[kj] OT: Bill Hicks

[Brendan Quinn]

Greg - we're all aware of any amount of John Lydon interviews talking about
the demise of music and basically how his band was the be all and end all,
everything that had gone before sucked, music as an art form was dead etc
etc, but I personally can't remember grunge a) existing as a coherent
movement other than in the eyes of the press / record companies marketing
depts., and b) having a figurehead - other than Kurt Cobain, who was
perplexed about the whole thing and unfit to represent his peers anyway. He
never spouted off like Lydon in interviews, he did the usual rock-star
sabotage the seriousness of the interview, crack jokes and get through the
whole thing while being off your tits schtick, but that was about it. He
didn't have a manifesto - he liked what he liked (Queen, Killing Joke
amongst others).? I think you're confusing what the lesser music journos and
marketers said vs what the reality was. If you're interested, there's a
couple of docos on the whole movement, lots of pretty honest interviews with
musicians who lived through it all, most of whom didn't touch that success,
and they sum it up pretty realistically. There was little else going on
musically (in the public eye) other than what'd been done before, people got
interested in the Seattle thing cos the musicians up there were pretty
creative because they had fuck all else to do and little contact with other
bands, so they did their own thing, and a lot of it was pretty cool, but it
got out of hand and made into something it wasn't. 

 

To me Punk came along, and yeah, had big enough balls to challenge the
status quo and rip it up, but to make out like the grunge movement, which
didn't really even exist, had the same aspirations or wanted to emulate
punk.I can't see it.

 

To me, there were a handful of brilliant Seattle bands that put out a more
realistic rock / metal sound that owed more to classic / stadium / 70s rock
(Big Rock was another tentative term before they settled on 'Grunge'), metal
and punk, and were a welcome move away from Warrant and Whitesnake and the
like. And bands like Alice in Chains owed more to metal than 'grunge.'
(Despite being a glam rock band until Kim Thayil showed Jerry Cantrell how
to play in drop D and they then changed their image and used drop D
exclusively, but we won't go there..)

 

Soundgarden were a bit different because they did a lot of experimentation
all over the show in the early days, but they covered rock classics like
Smokestack Lightning, Big Bottom by Spinal Tap, Earache My Eye by Cheech n
Chong.One Minute of Silence (the metal version) by John Lennon.they were
more about metal than punk, and were quite tongue in cheek. Big Dumb Sex
being a case in point.

 

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From: gathering-bounces at misera.net [mailto:gathering-bounces at misera.net] On
Behalf Of GREG SLAWSON
Sent: Sunday, 1 February 2009 05:23
To: gathering
Subject: Re: [kj] OT: Bill Hicks

 

Finally a true brother, b! I've always hated grunge too, from the start--it
paraded itself as the new "punk" but to me, it always sounded like Led
Zep/Aerosmith/Iron Maiden, etc. --all the music punk was against! I'll take
Blag Flag any day over that crap!


> Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:01:54 +0100

> From: bo.krogsgaard at gmail.com

> To: gathering at misera.net

> Subject: Re: [kj] OT: Bill Hicks

> 

> On 1/31/09, ade <ade at the-lab.zetnet.co.uk> wrote:

> 

> > I think we got there due to me being sick of Alex trashing almost

everyhing

> > I fucking post on this list, frankly. If he chips in, it's likely he's

> > telling me I'm WRONG. It's a good job he's a journalist - he's always

> > right...

> 

> You know, i have to agree with his viewpoint on Denis Leary. No Cure

> For Cancer was good, his performance on MTV Live was ace, but

> everything after that was boring crap, including his half arsed movie

> career.

> 

> As for Soundgarden vs Stone Temple Pilots, you can take them both and

> flush tem out the toilet, along with every fucking band that sounds

> even REMOTELY like any of them. The ONLY band EVER out of the whole

> "grunge" wave EVER worth more than two shits is Tribe After Tribe from

> South Africa, the rest can go autocopulate, devour feces and perish!

> 

> 

> b

> Grunge hater since day one

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