Music
I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, crass and vulgar, but in the big leagues all the same. Reading the Auf der Maur bio reminded me that a lot of the punk scene was steeped in ideas about social roles and archetypes and oriented around upending them – or at least giving them a healthy challenge. This subculture was also populated by poets and artists in the classical sense. The retro polish around ’90s pop culture has flattened that texture, but it was genuinely a thing.
The era also introduced the woman rock star, introducing women who wrote and performed with full creative authority, not just as muses, groupies or singers. The reception from fans and critics was mixed, and the discourse around Courtney Love in particular was gross and volatile. Most of the positions she was vilified for read as entirely unremarkable today. I was a teenager during all of this, too young to meaningfully participate, but the aesthetic dominated my early adolescence. At the time I loved Tori Amos and PJ Harvey like kids now love Chappell Roan. What I forgot over time is how literary the era was, and how romantic, both in the literary sense and in relation to the New Romantics of the 1980’s. Big culture lessons for a starry-eyed teenager.
L7’s music is not that deep – it’s metal for meatheads, by design – but their politics and presence were. While poking around, I found that L7 was one of four bands featured in the 1995 documentary film Not Bad For a Girl, which was co-produced by Love and Kurt Cobain. The film focused on several all-female indie punk bands and won Best Documentary at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1996. I’ve never heard of it before now. It got middling reviews from critics then, and it’s not available streaming in full in English, unless you’re viewing it here at this dubious Google Drive link – which I will do and report back.
A nostalgic read on how music nerdery bloomed online.
Watching the fallout: Fans discovered that the band Geese benefitted from a hefty marketing campaign. Folks are debating whether this makes Geese a “psy-op” or merely “sell-outs”, to use an old term of art. Meanwhile the marketing firm behind the push is getting a ton of attention in its own right.
Garbage Day on what makes something cool to Gen Z, and how this is impacted by the degradation of “pillars of coolness” in previous generations like culture rags and MTV. GD predicts that “cool” will be measured by lack of polish and “how many human beings left their house to experience it.”
What the internet was made for: A Chicago music fan secretly recorded over 10,000 live concerts from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Spoon, and has made them all available online.
Taste the Music is a new audio series exploring why artists are driven to create. The first episode features storytelling and songwriting by friend of the blog Whitney Mann, where she chronicles her experience getting “the yips” onstage, and how she worked through it and picked up her guitar again.