#13: Alternative Nation
If you're like me, you know (tell yourself) that going out on Friday nights is for amateurs. I'd much rather wind down with a glass (or three) of wine and a nice takeaway (a bag of potato chips) in the comfort of my home. Boring? Maybe. Restorative? Very. What I look forward to the most is tuning into the hours of music programs that kick off around 8 every Friday night on BBC4. After warming up with an episode or two of vintage Top of the Pops (Wham! Culture Club! Bananarama! Madness!), the programming moves on to music documentaries–and the BBC has a pretty extraordinary vault of footage.
I've watched baby-faced Dave Gahan and Martin Gore span a breathtaking nearly forty-year career with Depeche Mode. The rock and roll genius of Buddy Holly cut all too short. A great night was spent with back to back stories of the making of Carly Simon's 'No Secrets' followed by the journey of Carole King from Brill Building hitmaker to formidable piano-pounder who could make the earth move under your feet. I stayed up til 2am, rapt listening to the ever-humble Loretta Lynn weave yarns about life in Butcher's Holler. I'm an eager listener of these history lessons told through pop music, from Leadbelly to Led Zeppelin, I want to hear it all.
I've more or less tended to regard Hole with some of the typical disdain of a Nirvana obsessive, but over the years I've started to come around. Courtney Love turned 53 on July 9th, and this great take from Vice shines a new light on her expansive career:
"She's done everything that male musicians are often romanticized and celebrated for, but instead she's been painted by the media as a kind of one-dimensional, psychopathic caricature."
Similarly, I never could come around to Shirley Manson and Garbage–I still bristle whenever I hear "Stupid Girl," but I absolutely respect her role as a pretty badass frontwoman emerging from the decidedly male-dominated grunge days. As the industry chews up pop princesses just in time for them to spin out in a quarter-life crisis, I'm heartened to see Manson at 50, aging gracefully but not quietly.
The 90's were an exceptional moment for female rockers coming out of Boston. Tanya Donnelly, Kay Hanley, Juliana Hatfield, Mary Lou Lord, just for starters. Kim Deal may have hailed from the homely Midwest, but the Pixies were straight outta UMass. Here's a great retrospective of my hometown alt-scene. All hail WERS!
Up for another trip down memory lane? Here's an incredibly useful breakdown of 90's music, every year of the decade ranked. In short, 1995 really let us down by unleashing both Hootie and the Blowfish and No Doubt. Ugh.
1997, on the other hand, was pretty solid, delivering Radiohead's OK Computer unto a world that hasn't been the same since. Their sweeping two and a half hour set at Glastonbury a few weeks back was something that could legitimately be described as epic. Rolling Stone's 20th anniversary interview with the band is uncharacteristically candid, but The New Yorker's piece by Amanda Petrusich stopped me in my tracks:
"I recall watching the video for Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” late one night on MTV’s “120 Minutes,” and whispering whatever the thirteen-year-old equivalent of “What in tarnation!” is. The video begins benignly enough—a cluster of lanky, sunken young men, a mopey progression. Then the guitarist Jonny Greenwood raises a bony arm, slams out two scabrous chords, and a maniacal-looking Yorke begins wailing like a person who decided to jog down a hill, only to suddenly discover he couldn’t control how fast his legs were going."
Poking around the internet doing some high-quality research for this week's newsletter, I discovered that my favorite alterna-heartthrob MTV veejay Steve Isaacs has gone on to become a digital creative director. Which makes me feel like I also could have viably started my career as a veejay, as per my tweenage fantasies.