Like punk never broke

NO.

(speaking of slagging off gina arnold, tom, where is my review of the azzzzzerad book?)

it didn't seem all that angsty to me at the time, i always thought that "hate myself & wanna die" bit was just schtick, just "teenage lament 74" writ large and in crayon up until kurt killed himself. when he died it was like "dude, you were serious? you dumb fuck". the thing people forget abut grunge was that - during it's actual heyday -the good stuff like nirvana, mudhoney, sonic youth etc. all seemed very silly & goofy. the stripes n strokes seem to take themselves much more seriously than the grunge bands ever did.

Reductive probably but when those bands got on major labels/radio/mtv/the big mags, people believed it was the start of something good rather than an ending* and it changed the 'indie stakes' a bit -- sort of created a new set of goals and that, at least temporarily, seemed to end or diminsh the effect of local 'scenes.'

* one of the things the p-fork list highlighted to me was that with rare exceptions (talk talk, this heat) what the indie watchdogs cherished was exactly what a group of the same would have pegged as being great in the 80s 10 years ago -- nothing new has happened w/in that world to shine a different light on the past and those same recordings are still the ones being aped today. Those musical roads laid in the 80s + slint/pavement template from a year or so after the end of the decade seem to be the ones that indie is travelling.

and we bitched and moaned about the masses encroaching on Our Thing at the time, while secretly loving the attention.

As far as lasting impact, I'm not sure. I mean things were pretty much back-to-square-one enough for the strokes/stripes/hives to seem fresh a year ago (which I don't think is necc. a bad thing at all. indie is better at sending in John Brown raiding parties that end up mostly slaughtered than actually fighting Civil Wars)

A big negative: The breakthrough of Nirvana on their first single from their first record for Geffen has created unrealistic expectations for major label acts since. While there were certainly problems with the majors in the early 90s (making records was established as a business, not an artform), the astronomical rise of Nirvana made A&R men and CEOs think that it was possible to manufacture a huge, popular, genre-crossing act. And it isn't. The factors in Nirvana's popularity are many, but it made the labels think that they could do what they wanted. Ever since, if you're a band on a major, you get one shot and then you're out. This sucks. It erases a band's confidence... It's not a healthy way to make music.

But it seemed fresh cuz the rest of mainstream rock was still angst-filled/post-grunge + I think that had as much or more to do w/hip-hop than rock.

I agree, but more people who got into Nirvana in their early 20s followed the 'alternative' rock path than went back to the roots.

re: business -- it also probably fostered indie PR.

(I want to know what Jess means too actually - I might well agree with him though)

right, indie still could identified itself in part as what it is not -- and maybe fueled more by 'underdog spirit' than delusions of grandeur, which in turn could make people focus on music not ethos. The Nirvana exceptionalism feeds that "if only the big corporations would let the masses enjoy the goodness of trail of dead or blackalicious we'd be from top 40 evil" attitude that makes me crumble up my face and clench my fists.

The problem with Nickelback, as has been mentioned many times in this thread, is that grunge's huge impact has convinced current bands and labels that it's a good idea to dip back into that sound again and again... I mean, we're past the bottom of the barrel by now!

one thing i would like to see return from the po'faced days of alt-rock: an (often implied) sentiment of anti-racism/anti-homophobia/anti-sexism. it may have been as overwrought as spring break cancun (boing), but kurts poo-pooing on such things in very public venues had a very strong impact on me as a wee one.

I think Linkin Park are fine too.

And the anti-racism thing... Agreed. But now we have Moby!!!

Dude, didn't you know that David Geffen held a gun to Kurdt's head to get him to sign?

And shit, like Epic held Eddie Vedder's family hostage for a week?

Ah-yup. Didn't realize what the fuss was about initially, I liked "Sliver" more because it was fun and sad.

I would hope for some it's not a reactionary, negative motivation, but rather a positive eagerness to work with smaller, independent entities.

Except a fair amount of them suck as well as 'stewards of the public interest,' on any level.

but with indie pr, those smaller entities are still strangling access and asking the same favors on behalf of their clents just on a small scale. It's still back-scratching and the same motivations are there, only instead of saturating mtv they're trying to saturate magnet and 'zines and web sites. Sadly, some of the "positive eagerness" is being ruined by the conduits and middle-men.

And I also hate hearing the myths that "Kurdt didn't want to be famous" or "Nirvana came out of nowhere." Gimme a break, y'all. For those of us who were pretty aware at the time (and granted I was only in high school, but I was as big a music nerd then as I am now, just with decidedly more narrow tastes [i.e. I liked underground rock and a few of the Seattle bands, esp. Mudhoney]), it was obv. that Geffen hyped Nirvana (as they should have), and this led to their massive sales. At the time, a band that didn't have any prior videos getting the lead slot on "120 Minutes" was a big deal, at least in my teenage world (not to mention all the cultural mentions of Nirvana before the release of Nevermind, from the video to "Dirty Boots" to seeing reviews of shows from the Bleach era, etc.).

Alterna/Grunge as years-too-late marketing scheme: I just saw an internet ad for something called HyattPalooza. Y'know, for those 20-something bidness travelers who like to stay all "grunge" (but with room service!).

what gets me about the autobacklash a lot of folks on the board seem to have about them is that it's taken for granted that Nirvana equaled some kind of closing-off point: they signify an attitude of "rock is back, rock is all, rock is the end point, all else is fake" or whatever. and I never felt like that with them; I felt exactly the opposite. to me Nirvana always had an expansiveness that had room in it for everything, musically, culturally, whatever. that's a really rare thing for a band playing such a circumscribed, formalist type of music. and the fact that they became a crutch for rockist crits and a dartboard by indier-than-thou types who'd "heard it already" or popists who can't or won't hear past that interpretation is as big a tragedy as Kurt shooting himself.

But seriously, I think yer dead on to a point. I do think it would have been nice is Cobain hadn't furthered the lie that indechiperable and/or nonsensical vocals change the world as much as coherency does. Same goes for Stipe and Malkmus.

(look, I love the first three Pavement albums and stray songs off later works, but the Best Band Of The '90s crap is disgusting. In high school, I figured he was wanna-be with great potential. Now I realize he's a coulda-been who didn't try).

NB I like In Utero far more than Badmotorfinger or Siamese Dream.

Pavement were a great rock band. Unlike a lot of fans, I like "Terror Twilight" and I love "Brighten the Corners". Don't you think you're being kinda hard on the boys? (especially Steve) Besides, any band that tries too hard will be incapable of making a record like "Slanted and Enchanted" - that's sorta what makes it cool.
(I think you're right on with the Pirate thing though)

What tracer said ("It was less Nirvana than the Temple of the Stone Dog Pilots, in my opinion") is what I meant to say and didn't quite, so I thank him as always. (Dude, lately you're functioning as whatever part of my subconscious that works properly--superego, maybe?) And I also agree with the Hives comparison, though I like them more than most of the Seattle sludge. And I'm with Sundar: my guess is that Pearl Jam et al would have gotten about as big as they did only more gradually. The fact that Nevermind was a skyrocket just sped the process up. (See Lollapalooza, which happened in July-August; Nevermind was out September and went number-one over Christmas.)

As for changing the industry, Nirvana's success got a lot of independent labels distribution deals they never would have picked up had something so big not happened.

The charge that labels now demand winner-takes-all type of sales out of the gate is a stretch because of Nirvana however. Two other key aspects of the record business changed in the 90s: the implementation of Soundscan and the enormous influence of shareholder pressure on the major record labels to increase value. Nevermind or no Nevermind, the industry was headed in the direction it's in today, and to a great extent it was already operating under that premise prior to the release of Nevermind.

Also, it's easily arguable that the grunge thing was building up prior to Nevermind. I am like others on this board who was listening to Soundgarden/Screaming Trees/Mudhoney circa 1989 and the impact of REM (and others) had already solidified a nationwide indie touring circuit developed by post punk in the early to mid 80s. The gears were primed, and Nirvana wasn't even entirely unknown around the nation when Nevermind blew up. That's why Geffen anticipated that Nevermind would sell 200K copies--a huge number for a band like that, even back then. It's the fact that NO ONE saw the hugeness of Neverminds's sales coming that is a testament to its cultural relevance today. There hasn't been an album with that kind of sales shock since.

And going platinum -- and at that time the Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, and Pearl Jam were touring on the same bill in clubs. I dunno, things may have changed gradually -- yes, they had been doing so, and indie became more nationalized over the previous three years. But because the change was so immediate -- it was triggered by a single song! -- it forced the labels and even radio formatters to scramble so quickly that instead of just being something that gradually happened that maybe the people here or those who had invested in indie rock prior to that noticed, it was something that could be painted as a "rock revolution" complete with Seattle as its "center" and media focus and, hell, my mother and every kid in my college knew that Nirvana was supposed to be leading us to this brave new world.

Also, because it happened so quickly and bands that pre-dated Nirvana such as Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets and so forth were caught up in it and selling records and getting on the radio, there was an air of legitimacy to the whole thing for indie kids that may not have been there if radio format changed a few years later and a band that wasn't respected, such as Pearl Jam, faciliated that change, or if vets such as the Meat Puppets weren't around to reap the benefits.

(Also, it seems strange, in a way, that "i heard of (x) before Nirvana" is proof that (x) would have made it big without "smells like teen spirit" making it fashionable. Soundgarden had two major-label records before Nevermind; Alice in Chains had one, so did Temple of the Dog. Ten came out before Nevermind, and so did Gish. And nationally none of them did shit prior to "SLTS.")

(Ultimately this is a "What if you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler?"-type question and is therefore fundamentally silly.)

Bah, essentially I agree w/all of Sundar’s post above –esp. the Hitler bit -- and am just being a little defensive because my point, that the immediacy of the change forced everyone to notice, was eclipsed by these guessing games.