Post a controversial music opinion

i actually can't stand smooth jazz ... now there's a genre that's probably more popular among megalomaniacs and narcissists than grunge ... though maybe it's a generational thing?

― sarahell, Sunday, May 7, 2023 10:59 AM

the real culture war!

(but honestly, good point! this is the sort of stuff that needs anthropological studies imo)

probably related to this:

yeah i hate all that bullshit, table. it's all very trash. sorry?

why? idk, lack of dynamics, tunnel vision syndrome, distaste for diversity. it all seems like easy listening for meglomaniacs and narcissists. i understand not everything needs to be a melting pot, but enough is enough with dudes chugging shittily away at guitars and talking about pseudo philosophy.

disliking a popular genre is having a controversial opinion, implying that anyone who does like that music has some sort of pathology crosses the line to dickhead behavior

xp- though in reality, people could probably come up with examples of music that they would categorize as "smooth jazz" (e.g. Sade) that I like, and then we'd have the moving goalposts discussion of "well, that's not actually the genre I hate" ... but in general, I find it painful to listen to

but that's always how i've felt about it?

(to quote a smarter person than myself, "i stay woke." apparently?)

Sade is… not… jazz? Though?

I like grunge.

I like rap

I like you all

don't think austin was using "diversity" in idpol terms but it's difficult to read the word in any other way now. lolef when I heard an old Cary Grant quote about doing "Gunga Din" because he wanted more diversity.

8 Way Santa behbeh

I feel like this is all just bullshit and that every genre of music attracts good people and horrible people and in-between people and everyone just makes stuff like that up because it's a convenient cudgel to beat on something they just don't like on a gut level.

Sade is… not… jazz? Though?

― ian, Sunday, May 7, 2023 11:09 AM (twenty-four seconds ago)

idk ... maybe i really just loathe all smooth jazz and i'm trying to be nice and saying, "hey, I'm not a monster, I like Sade?"

Austin, I like you (believe it or not) and don’t want to argue with you anymore.

I simply don’t think that music should be discarded or ignored because of who makes it, unless they’re yknow actual fascists. “Dudes playing guitars” aren’t automatically good or given a pass, obv, but to be like “fuck them and their music” seems like lazy and without much nuance, assigning moral wrong in a way that is nonsensical

everyone just makes stuff like that up because it's a convenient cudgel to beat on something they just don't like on a gut level.

isn't that one of the primary uses of this thread?

true enough

Hoping smooth grunge was a thing tbh.

Nirvana unplugged tbh

their cover of "In the Pines" wasn't very smooth tbh ... i loved it fwiw

Hoping smooth grunge was a thing tbh.

thank you. i'm not arguing, btw. i certainly didn't mean to assign moral wrong to anyone/anything. it would just as appropriate for me to say that it's one dimensional music and leave it at that. that's my one big criticism and the "WHY."

(and again, i bring up that i like repetitive-ass smooth jazz because i know for damn sure that there's plenty of folks out there who would be fine with memory hole'ing all of it. so this is a two way street.)

finally, neanderthal otm ('cept for liking grunge of course. but that's okay because we can all agree that sade is rad.)

Mother Love Boney James

I mean there is a ton of pop music I would rather never hear again, so I get it. I like most “Quiet Storm” music and a lot of AOR stuff so no memory-holing for me.

Mother Love Boney M would be fucking hilarious

it would not have been beneath Boney M to remix Mudhoney

okay, "smells like teen spirit"/"nautilus" mashup needs to happen.

i rescind my "ERASE ALL GRUNGE" controp

maybe we can just all agree that music as a whole is only for megalomaniacs and narcissists, no need to single out any particular genres

Austin, you were certainly working in the spirit of the thread, so kudos.

In the year of our lord 1993 I was working for a college newspaper that was next door to a college radio station; we shared a break room. At one point someone tacked up a cartoon spread detailing the ways in which a "real" grunge fan differed from a latecoming poseur. Like, if yr flannel was a hand-me-down from yr cool older brother you were real; if it was from the mall you were a poseur. If you first heard Nirvana at your cousins' house party you were real; if you first saw them on MTV you were a poseur.

I thought this cartoon puzzling, because grunge had barely registered with me and my friends. Most of my friends were into jazz, classical, Zeppelin, and weird shit like Zappa and Residents. I played drums in an experimental band that was mostly honky horns and incoherent screeching. However I can't claim any avant-garde cred myself. (I like New Wave and folk music and that's about it.) I was just along for the ride because it was what my roommates were doing. I would play a show where we sounded like a mad love child of Foetus, the Velvets, and the Pixies. Then I'd go home and listen to Suzanne Vega or something. It was a strange time.

ANYWAY, none of us listened to the radio or had MTV or had any clue what the charts were doing. I had no feelings whatsoever about any new music (fun fact: still don't!). I kinda thought grunge was meant for people younger than me. Mind you, I was 22.

Okay.

Fast forward 5 or 10 years, I mustered respect for some of that material. But lots of it just isn't that interesting to me. The Stone Mud Sound Jam Chains etc. does tend to blend together a little in my ears, but I have no grunge grudge against those to whom it is meaningful.

Fast forward again to now. Almost every time I find myself on a stage in a bar on a Wednesday night, there's someone who wants me to back them up on "Plush" or "Interstate Love Song" or "Cumbersome" or "The Rooster" or whatever. Even though this music doesn't have my heart, I acknowledge that some people like it so I oblige. What's weird is that the singers and guitar players are like 30 years old. They LOVE this stuff, plus jam-band stuff, plus fratboy funk like the Chili Peppers or whatev.

No one ever asks for "Here Comes Your Man" or "Borderline" or "Hungry Like the Wolf." They ask for Incubus. I don't get it, but I also don't really care.

I do think that some people on here are underestimating just how popular and ubiquitous grunge and alt rock were in the 90s and how much people still cling to that music as the glory days of rock or whatever, it can be a little bit annoying since it seems a particularly strong genre for people who refuse to listen to anything released in the last 20+ years. But still, there's plenty of music from that era that I enjoy so...

In the year of our lord 1993 I was working for a college newspaper that was next door to a college radio station

i worked at a college radio station at that time ... i was in college ... but we were "alt rock" and had playlists so i had to play all those songs ... I like(d) Nirvana quite a bit (saw them open for Dinosaur Jr at a club when i was 16 on a 16+ special show) ... a few of the others i was okay with, the rest i was like, "well, I can fit in an entire cigarette while this song plays, and it isn't as awful as that horrible horrible two princes song that always seems to be on my playlist" ... and that is my grunge story.

maybe we can just all agree that music as a whole is only for megalomaniacs and narcissists, no need to single out any particular genres

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Sunday, May 7, 2023 11:38 AM

better yet -or perhaps, because of that- let's erase everything. clean slate and whatnot.

thank you for that entirely unique perspective, puffin! i had never considered the "interzone" aspect of it all. i was 12 when nirvana was at their peak of popularity (well, when kc was still alive anyway) so it was just omnipresent. the "before times" were the cliche for me: michael jackson, bon jovi, etc.

everyone just makes stuff like that up because it's a convenient cudgel to beat on something they just don't like on a gut level

yeah def. i've posted somewhere on ilx about my early aversion to grunge, how it was a very physical, visceral reaction to its viscosity and the harmonic asymmetry of (especially) Nirvana. it's something i came to appreciate very much when i was still really young, but it gave me a queasy, seasick feeling initially. and some of the artists (though not Nirvana) struck me as oppressively masculine.

so i reactively took a very anti-grunge stance when i was way too young, and i've always regretted that, i mean i think it was maybe the start of just lazily dismissing things by association instead of trying to appreciate them.

sorry to repeat myself, but i have had the sense that the reaction against grunge in the various forms it took was the beginning of a harder division between rock and pop which bothers me a lot more than grunge ever did. i don't like it on a gut level because i feel much more alienated by both genres without the cross pollination between them. this is all highly subjective, of course.

so like even though i sympathize with Austin's position, and have maybe taken that position myself in the past, it's had a ripple effect that i don't like.

Before I ever heard the word "grunge" I saw Mudhoney open for GWAR in a legendary shithole club (City Gardens, Trenton, NJ, October 1989) and they were fucking amazing. I saw Tad a year later and they were just as incredible — the motherfucker stage dived and squashed people like bowling pins.

Now, I do think grunge's influence on alt-rock (and what has become radio rock generally) has been pretty negative, because for 20+ years you got nothing but mopey fucks yowling about their pain in the most generic fashion, plus I am convinced that grunge led to an overall slowing of tempos in rock music. 70s Aerosmith and Ted Nugent played faster than Green Day. I loathed Nirvana. But Soundgarden were one of the best bands of the last 30 years, labels be damned. Even Pearl Jam have a couple of good songs. And Mudhoney are still at it.

to offer something of a sidebar to what you're getting at there, deflator-
it always irked me that the grunge folks were always so outspoken of their hatred of "pop" but never acknowledged that they all liked the most popular style of music for people their age. again, like you said: this is just a personal, insular anecdote and reflects nothing on the larger scene.

I have in the last couple of years had something of an epiphany that really, white people's opinions don't matter when it comes to smooth jazz, because if you actually look at the history of the genre (meaning, starting with CTI in the early 70s and tracing that back to players like Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal in the 50s), it's music for the refined (or trying to be) black bourgeoisie. Kenny G was aiming for the Quiet Storm R&B crowd when he first came out, and he has a substantial black fan base. So white jazz critics shitting on smooth jazz is roughly equivalent to Greil Marcus's tone-deaf, very fucked-up thoughts on Anita Baker (look them up for yourself, I ain't linkin', but they've been discussed on ILM before).

the problem is grunge only makes sense as a scene, a literal small group of people in Seattle and a few other spots in the PNW in the late 80s, who were in bands or otherwise involved the music scene, going to the same parties and shows.

as a genre it was never different enough from whatever elements of hard rock, punk, garage, metal the bands had, which is why you end up with a "genre" that supposedly includes the Melvins and Pearl Jam and Mudhoney.

xpost - unperson otm - for example Michael Jordan was not listening to the hip hop groups that idolized him, but smooth jazz and r&b stuff

I started college in 1992, so I saw firsthand as a non-pro music critic working for his college paper had slowly what came to be called grunge seeped into the college radio programming. Well into late '93 and early '94 my station played Morrissey, Pet Shop Boys, Peter Gabriel, 10,000 Maniacs, Daniel Ash, and other Poppy Bush Interzone stalwarts. Pearl Jam's Vs, Soundgarden's Superunknown, and especially STP's second album did a lot to disrupt our programming. I never heard Candlebox, Collective Soul, Silverchair, etc. -- those were MTV phenomena. We did play early Oasis, some Suede and Pulp, and a lot of Portishead.

The point I'm making: Nevermind did not crack the world open. Impacts take a while to ripple onshore. (I don't even consider Nirvana grunge).

I never heard Candlebox, Collective Soul, Silverchair, etc. -- those were MTV phenomena.

they were also on alt-rock playlists at the time, I had to play them.

heh, i don't consider Oasis britpop.
xp

watching yellowjackets has brought back memories of the music of this era ... maybe an episode will feature a song by one of these bands though atm i couldn't tell you what they sounded like or identify them

I have in the last couple of years had something of an epiphany that really, white people's opinions don't matter when it comes to smooth jazz, because if you actually look at the history of the genre (meaning, starting with CTI in the early 70s and tracing that back to players like Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal in the 50s), it's music for the refined (or trying to be) black bourgeoisie. Kenny G was aiming for the Quiet Storm R&B crowd when he first came out, and he has a substantial black fan base. So white jazz critics shitting on smooth jazz is roughly equivalent to Greil Marcus's tone-deaf, very fucked-up thoughts on Anita Baker (look them up for yourself, I ain't linkin', but they've been discussed on ILM before).

― but also fuck you (unperson), Sunday, May 7, 2023 12:03 PM

now this - completely otm! wholly agree.

never heard Candlebox, Collective Soul, Silverchair, etc. -- those were MTV phenomena.

they were also on alt-rock playlists at the time, I had to play them.

― sarahell,

yeah those bands were on the radio (and maybe more like grunge-adjacent corporate alt rock?)

was one of them Australian? i vaguely remember one of them being Australian ... and kinda looking like that mmm...bop band, but with long hair?

yep, silverchair!

and they totes look like Hanson

bloke in the middle is offended by such comparisons

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/93/8f/27/938f2715b4b420a251e52c6f183780ad.jpg

I feel like we have moved into threads for ilxors in their 40s and 50s territory rather than controversial opinions

phish are good as long as they're not playing any of their horrible songs

I am warming to deflatormouse's point that the rise of grunge coincides with a larger cultural fracturing.

In 1983, Lionel Richie and Elvis Costello were on the same radio station. So were The Clash and Cameo. So were Donna Summer and Def Leppard. For my middle school classmates, Madonna and Michael were equally salient.

To what extent would those acts' present-day equivalents share the same cultural space?

In 1988, the B-52s and the Cure and Bananarama and Debarge were on the same radio station. So were Whitesnake and Debbie Gibson and Whitney Houston. For my high school classmates, Prince and Poison were equally salient.

To what extent would those acts' present-day equivalents share the same cultural space?

It may be overly simplistic to blame grunge for this. But there is strong correlation.

Have you read Fredric Dannen's Hit Men? One of the best books ever written if you want to know why things are the way they are. It's from the late 80s/early 90s, so pre-internet, but it deals with the walling off of radio formats, MTV, album marketing, everything. Depressing as fuck but you'll start to realize just how much of your "taste" was determined in a boardroom via the narrowing of options.