of US teenagers were using antidepressants at any one time, many of them spending years or even decades on the drug, unable to gauge what their authentic emotional reaction to any situation might be. Many more teens suffered without medical help, either unnoticed by their parents or refusing to swallow their emotionally anaesthetising pills. One survey in 1988 suggested that as many as one in seven American teenagers had attempted to end their own lives.

  For these adolescents, the lacerating fury of bands from the thrash-and death-metal traditions might represent a connection with grim reality, more honest than the panaceas or chemically induced calmness they were being offered by their elders. Few metal albums of the 1990s were as successful, or as overwhelming, as Pantera’s 1994 release, Far Beyond Driven. It became America’s best-selling record. As Rolling Stone reported, ‘Pantera have the ugliest26 fans in the world – proudly, defiantly, gloriously ugly – fans who revel in their ugliness, wear it as a badge of honour.’ That ugliness could reside within, as well as on the surface; it could manifest itself in the epidemic of heroin and crack-cocaine abuse which ran through the metal and grunge communities in the early 1990s, publicly affecting such bands as Nirvana, Hole, Alice In Chains, Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (outsiders on the metal scene because of their overt use of funk rhythms). Guns N’ Roses’ career was stalled by the musicians’ conflicting attitudes to addictive practices. Stone Temple Pilots, extending the melodic grunge tradition of Nirvana, were lent glamour by the well-publicised dramas of vocalist Scott Weiland.

  To many adult eyes, the growing teenage preoccupation with tattoos and body piercings – once associated predominantly with bikers, criminals and the military – represented another expression of self-hatred. Adolescents regarded their augmented appearance as a symbol of rebellion and/or artistic self-expression: hence the prevalence of these fashion choices on the 1980s goth and hardcore scenes, and in the skateboard culture of the next decade. At the end of the century, a new wave of metal bands emerged who spoke directly to the trailer parks and council estates, the skaters and loners, their musicians sporting the same ink designs, studs and rings as their fans. Bands such as Korn and Limp Bizkit unashamedly reached out to an audience proud to be considered ‘white trash’ or ‘trailer trash’. Childhood anguish and generational disquiet fired Korn’s 1998 album Follow the Leader, an Amer
ican No. 1 record, which in its unwavering, headbanging tempos seemed to offer a negative mirror image of contemporary dance music – a barrage of agony replacing the ecstatic celebration.

  There was another form of metal nonconformism, however, which represented a more direct threat to America’s self-perception. In the music of Rage Against the Machine, on their 1992 debut and 1996’s Evil Empire, metal and the stylistic emblems of rap music were set to serve a political agenda which hinged around a simple message: America was a haven of imperialism, corruption and authoritarianism. ‘Bullet in the Head’ confronted government manipulation of the media; ‘People of the Sun’ the nation’s brutal foreign policies; and ‘Bulls on Parade’ the distorting power of militarism and the arms industry. Yet, isolated incidents aside, Rage Against the Machine were free to promulgate their anti-American views from the heart of the US entertainment business, via a multinational corporation. African-American performers would not always be so fortunate.

  Rap is media control27. Everything else in the world about the black situation comes to you from another perspective.

  Chuck D, Public Enemy, 1992

  I didn’t want to be no28 R&B rapper and no motherfuckin’ crossover rapper … That ain’t me. I want my shit to be 100% gangsta shit … A gangsta runs his own thing. He’s got his own mentality, he’s his own gang, he don’t listen to nobody but himself.