I was a teenager in the early '90s when a single song from a little punk trio out of the Pacific Northwest single-handedly destroyed a whole genre of music on the radio with one song.
As a pre-teen in the 1980s, my music taste was 100% based on whatever I heard on the radio. I didn't have an older sibling to pass good music to me. My parents were cool enough to always have the radio on, so I was exposed to a pretty wide variety of music. I got super into hair metal: Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Poison, Ratt, and anything adjacent. (I'm supposed to make all band names in bold as per the SPB guidelines dictate, but I just can't. I don't hate those bands, I just don't think most of them deserve any more attention. Seriously, most of those guys in those bands were just terrible human beings.)
At 16 years old, I got into a band with a classmate from our local trades school. We met in the graphic design program. This guy showed me The Misfits. The first song he played was "Where Eagles Dare". As soon as I heard the hook, I was shook. The whole chorus is "I ain't no goddamn sunofabitch". How freaking epic! How freaking RAW! You can't just put a swear in a chorus! And the production on it was terrible to a kid that was brought up on Top 40 radio! These were my kind of people! They were just doing it! That one song seriously turned my whole world upside down.
Taking music out of the hands of greedy music executives and letting the people dictate what was popular was a very big deal. That's the only way to explain why mumble rap got as big as it did.
One epic night after band practice, we jumped in a car and started driving these snow covered back roads in the middle of nowhere. We had a rope and a snurfer. We'd take turns surfing behind the car. A snurfer was the first snowboard. I'm not fucking with you. Google it. It was invented in Michigan, but it was for sand dunes, not snow.
Damn I get sidetracked easily! OK, where were we? Oh yeah, we're being little degenerates and my drummer, Roach, puts a cassette in the tape deck. These were the guys that showed me Black Flag, Misfits, and The Dead Kennedys, so obviously I trusted whatever they were showing me. This dirty, quirky guitar riff came in. Like, it was DIRTY. And then the vocals came in and this guy sounded like he was blowing out his vocal cords. I asked who it was. He replied: it was a band called Nirvana. The song he played me was "Negative Creep."
I listened to that tape a few times and then kinda forgot about it. Later that year, I was driving home from that technical school listening to whatever garbage radio station I was listening to. Whatever terrible song was on ended, and the DJ came on and gave an intro to a new song from a new band out of Seattle, WA. I fully expected some kind of new Top 40 cock rock band. What I heard was the opening salvo of the end of rock radio as I knew it. It was that band Nirvana and the song was "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It hit me so hard that I had to pull my parents' baby blue 1981 Ford station wagon off to the side of the road and soak it all in.
It was 1991, and the grunge sound exploded. The best part was that these glam metal bands that previously filled arenas were now dying out and playing shitty small clubs to just a few hundred people at best. Grunge was directly adjacent to punk, and that fit into my headspace perfectly. My immediate friend circle would speculate for many years about that moment and when the next uprising in music would be. Personally, I think the way technology started allowing anyone to record a song in their basement and get it out into the world via social media was truly it. Taking music out of the hands of greedy music executives and letting the people dictate what was popular was a very big deal. That's the only way to explain why mumble rap got as big as it did.
I'm forever grateful that I was there as a teenager to see the rise and fall of Nirvana. They had the perfect discography. Bleach was a punk record. Nevermind was their most polished record, almost in a pop way. In Utero was the perfect blend of catchy hooks, quirky riffs, and harmonies while backed with sonic dissonance and sludge: the record they always wanted to make. Then to strip all of that down to its barest form, the Unplugged record.
I have since gone back and listened to a lot of that old cock-rock BS I was into as a kid, and I still do actually love it. I think there is room in this world for all kinds of music, even if it is morally terrible. A good tune is a good tune. No judgements.
