Smells Like Stagnation

The other day, my sister got home from school (as she tends to do once school is done), and she put on some post-punk pop album. I'm not a big fan of the genre, though some of it is alright. There was a part where the vocals dropped out and the guitar and drums were vamping, just tossing a rhythm around. Then, out of this stupid song most likely about a girl (I ignored the words) came the familiar riff that begins Smells Like Teen Spirit. What? Grunge, in my pop? It's more likely than you think.

I wondered at that for a while. The riff is reasonable, considering that Green Day wrote a song to the tune of Downtown and Catch 22 recorded their own take on Sloop John B, but this band didn't seem to be doing it for nostalgia's sake (Green Day's Waiting), nor because they thought it was hilarious (Catch's Sloop John B). They were taking themselves seriously, ripping out something that had blown people away when it started. If these kids (I use the term loosely, as they are likely at least as old as I) had been playing pop when Kurt Cobain had unleashed his madness on the world, they would have been at least a little terrified by Heart Shaped Box and other songs, where the words' sound was often more important than their meanings. How did the extreme of less than twenty years ago become the mainstream of today?

Nirvana released Nevermind in 1991, and Cobain started ripping us to pieces. From his youth of vandalism to piss off intolerant ignoramuses until his death (suicide or murder, it's certainly not something I know enough about to take a stand), he did things that made everyone uncomfortable. The genre title of "grunge" implies filth and things of a vile nature, and it became a movement as much as a style. Garage bands had something new to imitate; with Nirvana's sound being what it was, clean guitar riffs and smooth transitions weren't the order of the day. With Cobain's death, anyone who didn't know his music at least heard something about his life. Whether that was Love's side that he was suicidal or most everyone else's that she was kinda nutty and he wasn't the type to blow himself away, that depended on who you heard and who you believed. Beyond Nevermind's success and the acclaim gained by subsequent live and studio albums, Cobain dying gave one more push to Nirvana's fame.

Now, everyone's looking for a new sound. Some bands give us brand new ideas (Gogol Bordello, Streetlight Manifesto) and are promptly ignored, while others give us repetitive boring drivel (All American Rejects, Maroon 5) and are pushed by labels to the point where not owning the albums is seen as unusual. Every single band, though, is trying to be Nirvana, every singer is trying to be Kurt Cobain. Not that they want to sound at all like Nirvana or Cobain, not in the least. Most bands are convinced that they're avoiding sounding like anybody else or even that they're succeeding. Forgive me if I don't consider My Chemical Romance to be anything innovative and pass over a Bullet for my Valentine album in favor of one of Electric Six's. Newness is what everyone strives for, but those who succeed don't get any measure of success. It's the conformity vs. individualism argument in another form. If you go outside the box, the music industry is set up to let you fail unless you get a fan base without them.

Some bands are tiring of this system. Independent music is coming into vogue, but does that invite creativity? I don't think so, with a genre appearing for acoustic guitars and weak poetry called "indie rock." That's what people want from independent bands. That's the style of today. Where's the band that started it out? Where is indie rock's Nirvana? Who do they have to represent them as Cobain does grunge? Certainly there are figureheads, but there is nothing that inspires imitators or gives conservative figures a chill like like Heart Shaped Box. Nothing shocks and appalls now, because we want to look cool. If we're terrified of our music and relish that fear, that's not right. We need to be the crowd that sees Scream and gets bored, the people who read Stephen King and fall asleep midsentence. Fear is out, half lidded eyes are in. Gone is the desire to scream incoherently into a microphone, to pound out angry minor chords on a fuzzed guitar and cry onstage while your fans wish they could do the same. Now screaming incoherently is organized into metal and screamo, fuzzy guitars are classic rock wannabes, crying is for emo bands. We, as a society, just don't know what to do with our emotions, so we categorize them.

If everyone would get angry for an hour, all together, we'd all close ourselves in our rooms and avoid other people, because that's how we are. The world would be silent for that hour. Wait, what's that? Oh, the Nirvana derivative modern singers would be yelling into a mic hooked into their iBook, hoping this song would be the one that people would love. These singers fall into every genre. Singers in bands have retained that love for loud, angry noise. It's what makes us animals, and it's what terrifies us about ourselves. On iTunes you can rate Nevermind and other groundbreaking works in a scale of 1-5. People say things like "the 2nd Greatest Alternative Rock Album EVER!" and "I recommend Breed, Lounge Act, and the 90's anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit." What happened? This music was terrifying to everyone, and that's why it was devoured by its fans. What would Kurt Cobain think if, when writing these songs, he knew that Nevermind would be declared to be "The album that started grundge [sic]"? Now people listen to it with blank minds and faces; it's just something else that was good in the past. Popularity defines quality to most of those in my generation. Sure, it's amazing work. Cobain was a creative master. Why can't people understand that and accept it, and then move on?

Since then, numerous genres have risen and fallen. There have been other innovations in music. These have been largely ignored by the youth. Nirvana marks the end of creative music that gained much popularity. Most everything since then has been drivel. And now we can't even get something extreme and painful, because that's already been done, we're bored with it, pass the Death Cab for Cutie. The worst part is that there's no real cure. Creativity in music as we know it can't go any further.