A Bowl of Stupid

“These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars, and they will ruin rock ‘n’ roll and strangle everything we love about it. And then it just becomes an industry of cool.”
– Almost Famous (2000)

I happened to stumble into the gym this evening just as HBO Asia had started Singles, the 1992 film written and directed by Cameron Crowe that’s come to epitomize the entire Seattle grunge movement.

After watching it, I thought back to my own experience during that heady time in the early 1990′s, which itself could have been a blueprint for another tangent of that whole scene — how I left Arizona to work out of Seattle on the fishing and crabbing boats in Alaska for a couple years between college and law school.

At the time, however, nobody really understood just how radical the movement would be, it was just an alternative to the bullshit that Vanilla Ice and Metallica were churning out. There wasn’t yet the inkling of how it would eventually gain a life and momentum and foothold in the mainstream population that would ultimately claim the sanity (and lives) of several of what the music industry would call the movements “founders.”

At first, it was just music — arguably even when Singles was released in ’92. And this, given Crowe’s repeatedly voiced disdain for the music industry, could be the ultimate irony in that his film itself contributed to the ultimate despoliation of the source (In his semi-autobiographical film, Almost Famous, Crowe describes how corporate interests ‘killed’ Rock & Roll in the early 1970′s, turning it into an “industry of cool” for most of the following two decades).

Indeed, only a couple years later, the whole grunge movement imploded under the extreme pressures of the recording industry, leaving us with the Goo-Goo Dolls, The Verve, Matchbox 20, and the other bullshit “Made For MTV” “grungy-like” musical composites that were far more palatable (and profitable) to mainstream consumption.

Perhaps this is why I take so much pride in being around, and being a direct part of that ‘pre-grunge’ scene at its outset. It was, most likely, the last pure musical renaissance in modern music.

Shit, even when the corporate MTV shills got their grubby claws on the “grunge scene”, at least they and the artists respected (or at least saw how they could capitalize on) the purity of the music itself — which led to the whole ‘acoustic-grunge’ period, itself a musical triumph (just listen to ANY of the tracks from Unplugged In New York if you doubt me).

Hopefully, the music scene is cyclical, and a new pure musical revolution will spring up again some time soon to wipe away the disgrace of the Britney Spears’, and the Adam Lambert’s, and Justin Bieber’s, and all the other beautiful, synthesized, auto-tuned pseudo-rock stars. Given how much money is at stake, however … I doubt it (while there is something to be said for the indie-rock scene of the past several years, it hasn’t produced ANYTHING even remotely matching what was produced in the early 90′s).

So, with all that whinging about the current state of music out of the way, I’m posting one of my favorite songs, from one of my favorite bands, from one of the purest eras of modern rock, performing in quite possibly the purist way possible — acoustically, on the street, in front of a group of fans.

Smashing Pumpkins — Mayonnaise (acoustic version)

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