Music and Culture

I hate rock reviewers. I hate them for their little power trips, where they decide that "that kid tries too hard" and belittles a great band like Rush into a sideline 'cult'-status group. They even invented the term 'cult following' to belittle the poor fools who didn't listen to them and drop a group once they were declared uncool.

Now, the culture of music would still exist without rock reviewers, people would probably still listen to similar kinds of music to suit their tastes.

Of course, most well-known rock critics have a keen sense of culture, and that's really what they are, culture critics. They jump up and down and uncork bottles of champagne whenever one of them discovers a new movement or a band they think will 'change everything'.

Grunge is the best example of people confusing a cultural movement for a musical one. There's really no good description of grunge music. The messiness and griminess of the sound is a product of first the production that was available, and later on Steve Albini would seek out and exploit this aesthetic to its logical extreme. But beyond that, Soundgarden was a metal band, Nirvana was a punk band who hadn't properly done a good enough job of hiding their Beatles records, and Pearl Jam was not musically much different from what you could describe as a traditional straight-ahead rock group.

But those groups, and the lesser-known ones who laid the foundation in Seattle in the 80s when no one was paying attention, like the Melvins (stompy Sabbath-style metal that got ever more experimental) were in communication with each other, and they passed ideas around and played for each other and supported one another. It was a real culture, in the sense that bacteria left in a Petri dish forms a culture, growing in its own pattern around itself and creating perhaps something completely new in the process. But it was a heterogeneous culture that didn't require much musically except a rejection of flashiness.

But all through the early nineties all we heard about was how grunge music was the great new thing that would take over the world.

Kurt Cobain, bless him, bought into this idea as much as anyone, even once saying to Axl Rose "We exist to destroy bands like you." (David Geffen couldn't have asked for a better rivalry to fill his bank accounts as the grunge kids staked out their territory against the jocks. Vince MacMahon wouldn't have been able to write it better.) Kurt liked to call his music 'punk' without acknowledging the pop influences he may or may not have been conscious of at first but which he ran away from, self-defeatingly, in his later work, seeking authenticity, mistaking popularity for artistic uncleanness.

Now, the lesser grunge band, Stone Temple Pilots, was happy to glom onto the success of the grunge image, but if you actually listen to their music, if you gave it to a Martian musicologist along with all the other major albums released in that 5 year period, and asked him to arrange the music in piles according to which ones sounded like they belonged together, STP would be thrown directly on top of the Guns'n'Roses in the arena rock category. And Smashing Pumpkins would be tossed somewhere closer to Pink Floyd than to Pearl Jam.

Cultural lines are drawn with often little regard to musical lines, and the people who confuse the two are called rock critics.
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