The View From Hear - A Heavy Metal Family Values Column by Paul Hanson

"Prior to Nirvana, alternative music was consigned to specialty sections of record stores and major labels considered it to be, at the very most, a tax write-off. After the band's second album, 1991's Nevermind, nothing was ever quite the same, for better and for worse. Nirvana popularized punk, post-punk and indie-rock, unintentionally bringing it into the American mainstream like no other band before it."

--allmusic.com

Sure, it's easy to say that almost a decade later, but in 1991, there was something else going on. Hair metal bands like Kix, Poison, L.A. Guns, Warrant, Winger, Slaughter and as well as the 'wanna-be bandwagoners' like Tuff, Spread Eagle, and Bang Tango competed for time on MTV's Headbanger's Ball show on Saturday nights.

I think some claim they saw the entire grunge scene coming. They point to signs that the American culture was turning away from 'realism' and towards a fantasy world. The aforementioned hair bands were all about going overboard. Bands competed for the title of 'most lipstick on the face' fictional awards. The hair was teased high and the music was simple guitar rock. The popular late 80s anthem by Poison, "Talk Dirty to Me" summed up the era with its simplistic guitar riff and bombastic (read: simple) drumbeats. In retrospect, the world was looking for something that Poison couldn't provide.

Some disagree with my thesis, though. Sydney@netscape.net posted the following here:

[I attempted to clean up the spelling and grammar of the following quote, but stopped. The typos/ mistakes seem to be okay, for some strange reason.]

"ok grunge music is not that great I am only 13 and i really dont think that it is that speacail or even care for it. Grunge is dead, its has been dead for about 5 years know! Glam rock is pretty cool, alot of the boys in my school listan to bands like motley crue, gun and roses , warrant, ect. [emphasis mine] I really dont think that teen sprite killed Glaim rock. I think that Glam rock killed them selves. all the Glam rockers did alot of drugs and they had to stop sometime soon or they would of killed themselves by doing to much drugs! So you should be happy that glam rock died or you favorite bands like motley crue ,warrant,ect would have probabley died from to much duges like some grunge bands that i have herd about. motley crue kicks ass!!!!!!!!!!"

I still don't believe what it was looking for has even been identified. Our youth today are carrying guns to school as an equalizer against the people they dislike. A local high school teacher, only 31, was just convicted in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of having sex with a 14 year old and a 15 year old. The stories of their affair are shocking. The 14 year old would come to school early and they would have sex in his classroom before school. This man taught freshman level science and was a coach. We are supposed to trust our teachers.

That sort of expectation is being thrown out the window in dismay. All the rules are changing. I don't apologize for this, but Microsoft should NOT be split into three companies. I watched the TNT movie about Bill Gates' rise and my conclusion is simple. The man started with nothing and has achieved riches beyond his wildest dreams. He is the American hero. He took his dream and has reached further than I will ever reach. Did he do something illegal?

If he did, why didn't these charges against him come up years ago? I personally see Netscape and the others that testified against Microsoft in Washington D.C. as nothing more than bursting with sour grapes. You can't tell me that Netscape's CEO wishes he had designed an operating system that would be on practically every business PC in the USA and around the world. He wishes that he had Bill Gates' vision.

Instead, Gates owns more than the Netscape CEO. It's not about the better product; it's never been about that. It's about who has taken the rules and broken them to get what they want.

Which leads me back to exactly what Kurt Cobain and the other two members of Nirvana were confronting at the time. They attacked the music scene by storm not because they were accomplished musicians. They were different. On the same CD that rocked with "Smells Like Teen Spirit," they confronted rape in "Polly."

I remember vividly when this CD came out. My band, Old Stew, was playing its steady Sunday night gig at a bar in Cedar Rapids. Our guitarist started playing the familiar riff that starts "Teen" and after I came in with my best Dave Grohl imitation, our lead singer stopped us and said, "No one can understand the words of that song anyway so why play it?"

Indeed, why play it? And re-play it. And light up MTV request lines. And light up local rock stations that suddenly went from playing Winger's "Seventeen," Slaughter's "Fly to the Angels," and Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me" to lyrics like, "I'm so stupid, it's contagious. Here we are now, entertain us..." After watching the infamous video for "Teen Spirit" for the first time, my friends and I asked each other, "What the hell was that and what happened to my metal?"

Some picked up on Nirvana's importance right away. Those who were often in "the specialty sections of record stores," like one of the guitarists in Old Stew, knew before I did what was happening. At rehearsal one day, he sat me down and said, "Why are you wasting your time on Nevermind? Listen to Bleach." And I did. And again, I listened, intently trying to grasp what it was about these three musicians.

And I also remember mentioning that word, "musician," in the same breath as Nirvana was cause for an immediate dissertation on how easy Teen Spirit was to play, how stupid it was to sing songs with mumbling lyrics and how idiotic Kurt Cobain must be to release Nevermind, to create this masterpiece CD and then claim that they didn't want to be rock stars. Cobain, in interviews I read with him, claimed that he never wanted to be a rock star, never wanted success. He just wanted to write music and play it.

Simple, right? Is it that simple for bands to write music and play it. With the Internet, you'd think so. I was watching "Farm Club Dot Com" (or however you'd write the title of that show) after my weekly dose of WWF Raw tonight, 4/24/2000. A rap/metal band was playing with two rapping vocalists and a bassist that was staring down the shirt of a female fan. One of the vocalists seemed to make a decision mid-song and went around to everybody and whispered something. Not more than 30 seconds later, the guitarist lit a torch at the end of his guitar and began blowing liquid out of his mouth that caused his flame to shoot out. The band collapsed into a cheap imitation of the popular Rammstein song that was on everybody's rock radio station (outside of eastern Iowa, that is which is why I don't know the name) and the vocalist began screaming, "Rammstein! You suck!"

That is what "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is about. It is about taking the courage from within to voice an opinion about what they think the world is turning into. Cobain said it himself with these lyrics: "I'm worse at what I do best/ And for this gift I feel blessed."

Ironically, soon after Nirvana became a household word, record companies began mining the Pacific Northwest for contemporary bands. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam and supergroup, Temple of the Dog, all got record deals. Ten years later, Alice in Chains is broken up (well, I guess that depends on who you ask), Soundgarden have broken up, Mudhoney is back into its reclusive state and Pearl Jam is set to release a new record in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, Poison gears itself up for a major summer tour with Slaughter, Dokken, and other 80s hair bands.

A new cycle begins . . .

The View From Hear #24 - What "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Did to Our Culture

The View From Hear #23 - Life Ain't Fair

The View From Hear #22 - Pando 22

The View From Hear #21 - Metallica's S&M

The View From Hear #20 - Dokken, Def Leppard Live, Jeff Pilson Interview

The View From Hear #19 - All Hail the Mighty Zeppelin

The View From Hear #18 - Dokken, Slaughter, Metal Church

The View From Hear #17 - Guy's Night In

The View From Hear #16 - Christian Punks

The View From Hear #15 - Iowa Labels