Revolutions devour their own children

Glen Boyd, in what’s supposed to be a review of a Nirvana DVD, considers the longer term cultural impact of the Seattle grunge scene.

Still, as a rock and roll fan, and with the added benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure I really like what rock became after Nirvana. For awhile there, you simply could not turn on a radio without hearing the numerous knock-off bands that came in Nirvana’s wake. From Bush to Silverchair, these bands were in many ways every bit as faceless as the REO Speedwagon sort of corporate rock that Nirvana sought to destroy.

Kill Rock Stars indeed.

While guys like U2 and Springsteen tarry on and continue to wave the banner of a bygone era, your choices in music these days basically boil down to flavor-of-the-minute rappers and popsters played through the delivery systems of choice you hear on your tiny MP3 and cell phone speakers. The music business itself is run by and large from the corporate cubicles of software companies.

I’m not even sure that marvels of studio craft like Dark Side Of The Moon, Pet Sounds or Born To Run are even possible anymore.

Nirvana may well be the last of the great rock and roll bands. When Nevermind shocked the world by knocking Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the pops, I cheered just as loud as anybody.

But looking at things as they stand today, you’ve simply gotta ask yourself. Was this the revolution? There is no doubt that Nirvana succeeded in stripping a bloated rock monster back to it’s core essentials at a time when this was sorely necessary. But in doing so, was rock ultimately stripped out altogether?

Revolutions always eat their own children.

What was true of Grunge in the US was just as true of Punk in Britain two decades earlier. The standard mythology that’s repeated ad nauseam from the likes of Tony Parsons or Paul Morley is that punk destroyed bloated corporate rock and ushered in an era of unparalleled DIY creativity.

But anyone who bothers to look beyond that blatantly revisionist narrative and examines what really happened in the late 70s and early 80s will discover that most of the bloated corporate dinosaurs survived unscathed. All punk really achieved was to make musical ability and craftsmanship unfashionable, and killed off a whole generation of hard-working non-superstar artists. In just a few years the rise of the expensively-produced music video allowed the big media conglomerates to snuff out most of that DIY creativity. By the mid 80s mainstream Britain was a musical wasteland with vacuous manufactured pop and bland demographic-driven corporate rock dominating the airwaves as if punk had never happened. Sure, there was plenty of good stuff around if you took the effort to look for it, but it was all driven underground.

Punk and grunge produced both left us with some classic rock’n'roll records. But their long term legacy has at least as many negatives as positives.