emo cock-rock is what we used to call it. sad-faced assholes...and then that movie with Matt Dillon and the marine biologist chick and the close-up on the Coltrane record came out and there was a whole movie about them!
Melvins and Jesus Lizard were amazing live and the records have aged nicely.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
bassie said:
emo cock-rock is what we used to call it. sad-faced assholes...
Yep, nobody was having any fun at Mudhoney or Nirvana or Soundgarden shows before Spin magazine caught on. Thanks for playing.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
I love how some of y'all insist on some fringe, unobtainable punk aesthetic in rock but then turn around and champion the most cheesy, consumerist rap known to man.
I bought 90% of the first 200 or so Sub Pop records new (almost all are long gone). I voraciously read all the fanzines and magazines, saw all the bands who stopped in Albany. I know the context and contemporary levels of popularity. Nirvana did not stand out much until they signed with Gold Mountain and went to a major. Anyway, this is so old news. By the time Sub Pop started releasing stuff like Velocity Girl and Spinanes I pretty much gave up on new rock music (except for black metal). It's just this "John Lennon of grunge" hero worship stuff cracks me up, have to react to it.
emo cock-rock is what we used to call it. sad-faced assholes...and then that movie with Matt Dillon and the marine biologist chick and the close-up on the Coltrane record came out and there was a whole movie about them!
Melvins and Jesus Lizard were amazing live and the records have aged nicely.
I agree with you on the Melvins but for some reason The Jesus Lizard never grabbed me. A lot of my friends were fans and I'm not hating on them but I never managed to get into the band. The singer always seemed a bit calculated and unauthentic in his "outrageous" antics. But this was a long time ago and maybe I just got it wrong.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Plantweed said:
Man, you have some thin skin, bud. :-)
I bought 90% of the first 200 or so Sub Pop records new (almost all are long gone). I voraciously read all the fanzines and magazines, saw all the bands who stopped in Albany. I know the context and contemporary levels of popularity. Nirvana did not stand out much until they signed with Gold Mountain and went to a major. Anyway, this is so old news. By the time Sub Pop started releasing stuff like Velocity Girl and Spinanes I pretty much gave up on new rock music (except for black metal). It's just this "John Lennon of grunge" hero worship stuff cracks me up, have to react to it.
Nirvana made good music. People naturally liked it. End of story. All of this side show biz not directly pertaining to the music is irrelevant, at least to this discussion.
I mean, Billy Corgan wasn't fat and bald when I used to like Smashing Pumpkins. But yeah, now I need to alter my past opinion of music because dude wound up later looking like Uncle Fester. Makes perfect sense. Thanks, Soul Strut.
Get over it and lose the literal lenses. I am about your age and lived through it all and definitely don't need you to narrate for me what a show looked or felt like. If anything, I agree with you on a lot of what you've said here. If you love it, then you love it, who gives a fuck what anyone else on this board feels about it? Not sure why you are engaging someone who thrives off these types of exchanges/digs his heels in more and expect an outcome other than what has panned out.
I love how some of y'all insist on some fringe, unobtainable punk aesthetic in rock but then turn around and champion the most cheesy, consumerist rap known to man.
I'm glad you love how I do, despite the fact I don't use the same Life Rule Book as you.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
bassie said:
Get over it and lose the literal lenses. I am about your age and lived through it all and definitely don't need you to narrate for me what a show looked or felt like. If anything, I agree with you on a lot of what you've said here. If you love it, then you love it, who gives a fuck what anyone else on this board feels about it? Not sure why you are engaging someone who thrives off these types of exchanges/digs his heels in more and expect an outcome other than what has panned out.
Thank you, angel on my left shoulder. Now, what does the demon on my right shoulder have to say?
You're right though. I just find it annoying that people have turned grunge, something that was at least slightly punk at its earliest rise into the equivalent of a McRib sandwich to be denied at every turn. Shit wasn't just Eddie Veddor getting on our nerves. But that's generally how people now treat it. Annoys the hell out of me, sorry.
It sounds like Frank is coming from a punk rock base and I have to agree that the great majority of grunge bands didn't have the edge that the 70's punk scene did. That's why I asked about the Ramones vs. Nirvana.
Frank....being a much older Geezer than you let me assure you that when I first saw the Ramones in the early 70's they had an edge like no other. Considering that bands like Be Bop Delux, The Tubes, Styxx, etc. had evolved out of the 60's into the 70's pablum bullshit, the NY Dolls and Ramones were about as edgy as anything that would actually get played on the radio in 1974. Looking back on that from a late 70's punk perspective I'm sure it seems tame.
And looking forward with a 70's/80's punk perspective at grunge has the same result. But let's face the facts...the great number of punk bands were shit...90% attitude and 10% musical content.....you can argue exceptions, but this is the truth.
Typically what happenss in music is that an underground scene breaks out, becomes popular, and gets watered down by it's commercial success. Therefore there is a small window (1-2 years) where the edge is still sharp. By the time Grunge came around music had devolved back to pure pablum so in relative terms grunge had an edge at the outset. As sharp an edge as punk from 15 years earlier, probably not, but unquestionably better musicianship and songs.
By the time the Ramones and NY Dolls came around the sharp edge of the MC5 and Stooges was long forgotten and was time for a new generation to claim something of their own.
Having lived through this cycle at least 4 times I've come to recognize that it is all relative to time and place....there was some good grunge but most of it sucked, there was some good punk but most of it sucked....as a matter of fact that can be said about every style of popular music over the last 50 years.
I recall SP becoming popular way after Grunge had been mainstreamed. I was in school when my friends listened to Nirvana and was working in the real workd a minute after school, when i met a young out of towner co-worker who was a SP head.
Werent they at the tail end of the movement and managed to keep going for a while after the genre cooled off.
I kinda thought they transcended the movement.
HarveyCanal"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
Smashing Pumpkins wasn't a Seattle band, but they did have one of their first singles come out on Sub Pop which aligned them if the music itself wasn't at least generally in line already. And I'd say that both Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden successfully transcended the movement into non-grunge areas. For instance, Soundgarden's Superunknown album wasn't nearly as grunge as say their Ultramega Ok album from a few years prior, but Superunknown is still a great general hard rock album that has undeniable pop hits on it. I definitely wasn't into it when it came out because I felt the whole scene was sold out by that point and I could hardly bring myself to bother anymore. But over the years since then, I've sat with that album and have really come to love it for what it is rather than hating it for what it isn't.
With today's ears, the biggest problem with that scene was a lack of good songs. Same thing with stoner rock; that genre had such great potential (combining zoned-out psych with tough hard rock) but most of the bands had awful singers and couldn't write a strong album to save their lives. The idea was better than most of the results.
It sounds like Frank is coming from a punk rock base and I have to agree that the great majority of grunge bands didn't have the edge that the 70's punk scene did. That's why I asked about the Ramones vs. Nirvana.
Frank....being a much older Geezer than you let me assure you that when I first saw the Ramones in the early 70's they had an edge like no other. Considering that bands like Be Bop Delux, The Tubes, Styxx, etc. had evolved out of the 60's into the 70's pablum bullshit, the NY Dolls and Ramones were about as edgy as anything that would actually get played on the radio in 1974. Looking back on that from a late 70's punk perspective I'm sure it seems tame.
And looking forward with a 70's/80's punk perspective at grunge has the same result. But let's face the facts...the great number of punk bands were shit...90% attitude and 10% musical content.....you can argue exceptions, but this is the truth.
Typically what happenss in music is that an underground scene breaks out, becomes popular, and gets watered down by it's commercial success. Therefore there is a small window (1-2 years) where the edge is still sharp. By the time Grunge came around music had devolved back to pure pablum so in relative terms grunge had an edge at the outset. As sharp an edge as punk from 15 years earlier, probably not, but unquestionably better musicianship and songs.
By the time the Ramones and NY Dolls came around the sharp edge of the MC5 and Stooges was long forgotten and was time for a new generation to claim something of their own.
Having lived through this cycle at least 4 times I've come to recognize that it is all relative to time and place....there was some good grunge but most of it sucked, there was some good punk but most of it sucked....as a matter of fact that can be said about every style of popular music over the last 50 years.
I was born too late for 70s punk. I've seen a few bands that were still around in the early 80s like Chelsea or the UK Subs and of course the Ramones but generally I was heavily into what was probably labeled as post punk in the more established music press. I don't think I ever heard anybody use the term at the time or saw it mentioned in a fanzine. I was into X, the Gun Club, the Cramps, early SST stuff like Black Flag, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, St. Vitus etc NY noise rock like the Swans, Pussy Galore, J.G. Thirwell, Sonic Youth, Live Skull etc. some early Euro industrial stuff like Laibach or Einst├╝rzende Neubauten, Aussi rock like the Birthday Party, the Scientists, Beast of Bourbon, Lubricated Goat, Feedtime, King Snake Roost etc None of our gang felt like we were following or being part of any sort of scene or movement and a lot of our favorite bands came from entirely different scenes, geographically and stylistically. Shit just needed to rock hard and be a good soundtrack for a hellishly good and reckless time. I saw some of those early grunge bands cause they gut lumped onto the same bill with bands that we wanted to see. Some of these grunge acts had a good song or two like for example Mudhoney but TAD and specifically Nirvana bored the shit out of me. I totally couldn't understand what the guy was getting so riled up about, the music sounded lame and then for no apparent reason he smashed his guitar to pieces wtf? It all seemed super calculated, unauthentic and lame. I don't believe any of his later lament about the pains of being a superstar, Cobain was one calculating, unauthentic piece of shit. No pre-fame, semi-starving musician would routinely fuck up his gear like that. I now a shtick when I see it and that guy was a fraud. As the 90s proceeded I increasingly lost interest in current music and watched from afar and with disgust how flannell shirt wearing corporate hobo rockers were filling arenas and whining like a bunch of gut-kicked children.
it is all relative to time and place....there was some good grunge but most of it sucked, there was some good punk but most of it sucked....as a matter of fact that can be said about every style of popular music over the last 50 years.
What are people calling grunge and what are you calling punk from that era?
Slint
Laughing Hyenas
Steelpole Bathtub
Unsane
Pegboy
Six Finger Satellite
To this day the Laughing Hyenas are one of my favorite bands and one of the most amazing live acts I ever got to see. They had absolutely no connection to anything grunge related. John Brannon as the former singer of Negative Approach obviously had hardcore punk roots.
Steelpole Bathtub... I had Butterfly Love which I loved and Lurch which I found not as good as the former. I then lost interest. Did they put out anything worthwhile later? The first two definitely weren't grunge (also much too early, no?), if I'd have to sort them into a store bin I'd put them into the "noise rock" divider.
Unsane... I have to admit I bought the first couple of records but dumped them a long time ago. Am-Rep Noise Rock and not grunge.
Nirvana was a fairly tepid fusion of suburban alterno angst pop and some early 70s prog rock. Future classic rock radio.
Grunge = edgeless glob.
I don't have a horse in this race, but how can any grunge band be considered prog rock?
Or I should say, what elements of prog do you hear in grunge?
Soundgarden to me sound like an inept low rent version of Led Zep while Pearl Jam (I have to go dis-infect my hands after typing their name) would be their involuntary parody.
Led Zep are not prog. They are blues rock. Or British Rock, not prog. Prog, to me, is keyboards, complex chord changes, time changes, all that pseudo classical pseudo jazz pseudo sophisticated stuff. I think most would agree.
Yeah, grunge bands seemed more into mining a sound than songcraft.
Slint [post-rock, maybe the first]
Laughing Hyenas, Steelpole Bathtub, Unsane, Six Finger Satellite [post-punk, a generic term that encompasses a lot of disparate sounds]
Pegboy [retro punk]
Funny, not trying to rile LaserWof up, but at the end of the day I consider Zep a heavy progressive rock band, judging by their adaptation of styles and an increasing reliance with each LP on long, complex songs with lots of parts.
I consider Zep a heavy progressive rock band, judging by their adaptation of styles and an increasing reliance with each LP on long, complex songs with lots of parts.
Isnt that what most Rock bands were doing in the early 70's?
Yeah, grunge bands seemed more into mining a sound than songcraft.
Slint [post-rock, maybe the first]
Laughing Hyenas, Steelpole Bathtub, Unsane, Six Finger Satellite [post-punk, a generic term that encompasses a lot of disparate sounds]
Pegboy [retro punk]
Funny, not trying to rile LaserWof up, but at the end of the day I consider Zep a heavy progressive rock band, judging by their adaptation of styles and an increasing reliance with each LP on long, complex songs with lots of parts.
Don't worry about riling me. I know nothing about rock music, so I am learning here.
I can see how some of the later stuff, and things like SWTH, could be considered prog, now that you mention it.
I apologize for having been a dick but the rise of grunge coincided with the demise of most of the bands/music I loved so somehow I blamed grunge for ruining rock music for me. Other than that it would have just been boring music which isn't really anything special or worthy of much hate or aggravation. Plus I was in a foul mood cause some asshole farmer upriver must have sprayed his crops yesterday and all of my crawfish died and the kois were acting weird and refused to feed. Now they just started swimming around and eating again but I'm still mad as hell about all the dead mudbugs. Fucking Ticos and their love for insecticides.
Comments
Yes, you can quote me on that!
Melvins and Jesus Lizard were amazing live and the records have aged nicely.
Yep, nobody was having any fun at Mudhoney or Nirvana or Soundgarden shows before Spin magazine caught on. Thanks for playing.
I bought 90% of the first 200 or so Sub Pop records new (almost all are long gone). I voraciously read all the fanzines and magazines, saw all the bands who stopped in Albany. I know the context and contemporary levels of popularity. Nirvana did not stand out much until they signed with Gold Mountain and went to a major. Anyway, this is so old news. By the time Sub Pop started releasing stuff like Velocity Girl and Spinanes I pretty much gave up on new rock music (except for black metal). It's just this "John Lennon of grunge" hero worship stuff cracks me up, have to react to it.
I agree with you on the Melvins but for some reason The Jesus Lizard never grabbed me. A lot of my friends were fans and I'm not hating on them but I never managed to get into the band. The singer always seemed a bit calculated and unauthentic in his "outrageous" antics. But this was a long time ago and maybe I just got it wrong.
Nirvana made good music. People naturally liked it. End of story. All of this side show biz not directly pertaining to the music is irrelevant, at least to this discussion.
I mean, Billy Corgan wasn't fat and bald when I used to like Smashing Pumpkins. But yeah, now I need to alter my past opinion of music because dude wound up later looking like Uncle Fester. Makes perfect sense. Thanks, Soul Strut.
I'm glad you love how I do, despite the fact I don't use the same Life Rule Book as you.
Thank you, angel on my left shoulder. Now, what does the demon on my right shoulder have to say?
You're right though. I just find it annoying that people have turned grunge, something that was at least slightly punk at its earliest rise into the equivalent of a McRib sandwich to be denied at every turn. Shit wasn't just Eddie Veddor getting on our nerves. But that's generally how people now treat it. Annoys the hell out of me, sorry.
Frank....being a much older Geezer than you let me assure you that when I first saw the Ramones in the early 70's they had an edge like no other. Considering that bands like Be Bop Delux, The Tubes, Styxx, etc. had evolved out of the 60's into the 70's pablum bullshit, the NY Dolls and Ramones were about as edgy as anything that would actually get played on the radio in 1974. Looking back on that from a late 70's punk perspective I'm sure it seems tame.
And looking forward with a 70's/80's punk perspective at grunge has the same result. But let's face the facts...the great number of punk bands were shit...90% attitude and 10% musical content.....you can argue exceptions, but this is the truth.
Typically what happenss in music is that an underground scene breaks out, becomes popular, and gets watered down by it's commercial success. Therefore there is a small window (1-2 years) where the edge is still sharp. By the time Grunge came around music had devolved back to pure pablum so in relative terms grunge had an edge at the outset. As sharp an edge as punk from 15 years earlier, probably not, but unquestionably better musicianship and songs.
By the time the Ramones and NY Dolls came around the sharp edge of the MC5 and Stooges was long forgotten and was time for a new generation to claim something of their own.
Having lived through this cycle at least 4 times I've come to recognize that it is all relative to time and place....there was some good grunge but most of it sucked, there was some good punk but most of it sucked....as a matter of fact that can be said about every style of popular music over the last 50 years.
Werent they at the tail end of the movement and managed to keep going for a while after the genre cooled off.
I kinda thought they transcended the movement.
Slint
Laughing Hyenas
Steelpole Bathtub
Unsane
Pegboy
Six Finger Satellite
I was born too late for 70s punk. I've seen a few bands that were still around in the early 80s like Chelsea or the UK Subs and of course the Ramones but generally I was heavily into what was probably labeled as post punk in the more established music press. I don't think I ever heard anybody use the term at the time or saw it mentioned in a fanzine. I was into X, the Gun Club, the Cramps, early SST stuff like Black Flag, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, St. Vitus etc NY noise rock like the Swans, Pussy Galore, J.G. Thirwell, Sonic Youth, Live Skull etc. some early Euro industrial stuff like Laibach or Einst├╝rzende Neubauten, Aussi rock like the Birthday Party, the Scientists, Beast of Bourbon, Lubricated Goat, Feedtime, King Snake Roost etc None of our gang felt like we were following or being part of any sort of scene or movement and a lot of our favorite bands came from entirely different scenes, geographically and stylistically. Shit just needed to rock hard and be a good soundtrack for a hellishly good and reckless time. I saw some of those early grunge bands cause they gut lumped onto the same bill with bands that we wanted to see. Some of these grunge acts had a good song or two like for example Mudhoney but TAD and specifically Nirvana bored the shit out of me. I totally couldn't understand what the guy was getting so riled up about, the music sounded lame and then for no apparent reason he smashed his guitar to pieces wtf? It all seemed super calculated, unauthentic and lame. I don't believe any of his later lament about the pains of being a superstar, Cobain was one calculating, unauthentic piece of shit. No pre-fame, semi-starving musician would routinely fuck up his gear like that. I now a shtick when I see it and that guy was a fraud. As the 90s proceeded I increasingly lost interest in current music and watched from afar and with disgust how flannell shirt wearing corporate hobo rockers were filling arenas and whining like a bunch of gut-kicked children.
This.
To this day the Laughing Hyenas are one of my favorite bands and one of the most amazing live acts I ever got to see. They had absolutely no connection to anything grunge related. John Brannon as the former singer of Negative Approach obviously had hardcore punk roots.
Steelpole Bathtub... I had Butterfly Love which I loved and Lurch which I found not as good as the former. I then lost interest. Did they put out anything worthwhile later? The first two definitely weren't grunge (also much too early, no?), if I'd have to sort them into a store bin I'd put them into the "noise rock" divider.
Unsane... I have to admit I bought the first couple of records but dumped them a long time ago. Am-Rep Noise Rock and not grunge.
The other 3 bands I don't know.
Led Zep are not prog. They are blues rock. Or British Rock, not prog. Prog, to me, is keyboards, complex chord changes, time changes, all that pseudo classical pseudo jazz pseudo sophisticated stuff. I think most would agree.
Slint [post-rock, maybe the first]
Laughing Hyenas, Steelpole Bathtub, Unsane, Six Finger Satellite [post-punk, a generic term that encompasses a lot of disparate sounds]
Pegboy [retro punk]
Funny, not trying to rile LaserWof up, but at the end of the day I consider Zep a heavy progressive rock band, judging by their adaptation of styles and an increasing reliance with each LP on long, complex songs with lots of parts.
I will cop to having had a 1st-and-2nd-album interest in them, but I guess I have to chalk that up to being 12.
Isnt that what most Rock bands were doing in the early 70's?
Don't worry about riling me. I know nothing about rock music, so I am learning here.
I can see how some of the later stuff, and things like SWTH, could be considered prog, now that you mention it.
Some of them, yeah. Sabbath was definitely proggy, especially in the mid-'70s.
I dont place Pink Floyd at the same table as Led Zep.