Fluxblog 522: mid 90s alt-rock forever
Old posts about alt-rock classics by Veruca Salt, Hole, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, Toadies, Alanis Morissette, Belly, and more
October 14th, 2010 9:06am
Take My Sun Away
Veruca Salt “Number One Blind”
Almost inevitably, this new decade will bring us a large crop of bands recycling ’90s guitar rock. Of all the various strains of ’90s rock, I think the most quintessential and commercial is “alt-rock,” an aesthetic I think is best connected to the bands on the DGC label — Nirvana, Weezer, Hole, Elastica, Sloan, Sonic Youth, Teenage Fanclub, Veruca Salt — as well as other major label acts like Bush who were running with a similar formula and aesthetic. But what is that formula? What is that aesthetic? I think “Number One Blind” is a very good answer to those questions. In my mind, this song is a perfect example of the archetype, and just hearing it takes me back to the era of actually-pretty-great mainstream rock radio and suburban malls full of alterna-teens.
I’ll break it down for you.
* Gently rolling, thick bass line. Kim Deal has so much to answer for, and even the worst of it is pretty decent. (Like, say, “Good” by Better Than Ezra.) I think Krist Novoselic’s approximation of Deal’s style was itself extremely influential. I would argue that even ahead of fuzzy guitar tone, this is the most essential and recognizable element of ’90s alt-rock, especially when contrasted with a simple, pretty guitar figure as it is on the verse of “Number One Blind.”
* Strict verse/chorus/verse construction. I find that archetypal ’90s alt-rock very seldom includes pre-choruses, and bridges are generally quite brief. The bridge in “Number One Blind” takes us from a chorus into a solo, but it’s not necessary — a lot of songs in the sub-genre will just slam a solo between choruses, or skip the solo entirely.
* Verses are mellow; choruses are loud. Duh! You stomp on your fuzz pedal when it’s time for the chorus. ’90s rock radio was basically this steady ebb and tide of soft verses and loud choruses. Black Francis didn’t invent this, but I think pretty much all of this music is directly traceable to the Pixies catalog.
* The solo break is very short. The solo is always melodic, but the playing is never too smooth or overly professional. These are mainly to add some touch of melodic flourish and to break up the rigid grid of the song’s construction for a few seconds.
* The melodies are simple. Okay, but not so much that it’s totally sing-song.
* The vocals have an arch quality. This depends on the character of the frontperson, but there’s pretty much always some touch of irony and bitterness in the tone.
* Obscure title and/or lyrical references. The chorus — “Levolor, which of us is blind?” is a play on words — blindness, as in obliviousness, and Levolor, as in the manufacturer of window blinds. There’s a metaphor in here, but it’s not fully formed, which is pretty much the way things go in this style. It’s more about suggesting an idea and an image rather that explicating it. Bonus points for the specific reference to Levolor, which has some kind of nostalgic quality despite being a brand that still exists.
August 29th, 2016 1:14am
Stupid Happy With Everything
Everclear “Electra Made Me Blind”
There are so many reasons Everclear do not get the respect they deserve, and some of them are maybe fair: Art Alexakis has a reputation for being an abrasive dick, and they really threw themselves into the deep end of the corporate rock market with gusto at a time when naked careerism was reviled. Then there are unfair reasons, like weird ageism about Alexakis being noticeably older than everyone else in the scene, and a bias against their subject matter focusing almost exclusively on lower middle class people who’d proudly claim to be “white trash.”
Everclear arrived at the beginning of a major class divide in rock music that’s essentially torn the genre apart and made it less relevant over time – there’s the indie-derived music on one side for the educated and well-off, and the aggressive, unapologetically hedonistic, or unambiguously uplifting rock aimed at the radio and working class people. As you move into the 00s, the yuppie side of rock music starts to disown “rock,” and move away from its signifiers. Kid A is ground zero for that, and we haven’t seen the end of it. For a great many people, rock music – along with mainstream country – is kinda embarrassing because it’s the music of the uncool poor and working class. But classism is a thing we rarely talk about in the United States, so people rarely have the self-awareness to notice they have this bias in the first place. Sure, people will be all about Bruce Springsteen’s working class boosterism, but almost anything speaking for that audience since the early ‘90s is somehow beneath contempt.
“Electra Made Me Blind” sets the stage for Sparkle & Fade, a record full of songs about broke losers and recovering junkies trying to make it the world. Alexakis’ character is leaving a small town and heading for a “new life in old L.A.,” and he’s fighting through reflexive pessimism just enough to feel good about things. It’s not a complicated song but the dynamics are very impressive – the band makes every moment feel as urgent and physical as possible, and the refrain of “I KNOW! I KNOW! I KNOW!” sounds like Alexakis banging his head against a wall in frustration. The main feeling of this song is the thrill of escape, and listening to it on its own feels like freezing yourself in a moment of high hopes and ambition before having to find out what all the obstacles ahead of you are going to be.
Alanis Morissette, “All I Really Want”
“Do I stress you out?,” Alanis Morissette sings at the start of her breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill. At face value, it sounds like she’s concerned and apologetic. But within another few seconds it becomes clear that she’s confronting you and actually asking “can you handle me, or are you going to run away?” Within 20 seconds of what is effectively her debut album, Morissette is telling you she’s a LOT, and it’s only going to get more intense from here on out.
The Alanis Morissette of Jagged Little Pill is a complicated character. A lot of the album’s enormous success is owed to how effectively she presents so many facets of her personality — many of them contradictory — and is always telling you “this is who I am.”
Most artists, even Morissette’s most brilliant peers, only ever give you a few sides of themselves in their work. The self is curated, the art is focused on a set of specific feelings or experiences. Morissette, however, gives you everything she’s got — her neuroses, her love, her spite, her idealism, her petty jealousy, her lust, her arrogance, her insecurity, her empathy, her spirituality, her intellectualism, her dorky sense of humor, her sentimentality, her creepy obsession. She shows you her most fierce side, and her most basic. In declaring herself to be “all of the above,” she gave her listeners permission to be everything they are at once too. No wonder so many people saw themselves in her.
“All I Really Want” is a one-sided argument with a man who is either an ex, or is about to become an ex. She can tell he’s gotten sick of her. She’s probably sick of him too, but she’s not done yet. She’s still analyzing everything he says and does, she’s still trying to figure him out. She’s angry that he no longer seems to care, because she still does and that’s not fair. She’s fantasizing about meeting someone else who genuinely gets her, but she’s not moving on until she gets the last word here.
She has a sense of humor about this. The world at large had no idea who Alanis Morissette was at the time this song was written, but Alanis sure as hell knew who she was, and what was cartoonish and funny about her persona. She makes jokes at her own expense, if just to make sure you know she knows she is intense and dramatic. The bridge of the song starts off “enough about me, let’s talk about you for a minute,” because she is aware she is being self-absorbed even when she’s focused on someone else.
The jokes are a pre-emptive defensive tactic, but also a way of letting you see the bigger picture of who she is. She refuses to be any one thing, to have her thoughts and feelings reduced or limited. She is determined to control her own story, and a lot of her frustration in this song comes from this guy writing her off as a one-dimensional character.
The most interesting idea in “All I Really Want,” and by extension all of Jagged Little Pill, is insinuated but never directly stated. Basically, she’s asking you consider the possibility that all of her thoughts, concerns, and feelings are actually totally rational and reasonable. She’s not a psycho, she’s not a bitch, she’s not hysterical — she’s just being a normal person with normal emotions and normal expectations for how she wants to be treated in a relationship. So why is this guy — why is the world — treating her like she’s crazy? The obvious answer is that it’s because she’s a woman. But I think it goes deeper than that.
There’s a moment near the end of the fourth season of Mad Men in which Don Draper breaks off his relationship with Dr. Faye Miller by abruptly informing her that he’s just met someone else and is now engaged. Dr. Miller, a psychologist, immediately sees through Draper, and needles him with a line that succinctly describes one of the character’s defining flaws: “Well, I hope you’re very happy, and I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things.”
In “All I Really Want,” Morissette is essentially giving voice to the Dr. Millers of the world. She’s fed up with men who get bored of her once the beginning has ended, who back away from her once they actually get a sense of who she really is rather than what she might immediately represent to them. They only want two or three facets of who she is, but she’s got hundreds of facets to offer.
The confrontation in “All I Really Want” is not about merely calling this out, and revealing this man to be a shallow coward. Morissette is concerned about his state of mind, and is angry at him for limiting himself. She’s asking him, why are you so afraid of me? What about my passion is so frightening and off-putting? Are you afraid of what you’d be if you were more like me?
I promise you, this guy is afraid of being like her. Vulnerability is terrifying; it’s the opposite of having control. And this guy wants control. Most straight men do, because their egos are fragile and they need to delude themselves into believing they have some kind of power that might be attractive and intriguing. To be like Alanis, to be in touch with so much of yourself and to be unafraid of displaying it all — it requires a level of bravery a guy like this just doesn’t have. She knows he’ll never be happy living this way, and pities him for it.
August 30th, 2016 3:26am
I’m With Everyone And Yet Not
Bush “Swallowed”
Gavin Rossdale has had an extremely charmed life, but it’s still a bit unfortunate for him that his band arrived in the exact window of time when they would get the least respect. Worse still, that those biases have carried on long after people stopped caring about whether or not they were another corporate rock Nirvana rip-off fronted by a guy who looked like a male model, but more handsome. I am certain that if Razorblade Suitcase came out today, it would be warmly received, and the people most likely to have dismissed it back in the day would be the first to welcome a record so full of dynamics cribbed from Nirvana, Pixies, and PJ Harvey records that they just went ahead and had Steve Albini record it for them. In 1996, this type of music was in surplus and we could shrug off the uncool stuff. In 2016, there’s a lot more of it than there was for a long time, but it was a loooong draught.
Rossdale was great with dynamics and hooks, but pretty iffy when it came to lyrics. It’s hard to imagine that the bizarre syntax and mangled phrases of Sixteen Stone were written by someone for whom English is their first language, but it was the ‘90s and it didn’t take much for a hot dude to make a word salad like “Glycerine” seem deep to teenagers. With this in mind, “Swallowed” is notable for two reasons: 1) The lyrics are actually pretty good for the most part 2) they’re direct and vulnerable in a way that Rossdale habitually deflected up until that point. He’s singing about feeling alone in a crowd, and just wanting to be with the one person he can’t be with. When he sings “I’m with everyone and yet not,” he sounds a bit guilty for not appreciating the good times he’s supposed to be having. Ignore the biographical details about him feeling shitty on a tour for a massively successful album, and this is an incredibly easy song to relate to, especially if you’ve ever endured a long distance relationship. At the end of the song, he’s done being oblique and just says exactly what he means: “I miss the one that I love a lot.” It’s a very real moment from a guy everyone assumed was just a hunky poseur.
September 1st, 2016 10:49pm
So Help Me Jesus
Toadies “Possum Kingdom”
I’m with Arianna on this one. “Possum Kingdom” is also my favorite song from the perspective of a vampire, my favorite song that makes the phrase “do you wanna die?” sound like a flirt, and my favorite song about seducing someone with the promise of immortality. And look, “Possum Kingdom” doesn’t have much or any competition in any of those categories, but even if it did it would almost certainly still be the best.
On a surface level, “Possum Kingdom” is a generic alt-rock song, but as much as it is a very representative example of the form, it also feels like an outlier. Alt-rock rarely had this sort of seedy swagger, and generally stayed closer to vaguely morose grandiosity or a stoned, vaguely ironic or shrugged-off version of “rocking out.” The Toadies’ sound isn’t quite ~sexy~ but it’s definitely sexual, and the song is one of very few notable mid-‘90s alt-rock hits to be sung from the perspective of a person who believes they are sexy. (Low self-esteem was very big back then.) There’s a heavy touch of black comedy to the lyrics, but the music doesn’t totally undermine the character’s predatory horniness, and the result is a bit like a ‘90s version of Twilight with Trent from Daria cast as the hunky teen vampire.
September 4th, 2018 1:13am
Beauty Can Be Sad
Juliana Hatfield “Universal Heart-Beat”
“Universal Heart-Beat” has an extremely bright and perky sound, like if music could somehow be made out of Starbursts and Skittles. The overwhelming sweetness of the sound barely masks the bitterness of the lyrics, in which Juliana Hatfield argues that love is entirely inseparable from pain. “A heart that hurts is a heart that works!” she sings cheerfully in the chorus, which feels like early ’80s aerobics pop filtered through crunchy mid-’90s alt-rock chords. It all sounds very fun, and that’s half her point: The high highs and the low lows are an emotional rollercoaster ride, and if you get over your anxiety and just go along with it, it’s a total rush. The bad parts don’t even seem so bad in retrospect – she comes across as rather nostalgic when she recalls the more humbling and pathetic moments. Better than feeling numb, right? That’s just boring.
November 6th, 2019 3:41am
Like A Cheap Surprise
Stone Temple Pilots “Silvergun Superman” (Live at New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, New Haven, CT, 8/23/1994)
“Silvergun Superman” is a freaky hybrid juggernaut, like if mid-period epic Led Zeppelin merged with David Bowie in his glam-boogie phase but was recorded with the aesthetics of grunge. It’s the logical outcome of the Stone Temple Pilots collective rock obsessions, and made distinctive by the slightly odd angles and tangents of the DeLeo brothers’ guitar parts and the slippery charisma of Scott Weiland.
It’s still so difficult to get a handle on what made Weiland such a compelling presence – he had the look and the voice, sure, but also a peculiar balance of raw sincerity and eagerness to obscure himself in personas and poses. At the time this mercurial identity was considered crass and inauthentic and was subject to merciless ridicule, but now it’s clear that he was acting out genuine fandom and trying to protect himself. This is most obvious when he’s singing the more aggressive and macho STP songs – he’s play-acting masculinity, and in his own way critiquing what would later be commonly known as “toxic masculinity.”
The more glam and arch STP got, the more it seemed like we were getting the “real” Weiland, and that’s probably true to some extent. But it’s also pretty clear that the songs confronting his self-loathing and struggles with addiction were deeply felt. And so while a cheeky glam song like “Big Bang Baby” is still a very good time, a song like “Silvergun Superman,” which is sly and winking AND extremely bleak in its portrayal of life as a junkie seems like the greater triumph. Weiland’s lyrics are very vivid in this song as he sketches out scenes of pitiful lows with a touch of sentimentality and grapples with paranoia in a way that grounds terrible decisions in the context of loneliness and a deep need for connection.
This live recording of “Silvergun Superman,” included in a full 1994 concert included in the recent deluxe reissue of Purple, doesn’t change much about the song but presents it in a state that’s a bit more loose and raw than the album production by Brendan O’Brien. The DeLeo brothers really shine here, particularly in the final third when Robert’s bass part gets a bit more fluid after mostly thudding through the main riffs and Dean gets to emulate the graceful shredding of Jimmy Page on the outro.
March 2nd, 2016 7:36pm
Covered In Honey, Showered In Beer
Belly “Puberty”
I have long associated the sound of this sound with the beginning of spring, and the first warmish, sunny days after weeks of winter greyness. The days when you see a lot of people willing the day into actual summer, and running around dressed like it’s the middle of July. There’s a sunny sound to “Puberty,” particularly in the chords and wordless vocal melodies, but there’s a slight chill to it too, and the rhythm at the start sounds slightly tentative, like the song is peeking out and looking for permission to gallop and strut.
Tanya Donnelly’s voice is what really makes this song, though. I love the way she sounds hopeful and a little coy on the verses, like she’s heading into some unknown situation with cautious optimism. I suppose that’s why it’s called “Puberty” – it’s the cusp of adulthood, and that all seems great except for everything that’s awkward and weird, which is a majority of it. The lyrics on the chorus and bridge are cryptic but lovely, with Donnelly imagines having deliberate control over some magical light. The contrast is clever – the rest of the song is about feeling uncertain, and the part that’s most emphatic is about imagining agency, power, and meaning.
August 24th, 2010 10:19am
Minus Forever
This time last year I was visiting my father at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on the Upper East Side nearly every day of the week. He had been sick for years, but had generally been living life normally until his luck started to run out somewhere around June. He was hospitalized in late July, and except for a brief stint back at home, he was there through the end of September. After that, he returned back to the house he bought in his early 20s, the house where I grew up, and he died in mid-October. I’m glad it happened there, and not at the hospital. It’s how he wanted it to be. In my mind, though, my father died at Sloan-Kettering center, and I watched it happen slowly in small installments spread out over days. Every truly painful memory is tied to that place, when he finally passed away at home, it was mercy. It was relief.
I hadn’t been in that neighborhood since then. It’s on the far eastern edge of Manhattan in the north 60s and there isn’t much reason for me to ever be around there. I recently got it in my mind that I should go back up there, walk around. Not so much in this “I need to confront something” sort of way, but more like…on some level I missed the routine of taking long walks in that area every day. I put it off for a while, in part because I knew that, yes, I was going to have to confront something, but I finally went back there last Thursday. As it turns out, there really wasn’t much to face. It was mostly a matter of retracing lines. The incredible anger, depression, and hopelessness I felt at the time when I was in that area every day — most of it to do with my dad, but certainly not all of it — was long gone. All that was there for me was nostalgia, and passing through familiar places tied to bad memories.
I mostly thought of songs. Animal Collective was a revelation to me back then. They’re about my age, they’d been through some similar things, and expressed something about those experiences in ways that resonated with me in a comforting way. There’s this patch of 68th or 69th Street near 1st Avenue that’s tied in with Liz Phair’s “Explain It To Me.” I spent most of my time with music that echoed my anger and despair. The problem was, there really wasn’t very much of it, and none of what worked for me was at all recent. The records that really did the trick for me at this point in time were Hole’s Live Through This, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and Nirvana’s In Utero. I feel like at some point in the mid 90s, rage and anguish became very uncool in music, and was more or less ceded to metal, emo, post-grunge, etc, and in those genres, expressing these negative feelings was often just a hollow, and in many cases very petty and whiny, ritual. I have my theories as to why this happened, but as it stands, it’s rare to find clever, tuneful musicians expressing agony and fury these days.
Hole “Violet”
It’s not like just anyone can make music like this. The pain really has to be there, and I think most of us can tell the difference between a singer who is really putting it out there vs. someone who is servicing the conventions of their chosen genre. I hate to say this, but I don’t think an artist can go to this place without a complex of mental health issues. Depression, narcissism, exhibitionism, self-destructive impulses, the works. Craft is important too — you want something with hooks, something with thoughtful dynamics, not just a bunch of formless bile. It goes deeper when it’s actually musical, when the artist really knows how to make you feel how they feel. How many people really have the combination of problems and talents necessary to produce this stuff? And the support system too! Labels simply don’t have the funds to bankroll brilliant basket cases like they did back in the boom years.
So yes, an album like Live Through This is sort of a miracle. The two songs from that record that worked for me last summer were “Softer, Softest” and “Violet.” The former tapped into my feeling of impotence and hopelessness, and I still wince every time I hear Courtney Love sing “the abyss opens up, it steals everything from me.” That image was so vivid and real to me at the time. Everything was going wrong, and I could only be passive. “Violet” expresses a painful passivity too, but it doesn’t sound like it. The chorus is all desperate surrender — “GO ON, TAKE EVERYTHING!” — but even if Courtney didn’t follow that up with a bitter “I dare you to,” it would still sound entirely defiant. The song has the dynamics of a brutal storm. You hold tight in those lulls, the chorus blasts at you like a choir of hurricanes.
Hole “Softer, Softest”
The loudness and violent dynamics in this music is the key to what makes it so therapeutic. The cathartic peaks makes it feel as though you’re fighting back. “Softer, Softest” sounds fragile for the most part, and unusually pretty for a Hole song. It’s not a song that demands for a release, but when it comes, the shift in scale is jarring. Courtney sounds small in the first two minutes, she sings about feeling powerless. When the song builds up, it’s like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. The tiny, wounded woman is gone, replaced by this rampaging, avenging giant: “BRING ME BACK HER HEAD!” It’s empowering. It’s not real, but that’s part of what makes it so important: It’s a clear example of art giving you something that you need that you can’t often have in reality.
Keying in on seedy, predatory horniness as a defining feature of Toadies brings back an elementary school memory of getting Rubberneck for Christmas and then immediately riding in the car with my notably stricter and more religious aunt+uncle for a cousin sleepover. Lack of forethought had me blaring Rubberneck from discman headphones, which led to “why don’t we put that on the car speakers so everyone can listen to it?” and a very uncomfortable hour of listening to Toadies with them in speechless disapproval.
(Loved this whole list, btw!)
You're dead on about Everclear. How would you compare them to a band like Buffalo Tom, who also seem to be writing about the lower middle-class? I think we need more examination of these class prejudices in (North) American music.