Grime and Gloaming

Original Artyfacts

2006-05-23T02:03:00.000-07:00

In 1972 a compilation set entitled Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era was released on Sire records. The double LP set featured artists such as Thirteenth Floor Elevator, Shadows of Knight and Chocolate Watchband and a whole lot of other bands that nobody had heard of then and not that many (barring a select few alternative rock aficionados in the endless pursuit of cultural capital) have heard of today. Except for maybe the VB Slab of Rock or Jim Beam’s 40 Shots of Rock (irony warning people), has there been a compilation release since that has had so much impact on the way people made, and thought about music? The nuggets, all previously released as singles, were a showcase of 60s underground “garage rock”, a simple style of rock typified by its rough and ready but nevertheless energetic and lively, DIY aesthetic, usually put together by kids in garages and played at local small scale gigs. Three points I’m headed for here…

1. The set was put together in 1972.
2. One of the compilers, and the guy who penned the sleeve notes was Lenny Kaye (the other guy was Elektra records founder Jac Holzman).
3. The set was re-released on cd in 1998.

so….?

1. 1972 was right smack bang in the middle of an American musical revolution. I made this timeline when I was writing my first essay on proto-punk. (Remember in last week’s lecture we listened to “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground “I Wanna Be Your Dog” The Stooges, and “Kick Out The Jams” from the MC5…. That was proto-punk. It was the raw kinda sound that “classic punk” like The Sex Pistols and The Clash came out of.)
1964 – Velvet Underground forms
MC5 forms
1967 – Velvet Underground 1st release (Velvet Underground &
Nico)
The Stooges formed
1969 – The Stooges 1st release (The Stooges)
MC5 1st release (Kick out The Jams)
1971 – New York Dolls formed
1973 – New York Dolls 1st release (New York Dolls)
1974 -The Ramones formed
Blondie formed
1975 – Patti Smith 1st release (Horses)
1976 – The Ramones 1st release (The Ramones)
Blondie 1st release (Blondie)

By the time 1972 rolls around this rough style of music that traded musical virtuosity for kickin’ out the jams, was well established in the underground. I probably don’t have to mention that the proto-punk sound was rooted in the aesthetics of garage rock (but I just did). To me, it seems the release of a double LP set signifies the commercial possibilities of the counterculture were beginning to be realised as more and more music fans were getting into this sound.

2. Lenny Kaye was a music writer and probably more notably, Patti Smith’s guitarist. Kaye’s musical style, described on All Music as “primitivist noise and capacity for loosely structured improvisation” owed much to the garage tracks he was putting together on this set and contributed to Patti Smith (and the Patti Smith Group) being a major, yet often unappreciated, player in the birth of punk. He was also from New York, as was Patti Smith, as were The Ramones, as was Blondie, as were New York Dolls, as were The Velvet underground, demonstrating that New York was a MAJOR scene for the beginnings of punk music. Both the music and the city was/is loud, rough, sometimes mean and had a lot of stuff going on under the surface. The Stooges and MC5, although part of the same sound, were from Detroit which is kinda close to New York but the important point I’m going to stress here was that Detroit’s thing was car manufacturing (MC5 = Motor City 5) and was a predominately working class city, not unlike Seattle.

3. The Late 1990s. Nirvana was long gone, Pearl Jam were getting crap and rock was getting soft and kinda boring. Generally, the world was beginning to calm down after the early 1990s grunge explosion. But people were still a little bit interested and there were a few hanger-on-ers of that good ol’ play-three-power-chords-with-heavy-fuzz-against-some-whisky-and-cigarettes-vocals-and-slap-it-all-together-in-under-5- minutes sound. 1996 saw From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, a Nirvana live collection that had a couple of pretty cool rarities, there was a Pixies anthology (Death To The Pixies) in 1997, and 1998 brought back The Nuggets with a massive 91 extra tracks. The difference between the 1972 and the 1998 release was that in 1972 the sound was emerging and in 1998 the sound was largely declining and people were being reminded where it all came from way back when in that first psychedelic era.
For a tracklist for the 1998 release check out
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:8btxlfdejcqu

The Godfather: A Spontaneous Ramble

2006-05-21T03:08:00.001-07:00

I was strolling through the internet the other day looking for stuff to link to by blog and I came across a precocious little site at http://www.thrasherswheat.org/gog.htm that was all about asking the question, who was grunge’s godfather? I didn’t read the whole thing very closely, as any web page that contains any reference to Wikipedia in a definitive context must be taken with a grain of salt, nevertheless there were some interesting tidbits such as the very concept of the “godfather of grunge”. This page seems to hail Neil Young with the title justifying it with claims of Rust Never Sleeps being a turning point in both and rock and reference to Young’s performance of “Rockin’ In The Free World” with Pearl Jam at the 1993 MTV awards. Now, I am not gong to deny that Neil Young had an enormous influence on alternative rock music but to present him alone with the title of “godfather”, seems to me to be a little narrow minded. What about Lou Reed? He doesn’t even get a mention on this page, nor do any of the Velvets and I think Reed was WAY more influential on grunge than Young. What about The Stooges? MC5? Patti Smith? The Ramones? Leonard Cohen (or would he be better suited to being Emo’s godfather?)? Or any of the countless garage bands out of the 1960s? I guess what I am trying to say in this off the top of my head spontaneous blogspurt is that grunge as a style had so many influences and really, a variety of sounds, that I can’t see naming a single figure with a godfather title to be overly helpful. Perhaps if Nirvana had always sounded like that weird alt-country stuff they did for Unplugged, or if The Smashing Pumpkins had not existed I’d have to retract my statement. But they didn’t, and they did so I won’t.

Ah, but hang on a minute…. Shouldn’t the Pumpkins be called post-grunge? What the hell is post grunge? Our friends at All Music.com say that post-grunge was the influx of bands imitating the underground sounds of the “Seattle style” that happened when grunge crawled out into the mainstream after Nirvana hit the big time. Fair enough. Until of course they placed soft rock boybands like Matchbox 20 and Live into the same category! What’s that about?!! So, judging on All Music's inclusions of who counts as what in this context, I'm disregarding post-grunge as a genre (for the time being at least). As I’m writing this, I’m listening to “Jellybelly” (The Smashing Pumpkins from Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness) and damn it, that’s grunge music. Low and behold, the next track “Zero”….. grunge. “Here’s No Why”… grunge. But then we start to think about the gentle and melodic solo piano number that is the title track, the screechingly undefinable cacophony of “Tales Of A Scorched Earth” that’s punk, grunge, metal and something else altogether, or “Lily (My One And Only) that seems like it could’ve come from a Belle & Sebastian album. The Pumpkins, definitive grunge in my book (until I started to turn the pages), just go to prove that these artists had such a diverse range of stylistic influences it’s impossible to claim one man as the “godfather”. Or maybe Billy Corgan is just a pretentious wanker. Both are equally valid conclusions.

Kellogs Emos

2006-05-21T02:37:00.000-07:00

Just found this image on the web and it made me giggle. Enjoy.

"Pure Grunge. Pure Shit." What's In A Name?

2006-05-20T18:14:00.000-07:00

Apparently it was Mark Arm of Green River and later Mudhoney, who first used the word “grunge” to describe a music, saying his band’s sound was “pure grunge, pure shit.” Someone else told me it was Bruce Pavitt, founder of Subpop records who first said it. Personally, I’m not really worried about who said it first. What I am concerned with is that it was a label that captured the character of the music’s sound. You see, I wanted to do the same thing for my blog title, but someone already had used grunge as their blogspot name so I had to come up with something else. Incidentally, thinking someone else might have made a blog about grunge music that I might be able to link to, I checked out what grunge.blogsplot was all about,. Instead I found that it was an “adult friend finder” service and retreated with haste. I still needed a title that reflected the music that I was going to be writing all about…..

If that black stuff that accumulated around the seal of a fridge or the bottom of a shower started singing and playing guitar, it would sound like this music. It is dirty, it is rough, it is basic. It’s grimy. Grunge is characterised by a raucous guitar which is usually the lead instrument. The guitars are usually smothered in distortion, feedback occasionally some playing around with choruses and delays but not so much that the raw quality of the music would be jeopardised by “arty” effects. Grunge vocals tended to be as rough as the guitars with singers like Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan screeching and wailing from one extreme of their vocal range to the monotonous drone of the opposite end. The songs followed the same aesthetic that characterised punk music – short, fast and loud. Ok, that’s a generalization, but most grunge defining songs were pretty short and tended to be fast. The loud part was relative. Grunge was no great showcase of musical virtuosity. Most songs were built on three or four (power) chords to a verse chorus verse structure, again testament to the punk aesthetic. So that’s the grime.

The gloaming, which is a cool word for twilight, is referring to the grunge attitude. Lyrically the music tended to the darker, more serious and unpleasant side of life, appealing to troubled, disaffected and generally angsty teens. But the music did possess something of a pop aesthetic that prevented it from becoming really dark. Listen to grunge’s (commercial) anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – it’s a fun song! Listen to “In Bloom” from the same album – satirical and kinda funny. Grunge did not remain an underground movement. In the 1990s it became huge - pure, unadulterated popular music. Nevermind, in its second week of release, knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the #1 spot. Even though charts don’t mean what they used to mean, that’s still fairly impressive for a hitherto nobody band. Songs that achieved huge commercial popularity such as “Come As You Are”, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”, “Black Hole Sun” and a variety of other tracks were rife with catchy licks and poppy riffs. This was troubled music for sure, but was it really that dark?

Well then.... Here We Are Now. Entertain Us.

2006-04-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

ok, ok, I know, it's the cliched catchcry of whatever letter this generation wants to call itself. But it's relevant here. I promise. My topic is Grunge. I'm hoping my essay will wander through what I'm going to argue as its NY punk origins, head on over to Seattle for a bit of discussion on its flourishing, thanks to our friends at subpop and that Cobain guy (was he in the right place at the right time, or did Kurt Cobain really possess some kind of Lennonesque vision?), as a worldwide musical phenomena. Then leaving the U.S, I'd like to look at how grunge was embraced by hordes of jaded teens specifically in Australia, which is basically just an excuse to talk about me and my friends as teenagers in an academic context. Well, that's the basic plan and about all I can think of to write in this, my first ever blog. And to think how I have mocked all those who went before me into this weird wide web of blogging...