Let’s face it: Rock 'n Roll is inherently ridiculous. Rock stars make a living wearing clothes that would get them laughed at on the street and striking poses that would get them beaten up at the pub. If you don't believe me, watch a Rolling Stones live DVD with the sound off. Or better yet, any Metal video from the 80’s.
Most of the greatest Rock 'n Rollers are total frauds; nice middle-class boys pretending to be hoodlums (or revolutionaries, or sorcerers, or space aliens). Mick Jagger was studying economics before he decided to make a living imitating hard-luck bluesmen. Jimmy Page was a clock-punching studio musician, the polar opposite of his hero Aleister Crowley. And Jim Morrison’s dad was a bloody admiral, for fuck’s sake.
Pretense became part of the package when Glam rolled around. Alice Cooper - a minister's son from Bible Belt America - pretended to be the devil’s daughter and then blew his cover when he started playing golf with Bing Crosby. David Bowie pretended to be a trisexual Nazi alien, but was actually a nice suburban lad with a wife and child. Freddie Mercury didn't spring out of a manhole on Carnaby Street, replete in chiffon and taffeta, but actually had a traditional Parsi upbringing in Zanzibar.
Contrary to public opinion, Punk Rock wasn’t any more “authentic” than Glam. The New York Dolls pretended to be transvestites, then turned around and pretended to be Communists. The Ramones pretended to be brothers, but weren’t even friends. Feminist icon Debbie Harry started her career as a Playboy bunny. Believe it or not, Joe Strummer's father was not actually a bank robber, but a bonafide secret agent for the Foreign Office.
All this hummed along quite nicely for decades: kids paid their money to watch slightly older kids dress up like idiots, pose about onstage like spastic Liza Minelli impersonators and repackage the same ancient chord progressions over and over in cleverly-marketed genres like Acid, Glam, Metal, Punk and New Wave. It was big, dumb, loud and ridiculous, the way it should be. No one suspected an army of party poopers were waiting in the wings to rain on the Rock 'n Roll parade.
Rollins kills Black Flags dead
Despite what some think, Grunge didn’t emerge fully formed when Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991. It actually began in the early 80’s when humanity-hating Hardcore bands like Flipper, the Butthole Surfers and Black Flag set about deliberately alienating their fans by playing dumpy, druggy, dumbed–down versions of their favorite Grand Funk Railroad and Black Oak Arkansas records through cheap, lousy equipment. The inept, dingy mess that these losers kicked up was later tagged with the descriptive label, “Grunge.”
Pretending to be hard-bitten social realists, the OG grungesters embraced the worst aspects of Jerry Springer Americana; from trailer-trash fashion statements (ripped jeans, ill-fitting plaid shirts and greasy hair), to bad drugs and piss beer, to serial killer chic, drag racing and trash cinema. It was all meant to be ironic, but soon gave over to mopey, po-faced nihilism. And no one seemed to get the memo that said that no one ever listened to Rock 'n Roll for social-fucking-realism in the first place.
But the world at large was happily unmolested by Grunge for most of the 80’s, until Nirvana came around and ruined everything.
If you turned off your brain, Nirvana’s breakthrough Nevermind made for great ear candy. Producer Butch Vig gave their ultra-simple yet catchy songs a slick finish, making good use of Nirvana’s best musician, drummer Dave Grohl. But buried in all those insidiously catchy hooks was some real bummer content: a blizzard of whiny, nihilist lyrics whose only redeeming character was that Kurt Cobain’s marble-mouthed diction made them indecipherable. But ear candy is ear candy, and Nevermind was a monster smash.
Since no one in the business could figure out why kids liked Nevermind, the record companies went on a signing binge, blowing untold millions on legions of would-be Nirvanas. Soon the airwaves were clogged with earnest baritones moaning about how hopeless it all was. But after choking on a diet of insta-Grunge for a few years, America’s pampered teenagers suddenly decided this queasy mix of trashy garage rock and goodbye-cruel-world nihilism was icky. And overnight, Grunge died. Hard.
(Note: I don't consider a lot of the bands commonly associated with Grunge -- Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins -- to be Grunge. I see them as traditional hard rock bands).
Once the dirt was splayed on Grunge's plywood casket, the Sex Pistols and the classic KISS lineup almost immediately rose from the dead, as if summoned by our mass unconscious to reignite our belief in Rock 'n Roll's glamorously decadent past. It was as if we were begging Daddy to put the Santa Claus costume back on so we could believe once again.
And since then we’ve had some truly exciting bands pop up and relight the fire. But even the snazziest acts – all the ones who’ve come along in the past ten years and tried to make us forget we already peered behind the curtain – have had a vaguely disappointing character to them, like rain on your birthday or losing your virginity with a piss hard-on.
Will Rock 'n Roll ever mean as much as it once did in the 60’s and 70’s? I really can’t say. Grunge really fucked things up good. We probably can’t go back to pretending that Rock 'n Roll can change the world again. But I can say that what we need is a period of total, outrageous artifice. We need bands that make KISS look like Pearl Jam and The Darkness sound like Staind. We need wretched excess: makeup and orchestras, dry ice and ice skates, gunpowder and gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam, you name it. Rock 'n Roll needs to get really stupid again, but in a good way.
You see, the raison d'etre of Rock 'n Roll is to temporarily relieve the shattering dullness of modern suburban life. 10,000 years of human striving and what to we have to show for the sacrifices and labours of our forebears? Microwave TV dinners? Starsky and Hutch reruns? A night-out at the pizza counter at Asda's?
You withstand acne, bullying, rejection and bad food in high school and what do you get? Well, if you’re lucky you get more of the same at some miserable corporate job, only minus the acne. At least on your face: your ass is probably lousy with it. Do you really need Chad Kroeger telling you about his stupid fucking problems?
In his alleged "suicide" note, Kurt Cobain rued that he didn’t live for the adulation of the crowd the way Freddie Mercury did. Well, perhaps he would have had Nirvana offered the crowd something other than adolescent “Dear Diary” whining and untutored dissonance. Freddie reveled in the transformative possibilities of pure, unadulterated showbiz, which took him out of a dreary public school and put him before the largest audiences in history. Freddie knew that it’s all fake, it’s all phony. And that’s what the audience needs- a bit of escape from the boredom of the office, or the classroom or the bedsit. If you’re going to be a whore, act the part.
After all, the best paid whores are the ones who can convince their clients that they enjoy their jobs.
A version of this originally ran in Classic Rock way back in the day.
