1. The music business at the time was overwhelmingly dominated by brain-dead Boomers imposing their Nostalgia Industrial Complex all over the previously available space for rock n' roll; so much so that we basically had to invent from scratch a new "music business" that we were allowed to participate in (it was called "alternative" or "college" rock).
You weren't supposed to like it; it wasn't for you. It was for us, as a refuge; and there were just enough of us that the Big Business decided they had to co-opt our homemade scenes, mags, and college radio outlets and dilute those with their manufactured "product", both to profit off it and to neutralize *us* as a threat to their imposed-nostalgia dominance.
If they slathered it onto your life; blame them, not us.
We didn't want you to have it.
2. To us, our music wasn't "grunge"; that was a marketing term invented outside (+ largely after the fact) by the press, and they poured everything they didn't understand into that same box.
We were just playing what we felt like, with what we had. And, unlike all your now-fetishized "genres", all of it was real; no AutoTune or Photoshop, no "fashion" hangers-on or "stan armies". We despised your trends because we saw what they were: fake, top-down imposed "cultures" that were and are spectacles to pull consumer $$$ and squat over vast amounts of media space. You chose to buy into those, which is why you have the worthless-streams-+- $500 concerts business you have now (we fought both those trends back in the '90s, + we were right to; even tho' we lost).
In sum, GenX musicians owe you nothing; partly because we never "dominated" anything, and partly because your approval isn't worth anything.
If you send your Kpop army, we'll just unplug their backing tracks, and watch them stand around helplessly, trying to call their producers back in Korea for instructions.
Well, it's not MY K Pop army. Also, which exactly of the musicians and singers I included in my essay is "fake"? Every one of them is supremely talented.
And I'm not mad at the actual college/alt musicians themselves. I'm mad at the fans who worshipped them. Specifically, I am aggrieved at the unbelievably pretentious 16 year old music critics (read: suburban Gen X white boys) whose basements I had to sit around in, listening to them spout their utter contempt and disgust at any song that was remotely danceable or expressed any positive emotion, when actually we all could have been having a much better time.
Then you could've left their basements, gotten a subscription to NME and gotten into the music coming out of Manchester and the rest of the UK from about 1989- 1996; like I did in Boomer- Music infested Cleveland, OH.
Charlatans UK, Blur, RIDE, Stone Roses, all that stuff was fun; and none of it was fake or contrived, or someone else's past trying to obliterate our present.
We made the fun we had from whatever we could scrounge or find; and then defended it from attacks at every level and angle of "culture".
I feel like you are demonstrating exactly the type of hostile and self serious attitude I'm talking about, and I'm having a hard time believing in your alleged fun. You are in your 50s and still calling music "fake"? Come on. It's not like they had auto tune back then. And I have no idea what you're even talking about with boomer domination, are you sure you're not just making things up to suit some kind of heroic narrative? Bc the boomers created plenty of groundbreaking music themselves, and my recollection is that they were not paying any attention to Xers or caring that we even existed, at the time. What were you wanting them to do, roll over and die at age 35 so you didn't have to listen to Led Zeppelin anymore?
And anyway, there was an enormous amount of brand new, never before been heard musical innovations going on right here in the US between the late 70s and early 90s...disco, funk, house, techno, pop synth, R&B, hip hop. It's just that many of those sometimes involved smiling, and I get the sense that's not your jam. Why would I have to go searching out some obscure foreign music when there was plenty of good stuff right here? There was no dearth of good music, there was simply an oversupply of snobbery.
Why am i calling some of that other music fake? Because it was fake.
And a lot of it still is.
How would I know?
By knowing the tools by which it was made; and the conditions and methods by which it was sold.
The Boomers decided around 1987 that their past was gonna displace the present at the center of music culture; + since they sat, Hutt-like, on top of all the business + media that disseminated that culture, they invented "Classic Rock" and pushed everything made after 1978 to the margins.
That's not a "heroic" fiction; it's a struggle within living memory.
It blighted the careers of thousands of good artists, of many genres and scenes, and continues to do so today; because it didn't just make its own space, it took ours. And the effects have lingered:
Cosplay, backing-tracked "tribute bands" of Queen or Pink Floyd or Billy Joel draw thousands to city parks and festivals all over America; while perfectly good bands with good songs today can barely draw 100 people on a Saturday night, and all those festivals, etc. are closed to them.
Every song on the pop charts has 12 "writers" and 18 "producers"; and no drummer to be found anywhere on them; just "samples", quantized to a grid like stock-market bets.
In 1984, every European band dreamed of coming to America; in 2024, it's the opposite.
Even with "Eurodisco", gabber, Swedish pop, and whatever; they at least still have room for rock of this century there.
Does that mean we're 'bitter'? Maybe.
But who that has to do 10-20x the dirty, unglamorous work that the "Greats" ever had to do (bc they had other people to do it all for them), just to play outside our own basements, wouldn't be? Especially when we get unfavorably compared to them every hour of every day, with no thought of the contexts behind their times or ours?
So yeah, bitter.
Yeah, not feeling the joke.
If you wanted or want something else, it's literally all around you. It was then, + is now.
But instead of happily splashing around in that ocean, you chose to piss in our puddle.
Y'all were pissing in everyone's puddle in 1993, so it's just karma, that's all I'm saying.
I can't agree that any artist's career has ever been "blighted" by something done to them, because art of any type has never been a career that provides a living for anyone but the .00001%, hence the starving artist stereotype that has been around for centuries.
Because creating art is enjoyable, and being adored and admired for putting on a show is also enjoyable (or so I hear), so there will always be a huge oversupply of artists relative to what the free market can support.
If preparing tax returns was as intrinsically satisfying as singing a song or creating a painting, we would have tens of millions of starving accountants complaining about how only the mega-star CPAs can get any work, and how they can barely get anyone to let them do their taxes for free. But CPAs get paid because they're doing something everyone else hates doing, and will pay to avoid having to do.
Getting applauded for performing a song is enjoyable enough that in a sense, one could say that the performers should almost be paying the audience, rather than the other way around. This is why the only societies that have ever provided broad-based living wage type support for artists were non-market based, like the Soviets. It's not that people don't value art, it's just that so many people value supplying art that inevitably in a market system the price will crater to zero. Look at this site...all these people including me creating writing for free, just because they like to.
So apparently a lot of people love certain bands and songs so much that they'll pay money to go see the imitation "tribute" version. But if people find the experience enjoyable enough to pay for the tickets, then I don't see how you can blame the investors for putting up money to provide what the audience wants.
It even happens to the actual bands themselves. I went to a Def Leppard concert a few years ago, and after playing their hits, they said "who wants to hear some new songs?" and the whole audience screamed "NOOO!" and booed them. They weren't paying their hard-earned money from a much less enjoyable job to hear some new song they probably wouldn't like, they were paying to get their nostalgia neurons tingling and relive 1987.
I highly doubt Def Leppard finds it enjoyable to play the same songs over and over and over again for 35 years straight -- in fact, I wouldn't surprised if it made them feel ill to do so! But they can choose to play new songs to no audience for free, or they can choose to bore themselves sick doing the same thing for the 50,000th time and make a shit-load of cash. But it hardly seems fair that they or any other artist should get to do what's interesting and enjoyable for them AND make money from it. Not when the rest of us poor saps have to be made ill every single day going to our shitty jobs to make a buck!
My older sister is an artist and would argue with me vehemently, but it's always struck me as quite an imperious demand to expect to be able to make money doing something enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding. I can understand being bitter at the .0001% mega-stars who suck up all the money and attention. But the way it gets communicated is hostility towards the music audience and anger at them for not having the right taste, which doesn't really make sense.
But also, instead of feeling bitter or like salt is rubbed in wounds, I think you should feel happy that you've been able to do something like have a career in an artistic field. That is a complete fantasy far beyond what most people would ever even allow themselves to dream about. For real, you should be brimming over with beaming bucketfuls of joy. Are you not living a dream?
No, I'm not living a dream. I'm working my ass off.
I'm playing music because that's what I'm really supposed to be doing with my life, instead of what I and 97% of my musical contemporaries of all ages under 55 are doing: holding down real jobs in order to eat and stay housed, etc. while doing as much music as we can edgewise.
We don't do it to get rich; or get ego-strokes or free drugs or special treatment; we do it to communicate.
You're a writer, and a skilled one: imagine if there were 900 places you could put your writing for others to see in, say, 1987, to be judged upon its own merits; and in 1989 850 of those were bought and converted to publishing only reprints of works from before 1980.
Maybe your work wouldn't have been accepted by >40 of those 900 outlets before, due to genre/ theme, focus, etc.; but at least there were those 40 to communicate to, and be discovered in, + find friends to communicate with through.
With only 50 left for everyone, your window to communicate became impossibly small; + worse yet, the other 850 were dedicated to instilling the idea that you + others like you had nothing to say worth reading.
And then they did that, for 30 years.
That's what it's been like to be us since 1989.
We'd have to be 90% better and 3000% luckier, just to approach what Def Leppard was in 1977-78; forget about 1984 or after.
DL themselves, if you projected them from 1979 into 2024, wouldn't even get a hearing from over 90% of their fanbase today. Even doing the exact same level of music.
That's not a "skill issue", or a context error.
Ordinary people's perceptions do not just grow that way naturally; they are shaped that way by those who profit most from weaponizing the past (which they can buy and own) against the present (which they see as both unwelcome competition and an unpleasant reminder that there are people younger than them).
But enough of that.
The point is, you're attributing to us a cultural power we not only never had; but were deliberately prevented from having the opportunity to earn.
Our existing and doing our things deprived you of nothing; you could've had any kind of fun you chose, if you'd only sought it out or made it yourselves.
The "DIY" kids are doing that now, in places like Bowling Green, Ohio; their "emo" music ain't for me, but it's real; I love that they're doing it, + give them all the props for it.
"And I have no idea what you're even talking about with boomer domination"
Seriously? Then you must have never listened to mainstream rock radio in the mid 80s that was all Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Beatles oldies all the time. It was exactly a giant boomer nostalgia trip.
Well, they were the grown-ups, who had the money and were in charge. It does not seem to me to be a case of oppression or domination if radio stations were playing music that the audience of people with money to spend wanted to hear. And anyway they now play Nirvana on the classic rock station.
Your whole comment has the whole whiff of a humorless guy who is still pissed off as an adult man that no one properly respects his teenaged musical pretensions and deep emo tastes. I don't drink wine btw and I have Han Solo art on my wall, not weird sayings.
I apologize for this tangent, but speaking of Boomer music…how relieved are you that we are finally free of scenes (in movies, in commercials, on TV) of aging Boomer couples putting on an old Motown / Al Green record in the dark and dancing sexily to indicate impending “sexy time”? They were doing this right up through the early part of this century.
Also I realized the other day I haven’t been subjected to James Taylor in quite some time—thankful for the small things
Metal and punk were already providing such spaces before alt rock even existed, but metal required you to learn how to play your instrument, and punk required you to believe in s cause greater than yourself and live by that cause, but alternative rock did not demand either.
The early-90s style called "shoegaze" required an above-average level of skill from the bass player; because I couldn't get away with smearing the notes all over the place like the guitar players did. Playing metal and punk, no one heard me unless I stopped; so I just stopped a lot. But shoegaze? Had to go all the time, holding the ship in the channel.
You are so sick and twisted! Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears is an incredible song.
Though I went to see them live a few years ago, and while they put on a great show -- I was impressed at how strong their voices still were -- it was ultimately a turn off, because the lead singer acted like such a pretentious twat through-out the whole show. As if he thought he was dark emo Jesus or something. I have no idea if he was ALWAYS like that, or if he's just turned into a warped person from making too much money singing the same songs for 35 years. Perhaps he turned into a hostile self-aggrandizing hipster after being made fun of them for so long. As they say, people eventually become what they fight against.
Sorry for coming to this so late, but Tears for Fears a 'teeny bopper bubblegum pop' band?! Not that there's anything wrong with good teeny bopper bubblegum pop anyway: it was my way into music and I've always loved it, even when my main preoccupation was playing in HC, anarchopunk and noise bands in the eighties and nineties - as, to varying degrees, did plenty of the other people I knew who were involved in those scenes - but calling Tears for Fears 'teeny bopper bubblegum pop' is just daft. Apart from the fact that they were great and both great musicians, their debut LP was, to quote wikipedia, a 'concept album focusing on themes of child abuse, psychological trauma and depression'. And they were gloomy and weird as fuck - haven't you heard 'Pale Shelter' or 'Shout'?
I would've named some of the worst offenders and bands, but I don't want to give them any shout outs. The sinners I'm talking about know exactly what type of artist I'm talking about.
Neil Young father of Grunge is definitely a Patsy. Listen to the song Ohio about Kent Street. And long before that he sold his Soul to or Controllers so he could stay in the USA. He came to my city in the eighties promoting nuclear weapons and Regans Star Wars. And he wrote in his book he use to hang out with Charles Manson. Probably had the same controller.
Haha, I suppose I'm living a happier, fuller life not even knowing, so I'm not going to look them up. Give me Louis Armstrong, Chicago, or the Gypsy Kings.
52 year old white make here and unrepentant lover of the Smiths, the Cure, Radiohead, and Neutral Milk Hotel. You'll never take me alive. Sad bastard music 4ever!
I’m 46. I don’t ridicule people for listening to pop, and haven’t for decades now.
I grew up in a working-class household in an upper-middle-class suburb. Among my peer group, the angry and depressing music was dominant. Maybe we had our reasons, since no one paid for us to drive anything but the shittiest of cars, no one was gonna pay for us to go to college, no one paid for extracurricular activities for us like sports or private music lessons.
We all started working as many hours as possible the minute we turned 16 because otherwise there was no social life for us. Mom didn’t drop us off at the mall with $50 to blow on whatever when we were teens.
Grunge, metal, industrial also sounds great when you’re high or you’re taking psychedelics. If I had had to listen to a Mariah Carey record on acid I would have had a psychotic break.
Most of those grunge acts didn’t come from happy homes or happy neighborhoods. Nirvana was born in a depressing logging town. Lot of those guys had shitty working-class childhoods where the future wasn’t very bright.
But hey, at least we got to make extra cash by selling drugs to the upper-middle-class kids.
You might be surprised. First time I took acid is the first time I listened to Phish...Rift specifically...and it blew my mind and I loved Phish after that (was never much into the hippy thing previously). So if you HAD been listening to Mariah...well...you never know.
I also drove a piece of shit car that stalled every time it rained, broke down about once a month (and then I'd just have to wait on the side of the road for a kind stranger to tow me to a gas station, since no cell phones then), had no AC, and that I had to wrap a rubber band around the ashtray in order to keep it in 5th gear or it would pop out on the highway.
We all worked shit jobs, I didn't know anyone without a part-time and summer job back then. But funny bc to me they were great times.
I have had so many women DM me saying thank you, it was so awful back then how terrible the music snobs were. And yet here on this thread I find out that there are 50 year old guys still holding onto their ridiculous musical pretensions from 30 years ago which is just WILD. But many are being big enough jerks about it that they have only reminded me and further convinced me of exactly how insufferable it was back then. Not like nowadays when everyone can listen to whatever they want.
I submit that AIC and Soundgarden is far from pop. Talented af. I took acid and listened to AIC - Dirt for the first time. Connected would be an understatement.
I stopped reading Freddie a while ago, because every post is the same 10,000 words rearranged, but it occurs to me I have no idea what kind of music he actually likes.
I actually like Freddie's writing a lot and he is one of the first writers I subscribed to. But I'm not a fan of being an adult and still not getting over one's overwrought teenaged angst, including treating musical tastes as some serious life and death matter. It is right and good to look back at your teenaged self and find yourself absurd and embarrassing and laugh at what a moron you were. And it's wholesome to look at today's teenagers, as an adult, and think they're idiots. Because all teenagers are. It's not healthy to be upset that one is not a teenager anymore, or that they don't respect and admire your musical opinions. They're not supposed to. They're supposed to roll their eyes at gross, lame 40 year olds, and 40 year olds are supposed to consider teenagers to be moronic barely human animals. That is the natural and wholesome way of the world.
Completely agreed. Freddie is actually kind of one of my heroes, and I'm reasonably sure that I am or was one of his 'founding' Substack subscribers, whatever that means. I don't think it's correct or good to never change in your opinions (certainly my own views have evolved to the point of incoherence since I stopped being a talk radio pilled shithead), but I can definitely respect someone who pulls it off. That probably goes double for Freddie, since his views are so eclectic, not to mention avowedly (if not necessarily recognizably) card-carrying commie. It's just rare to find someone so unreformed after so long, not to mention all the very real shit he's been through and taken responsibility for (!!), that you have to pay attention, at least up to a point.
It's been fascinating to watch him, anchored to the core of the Earth, as the horseshoe of ideology and politics contorts itself around him. That's probably the main reason I read him for so long, but it has been that long, and I have read X hundreds or thousands of his pieces, such that now I can basically game out every one of his new pieces in my head by the headline.
But equally, one of my points in writing the above was that I never took his writing on music seriously, for exactly the reasons you identify, and certainly his musical opinions (beyond hating a strawman version of 'poptimism') never made an impression on me. My favorite artist is, legitimately, Carly Rae Jepsen. I own every one of her albums and the B sides and everything. She fucking kicks ass.
Agree with you on all of this. Though I guess I will credit him with educating me about the very existence of poptimism in the first place, which I've only heard of because of his pieces on it. It is very alien to my mind to care remotely what a 20 year old thinks about music or is listening to, so I did find his poptism pieces rather fascinating. And that allowed me to write this polemic and bring out the ire of the furious Gen X army of the Extremely Serious About Their Very Serious Musical Taste Guys. I had no idea so many were still devoted to the cause! I had thought Freddie was the only one I was poking fun at, but I guess not.
Heh, I just wrote a takedown note about my generation that fits perfectly with this. I'll share it here since it's pretty funny and all too true of so many of my generation.
Well said. And believe me, I haven’t written about my generation in this thread but I don’t spare it either. Gen-X is the most insecure, vain generation in history. We grew up with no power to change anything at all (being such a small generation), so we immersed ourselves in trivial opinion wars: what bands you liked defined you. Do you listen to sophisto-rock like the Talking Heads or Sonic Youth? Well you clearly are more intelligent than the common rabble. Do you prefer The Pixies or Nirvana? It really matters. Or are you one of those Cro-Magnons who like prog rock? Pathetic losers — can’t get laid.
Are you a wigger, a hipster, a longhair or a hey-ma headbanger? This is what matters. All that matters. Do you wear straight leg pants or do you taper them like a New Waver? Oh, you like New Wave, you’re a pretty cool liker of the second wave British invasion. Morrissey or The Cure? Both? Philistine.
Guns and Roses? Working class trash. Nine Inch Nails are so sophisticated.
What drugs do you do? Coke? Pathetic. Weed and acid, mushrooms? Okay you’re alright. Heroin? Whoa man, you gotta watch that shit but it is pretty fuckin’ chic.
As crazed as the Boomers are, and they are certainly crazy (if we can speak of a generation as a unit, which we can’t but I will anyway) Gen-X are the pathetic detritus left over from all the fun the Boomers had at Woodstock, and their key-parties before/during the first decades of their adulthood when they got real jobs and had us earlier Gen-X who they mostly hated and constantly talked down to for being frivolous and trivial. And they were correct.
This is so 100% right on. Pretentious fucks we all were! I truly had assumed that everyone had gotten over this long ago, but clearly many have not based on some of these comments. I can't remember the last time I asked someone, or anyone asked me, "what kind of music do you like?" as if it was some deeply meaningful and important questions that would impact their assessment of your character. Honestly I had forgotten just how insufferable all this used to be...until reading through some of these comments and now I remember why I've nursed this grievance bc of the ridiculous excess of snooty vanity.
God, so much of my lifelong anger at Pretentious Music Dudes makes sense now. I (41 in a few weeks) hung out with Xers almost exclusively until I was around 30. So many Music Dudes openly hating anything I listened to that wasn't properly deep. So many more who felt like they had the responsibility of being my official tour guide into the world of Real Music, so graciously bestowing upon me a more refined taste in music. God, I hated them and their attitudes so much and I didn't even realize how much happier I've been since they became more obscure, haha.
For real. The amazing thing is that I obviously wrote this in jest and just *assumed* that every adult had left behind their tortured teenaged pretensions several decades ago. But reading how hostile and STILL up their own butts about their deep musical choices some of these guys are has made me take my own roast more seriously. Like maybe they actually ARE kinda evil.
I haven't had to have much interaction with these dudes in a while, and oh boy, this comment thread brought me back, lol. They really never did grow out of it, and they're big mad.
There was a Portlandia sketch about gen-x music pretention - it takes place in the Women for Women Book Shop as I recall, where a bunch of parents with kids in a kindergarten class have a meetup and they get all pissy about the album collection the teacher keeps at school for the kids. Brought me back.
Oh for sure. I haven't thought about this shit in years, decades really, but I spent an hour or so ragging on Boomers earlier today and felt it only fair to offer a little balance.
I think we liked Guns'n'Roses precisely because it was working class. It was born of an opposition to stardom and glamour. I think it was the last attempt to reject Factory Musicing, the manufactured stars, the entertainment industry as industry. It eventually failed but it had a certain authencity that is fun to remember. I guess it depends on the circles, because in mine no one would say "sophisticated" or "philistine", the working class aesthetic was take seriously, especially by those who weren't, it was fun to get out from my overly rigid middle class parent's house and wallow in the mud.
Absolutely. Guns and Roses rocked the fuck out of us. I wasn't trying to criticize any one band (well, maybe Sonic Youth) just saying how uptight some of gen-x could be about these signifiers. Honestly in high school it was fine. Only when I went to college did I start to see this annoying behavior. But then colleges are generally full of insecure dumbasses so there you go.
Floored to see a gen X self takedown . As an older millennial I always felt like I missed the actually cool generation, and started off with a large back catalogue of gen x music, most of which I like to this day. I remember an infamous metal/hardcore blogger from a 10-15 years ago who was Gen x and seemed to throw himself under the bus a lot though 🤷
You know, that was about the time globalization started, good paying manual jobs got sent overseas, our communities started dying, and we started hearing what toxic pieces af garbage we are for being white and male. What precisely would you expect from young men at the time?
Anyway, Eddie Vedder is like a TDS woke tard now, and most of the rest are dead or irrelevant, so I'm not sure they need to go to jail too, lol.
BTW I'm still a better dancer at 51 than most of the k-pops and swifties, so jokes on them.
This reminds me of a conversion I had in my twenties with another girl where I said, "Isn't it weird how guys think they *own* music?"
And they do think that. They think it's something you need their permission to access and not just something everyone is free and entitled to.
The tyranny you describe was real. I remember a man at a party in Portland demanding-- DEMANDING that I renounce my love for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and he actually stood there tapping his toe waiting for me acquiesce. When I didn't he acted like this is the first time his demands weren't met and then he said, "Well, then your opinion on music is invalid."
Of course there were many, many more stories like this. I learned around 18 to just start saying "More for me" over and over and over when the subject of RHCP or anything fun came up.
And you wouldn't believe how persistent they were, even after being shot down a dozen times. "But are you aware he's not a good singer??"
"Don't care. Is to me."
"But.. But.. But... But... But"
And why did we suffer this? Like you said, it was where the boys were.
However, looking back I wish I didn't waste my time crushing on these nihilistic losers.
I was afraid of handsome jocks, but maybe I should've given them a chance, they liked fun.
Absolute classic. Encapsulates the whole ethic of the times so perfectly.
100% with you on being afraid of jocks too, while wasting years of my youth trying to impress pretentious too-cool-for-school skateboarders. The only explanation I have for this behavior is that I truly was brain-washed by all the movies of the time, which universally portrayed jocks as meathead asshole sadists and borderline rapists, and suffering melancholy pale skinny boys as the nice ones. I'm sad to say that it took me until my 30s to realize this was completely false and an inversion of the truth. Basically it was just the same miserable guys writing screenplays about how they thought the universe should be ordered, back then.
I too was very impressionable around movies. You can imagine the personality I cobbled together after watching Donnie Darko, The Secretary, Girl Interrupted and High Fidelity.
It wasn't just in music that this happened. It was across all of the arts. I was an aspiring writer at the time. I knew my writing wasn't nearly ironic, meta, or tragic enough for what was being passed around at the time. I saw the same thing going on with visual arts and philosophy. They called it "post -modern" but I agree with you, it was just a way to destroy expressions of joy and beauty.
As a lifelong metalhead and prog rock fan I am not exactly sure which side of your divide I'm on, but boy do I have my own axe to grind about alternative rock and its cult of mediocrity, ugliness, and failure. Because the alt rockers and their incelcore garbage also crushed my favorite music into the mud and claimed it as a victory over "hair metal". Cultivating musicianship was "pretentious", because nobody really would do something difficult just for the sheer joy of pushing oneself, or watch somebody do something difficult to witness excellence. Making men and masculinity beautiful was "gay" (OK, I admit heavy metal definitely is a bit gay, but suck it up you wusses!), men were supposed to look, sound, and smell bad. Mystery, metaphor, and ambiguity were "unrelatable", everything has to speak directly and plainly to the narrow worldview of a Midwestern suburban proto-incel. Speed was prohibited, as it might speak to some inner exuberance and affirmation of life, hence Pantera. The unabashed dorkiness and earnestness of prog rock and '80s power metal had to go too, as the incel is nothing if not forever embarrassed, cringing at what other men think of him.
You want some rock and roll? Listen to Queensrÿche doing "Take Hold of the Flame" in Tokyo in 1984, that's some rock and fucking roll.
Hard agree. Actually they were far worse about metal and hair bands and glam rock than they were about pop. Liking those bands made you basically irredeemable scum. And again I'd say that's a lot bc they were too fun. They really had a puritan like objection to showmanship and energy.
I remember my dad telling me a story about how he attended a Yes concert and during the climax of "The Gates of Delirium" a laser shot Jon Anderson in the chest and he pretended to die on stage, only to appear again for the "Soon" denouement (this was a 20+ minute song). He framed this as ridiculous, but to me it sounds awesome and I wish I had been there (unfortunately it was around 12 years before I was born).
Queensryche-- oh my god that takes me back! I haven't heard that name since college, but I had a roommate for whom it was the soundtrack of his life. Side note: that roommate interned at Polygram, and convinced me to get an internship at Virgin, where I ended up meeting Eddie Vedder before he landed the Pearl Jam gig. This was circa Mother Love Bone. (But the band we *really* bonded over was Jellyfish, which has nothing to do with anything in this thread!)
I'm glad you brought up Yes, since my Substack ("Flights of the Moorglade") is literally named after the proggiest of prog music. It's a band I've seen probably a dozen times. I was thinking about them while reading this piece, because their 70s "excesses"-- Tales of Topographic Oceans in particular-- are often cited as one of the catalysts of the punk movement that followed.
Yes has a very odd cult following...I've never been able to identify what the common thread is between the Yes lovers. Don't get me wrong, I love Owner of a Lonely Heart as much as anyone, but my husband is one of the Yes obsessives, and it does puzzle me a bit.
I literally have this Note saved in my phone! "How to describe the typical Yes fan? The guys around me in the crowd an hour before the show? Whatever I say about them I say about me..."
And with that, I will selectively stop quoting ; )
Interesting. I can add that what you described may have created a vicious cycle: depressed sexless losers create depressing, sexless music -> depressing, sexless music creates more depressed, sexless losers.
As a younger millennial, I started listening to mainstream pop in early 2000s. However, by middle school, the mainstream has shifted into techno and hip-hop, which became unbearable for me. I always struggled to fit in, and at the time listening to rock, grunge and metal was still an option, and I gave it a go. In hindsight, I think it made me more alienated, depressed and sexless, and, quite possibly, significantly contributed to my teenage inceldom.
Socially, it seemed like rock/metal/grunge worked only if you ended it in a small, tight-knit group of friends from the same subculture (the girls would usually branch-swing between long relationships with the boys from the group). Unfortunately I never got to join such group, most of the time it was just me + a couple girls I was friendzoned with.
Ah ha, nice try millennial! You're just trying to curry favour with the boomers to skip the hierarchy, now that it's rightfully ours. Yes we had our angst and depressing music but there was also catharsis in the moshpit (perhaps more often a male aggressive type but not wholly), then there was dance music and ecstasy - did you forget that period? As for that generic overproduced stuff you call music, well it's almost as tragic as you not being able to buy a house!
This was hilarious and so true. I missed the worst of it, coming of age to Spice Girls and the boy bands, but still had to sit through so much of the damned awful stuff when hanging out with the 'cool guys'. There was still plenty around though, I mean Papa Roach? Come on dude.
Yes the Spice Girls, Britney, and Backstreet Boys were the vanguards of their coming downfall...that wasn't my favorite era either, and they were critically acclaimed at least. But I really feel the grunge-sters ruined my time in high school!
The late 90s were probably the worst era of pop radio ever; the "rock" was super lame and formulaic (Creed, Matchbox 20), the pop was soulless crap (Britney, NSync) and even hip hop had left the musical/lyrical diversity of the early 90s and gone the lame single sample Puff Daddy route where every song was about how much money you had.
I don't like how rock has basically died and hip hop has gotten even worse(at least for male rappers) but when I listen to pop radio with my tween daughter it is SO MUCH better now than it was when I was in high school.
I agree with you that late 90s and early 00s was the absolute worst. 1999 may actually be the worst year ever of what was on the radio. All crap pop of former Disney stars and that awful Maxim magazine type skateboarder pop rock.
I’m more impressed that these apparently proto incels were capable of ruining the time of what sounds like a hot/cool girl in high school. Like what were you even doing in their basements lol
It was a weird time. You have to understand there was honestly an enormous amount of cultural/media propaganda basically saying that anyone who was outgoing, athletic, or popular was basically an evil borderline racist who spent all their time beating people up and bullying them, and that all the shy sensitive weirdo guys were the real gems. Almost everything that came out of Hollywood was kind of crafted in that message, and I was like 12 so I believed it. FWIW they gave the same message about girls. Heathers, Mean Girls, every teen movie and show was about how weirdos were all heros and outgoing popular happy people were evil. I think maybe it was a reaction to the early 80s. Or maybe just that the artistic types who write screenplays and TV shows and music were portraying their view of the world.
Tbh the media propaganda hasn’t changed in that regard. I guess it’s changed from “popular jocks” to “white/male/straight/christian” in general. Heathers and mean girls are like two decades apart? I loved both those movies .
Yeah all my friends loved the moshpit. Hell, half my friends had their own garage bands, I actually had forgotten about that until right this moment typing this. I was way too much of a wimp for that myself though. I don't mind sweat, but I wasn't about to take a chance on busting up my pretty face. ;)
You absolutely got the worst of it. The only good part of the 90s was the first. Yes Papa Roach is terrible, but they are a far cry from Nirvana or The Smashing Pumpkins.
While some stuff - the first Pearl Jam album, forex, from the 90's is still in my collection, outside of EDM and some great soundtrack stuff (the crow, cool world), the 90's is mostly a giant hole in my collection.
There's a lot more 80's, a fair bit of classic rock and prog, and a lot more post-zeroes EDM/prog and gloriously cheesy symphonic/power metal. Not much K-pop but I don't knock it, but a fair bit of Japanese bands in various genres too.
Why?
Because I may have been that gen Xer back then, in the long run it was just too much of a downer. So angry all the time. Sometimes said or down or angry is appropriate. But dwelling in it all the time?
Yes I’m a gen-x male, but the aesthetic of grunge was co-opted into some of the worst music possible. But I’m here to say that prior to nevermind, the scene was glorious. Also lots of my faves were women: L7, PJ Harvey, Bongwater, Liz Phair, the Royal Trux and Sonic Youth fronted by Kim Gordon. This stuff was an escape from the ubiquitous corporate pop spectacle. You can harsh on Fugazi, but ‘suggestion’ truly made me much more aware of how appallingly women were treated. Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, and Sebadoh were all angst but did a lot of musical exploration. Sometimes they might have been a bummer, but ain’t that the blues.
Hi. We made music like that for two reasons:
1. The music business at the time was overwhelmingly dominated by brain-dead Boomers imposing their Nostalgia Industrial Complex all over the previously available space for rock n' roll; so much so that we basically had to invent from scratch a new "music business" that we were allowed to participate in (it was called "alternative" or "college" rock).
You weren't supposed to like it; it wasn't for you. It was for us, as a refuge; and there were just enough of us that the Big Business decided they had to co-opt our homemade scenes, mags, and college radio outlets and dilute those with their manufactured "product", both to profit off it and to neutralize *us* as a threat to their imposed-nostalgia dominance.
If they slathered it onto your life; blame them, not us.
We didn't want you to have it.
2. To us, our music wasn't "grunge"; that was a marketing term invented outside (+ largely after the fact) by the press, and they poured everything they didn't understand into that same box.
We were just playing what we felt like, with what we had. And, unlike all your now-fetishized "genres", all of it was real; no AutoTune or Photoshop, no "fashion" hangers-on or "stan armies". We despised your trends because we saw what they were: fake, top-down imposed "cultures" that were and are spectacles to pull consumer $$$ and squat over vast amounts of media space. You chose to buy into those, which is why you have the worthless-streams-+- $500 concerts business you have now (we fought both those trends back in the '90s, + we were right to; even tho' we lost).
In sum, GenX musicians owe you nothing; partly because we never "dominated" anything, and partly because your approval isn't worth anything.
If you send your Kpop army, we'll just unplug their backing tracks, and watch them stand around helplessly, trying to call their producers back in Korea for instructions.
Well, it's not MY K Pop army. Also, which exactly of the musicians and singers I included in my essay is "fake"? Every one of them is supremely talented.
And I'm not mad at the actual college/alt musicians themselves. I'm mad at the fans who worshipped them. Specifically, I am aggrieved at the unbelievably pretentious 16 year old music critics (read: suburban Gen X white boys) whose basements I had to sit around in, listening to them spout their utter contempt and disgust at any song that was remotely danceable or expressed any positive emotion, when actually we all could have been having a much better time.
Then you could've left their basements, gotten a subscription to NME and gotten into the music coming out of Manchester and the rest of the UK from about 1989- 1996; like I did in Boomer- Music infested Cleveland, OH.
Charlatans UK, Blur, RIDE, Stone Roses, all that stuff was fun; and none of it was fake or contrived, or someone else's past trying to obliterate our present.
We made the fun we had from whatever we could scrounge or find; and then defended it from attacks at every level and angle of "culture".
We owe you no "repentance" for that.
I feel like you are demonstrating exactly the type of hostile and self serious attitude I'm talking about, and I'm having a hard time believing in your alleged fun. You are in your 50s and still calling music "fake"? Come on. It's not like they had auto tune back then. And I have no idea what you're even talking about with boomer domination, are you sure you're not just making things up to suit some kind of heroic narrative? Bc the boomers created plenty of groundbreaking music themselves, and my recollection is that they were not paying any attention to Xers or caring that we even existed, at the time. What were you wanting them to do, roll over and die at age 35 so you didn't have to listen to Led Zeppelin anymore?
And anyway, there was an enormous amount of brand new, never before been heard musical innovations going on right here in the US between the late 70s and early 90s...disco, funk, house, techno, pop synth, R&B, hip hop. It's just that many of those sometimes involved smiling, and I get the sense that's not your jam. Why would I have to go searching out some obscure foreign music when there was plenty of good stuff right here? There was no dearth of good music, there was simply an oversupply of snobbery.
Why am i calling some of that other music fake? Because it was fake.
And a lot of it still is.
How would I know?
By knowing the tools by which it was made; and the conditions and methods by which it was sold.
The Boomers decided around 1987 that their past was gonna displace the present at the center of music culture; + since they sat, Hutt-like, on top of all the business + media that disseminated that culture, they invented "Classic Rock" and pushed everything made after 1978 to the margins.
That's not a "heroic" fiction; it's a struggle within living memory.
It blighted the careers of thousands of good artists, of many genres and scenes, and continues to do so today; because it didn't just make its own space, it took ours. And the effects have lingered:
Cosplay, backing-tracked "tribute bands" of Queen or Pink Floyd or Billy Joel draw thousands to city parks and festivals all over America; while perfectly good bands with good songs today can barely draw 100 people on a Saturday night, and all those festivals, etc. are closed to them.
Every song on the pop charts has 12 "writers" and 18 "producers"; and no drummer to be found anywhere on them; just "samples", quantized to a grid like stock-market bets.
In 1984, every European band dreamed of coming to America; in 2024, it's the opposite.
Even with "Eurodisco", gabber, Swedish pop, and whatever; they at least still have room for rock of this century there.
Does that mean we're 'bitter'? Maybe.
But who that has to do 10-20x the dirty, unglamorous work that the "Greats" ever had to do (bc they had other people to do it all for them), just to play outside our own basements, wouldn't be? Especially when we get unfavorably compared to them every hour of every day, with no thought of the contexts behind their times or ours?
So yeah, bitter.
Yeah, not feeling the joke.
If you wanted or want something else, it's literally all around you. It was then, + is now.
But instead of happily splashing around in that ocean, you chose to piss in our puddle.
That's why you're hearing from me.
Y'all were pissing in everyone's puddle in 1993, so it's just karma, that's all I'm saying.
I can't agree that any artist's career has ever been "blighted" by something done to them, because art of any type has never been a career that provides a living for anyone but the .00001%, hence the starving artist stereotype that has been around for centuries.
Because creating art is enjoyable, and being adored and admired for putting on a show is also enjoyable (or so I hear), so there will always be a huge oversupply of artists relative to what the free market can support.
If preparing tax returns was as intrinsically satisfying as singing a song or creating a painting, we would have tens of millions of starving accountants complaining about how only the mega-star CPAs can get any work, and how they can barely get anyone to let them do their taxes for free. But CPAs get paid because they're doing something everyone else hates doing, and will pay to avoid having to do.
Getting applauded for performing a song is enjoyable enough that in a sense, one could say that the performers should almost be paying the audience, rather than the other way around. This is why the only societies that have ever provided broad-based living wage type support for artists were non-market based, like the Soviets. It's not that people don't value art, it's just that so many people value supplying art that inevitably in a market system the price will crater to zero. Look at this site...all these people including me creating writing for free, just because they like to.
So apparently a lot of people love certain bands and songs so much that they'll pay money to go see the imitation "tribute" version. But if people find the experience enjoyable enough to pay for the tickets, then I don't see how you can blame the investors for putting up money to provide what the audience wants.
It even happens to the actual bands themselves. I went to a Def Leppard concert a few years ago, and after playing their hits, they said "who wants to hear some new songs?" and the whole audience screamed "NOOO!" and booed them. They weren't paying their hard-earned money from a much less enjoyable job to hear some new song they probably wouldn't like, they were paying to get their nostalgia neurons tingling and relive 1987.
I highly doubt Def Leppard finds it enjoyable to play the same songs over and over and over again for 35 years straight -- in fact, I wouldn't surprised if it made them feel ill to do so! But they can choose to play new songs to no audience for free, or they can choose to bore themselves sick doing the same thing for the 50,000th time and make a shit-load of cash. But it hardly seems fair that they or any other artist should get to do what's interesting and enjoyable for them AND make money from it. Not when the rest of us poor saps have to be made ill every single day going to our shitty jobs to make a buck!
My older sister is an artist and would argue with me vehemently, but it's always struck me as quite an imperious demand to expect to be able to make money doing something enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding. I can understand being bitter at the .0001% mega-stars who suck up all the money and attention. But the way it gets communicated is hostility towards the music audience and anger at them for not having the right taste, which doesn't really make sense.
But also, instead of feeling bitter or like salt is rubbed in wounds, I think you should feel happy that you've been able to do something like have a career in an artistic field. That is a complete fantasy far beyond what most people would ever even allow themselves to dream about. For real, you should be brimming over with beaming bucketfuls of joy. Are you not living a dream?
No, I'm not living a dream. I'm working my ass off.
I'm playing music because that's what I'm really supposed to be doing with my life, instead of what I and 97% of my musical contemporaries of all ages under 55 are doing: holding down real jobs in order to eat and stay housed, etc. while doing as much music as we can edgewise.
We don't do it to get rich; or get ego-strokes or free drugs or special treatment; we do it to communicate.
You're a writer, and a skilled one: imagine if there were 900 places you could put your writing for others to see in, say, 1987, to be judged upon its own merits; and in 1989 850 of those were bought and converted to publishing only reprints of works from before 1980.
Maybe your work wouldn't have been accepted by >40 of those 900 outlets before, due to genre/ theme, focus, etc.; but at least there were those 40 to communicate to, and be discovered in, + find friends to communicate with through.
With only 50 left for everyone, your window to communicate became impossibly small; + worse yet, the other 850 were dedicated to instilling the idea that you + others like you had nothing to say worth reading.
And then they did that, for 30 years.
That's what it's been like to be us since 1989.
We'd have to be 90% better and 3000% luckier, just to approach what Def Leppard was in 1977-78; forget about 1984 or after.
DL themselves, if you projected them from 1979 into 2024, wouldn't even get a hearing from over 90% of their fanbase today. Even doing the exact same level of music.
That's not a "skill issue", or a context error.
Ordinary people's perceptions do not just grow that way naturally; they are shaped that way by those who profit most from weaponizing the past (which they can buy and own) against the present (which they see as both unwelcome competition and an unpleasant reminder that there are people younger than them).
But enough of that.
The point is, you're attributing to us a cultural power we not only never had; but were deliberately prevented from having the opportunity to earn.
Our existing and doing our things deprived you of nothing; you could've had any kind of fun you chose, if you'd only sought it out or made it yourselves.
The "DIY" kids are doing that now, in places like Bowling Green, Ohio; their "emo" music ain't for me, but it's real; I love that they're doing it, + give them all the props for it.
On that note, I'm leaving this thread behind.
Hi 5 brother, as someone who was in punk bands in the 80s, and who makes experimental music I post here, I feel every word you are typing.
As Kurt Cobain said, corporate music STILL sucks! The bland Taylor Swift most of all.
"And I have no idea what you're even talking about with boomer domination"
Seriously? Then you must have never listened to mainstream rock radio in the mid 80s that was all Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Beatles oldies all the time. It was exactly a giant boomer nostalgia trip.
Well, they were the grown-ups, who had the money and were in charge. It does not seem to me to be a case of oppression or domination if radio stations were playing music that the audience of people with money to spend wanted to hear. And anyway they now play Nirvana on the classic rock station.
"they now play Nirvana on the classic rock station."
Which means it's time to move onto different real music, not shallow materialist pop.
Grownups in charge. How has that been working out for us in the corporate dominated world of dying imperial America?
Your whole comment has the whole whiff of a humorless guy who is still pissed off as an adult man that no one properly respects his teenaged musical pretensions and deep emo tastes. I don't drink wine btw and I have Han Solo art on my wall, not weird sayings.
you started it
Correct.
I apologize for this tangent, but speaking of Boomer music…how relieved are you that we are finally free of scenes (in movies, in commercials, on TV) of aging Boomer couples putting on an old Motown / Al Green record in the dark and dancing sexily to indicate impending “sexy time”? They were doing this right up through the early part of this century.
Also I realized the other day I haven’t been subjected to James Taylor in quite some time—thankful for the small things
I am definitely happy about no longer being subjected to James Taylor at any significant frequency.
Yes. Britpop was so fun and pretty. Often funny, too.
Why are you responding to a hateful and bigoted rant with a logical point?
Perhaps she recognized the humor in the tongue-in-cheek essay, unlike a great many other commenters here, somehow.
Your tongue-in-cheek is my salt-in-wound.
A hundred glib "Rock Is Dead" essays that make my work immensely harder every day have taken their toll.
So now I talk back.
Lol, you only sat around in those basements because you were trying to get railed you dumb Trollop.
Metal and punk were already providing such spaces before alt rock even existed, but metal required you to learn how to play your instrument, and punk required you to believe in s cause greater than yourself and live by that cause, but alternative rock did not demand either.
Dunno about that, boss; I played all three.
The early-90s style called "shoegaze" required an above-average level of skill from the bass player; because I couldn't get away with smearing the notes all over the place like the guitar players did. Playing metal and punk, no one heard me unless I stopped; so I just stopped a lot. But shoegaze? Had to go all the time, holding the ship in the channel.
No, alt rock just made heavy music dynamic, melodic and downright listenable.
You get it. Trying to bring back the synthpop 80s is so cringe.
Queue “Upstairs at Eric’s” from Yaz.
That at least was relatively talented synth pop, unlike say Tears for Fears, a Flock of Seagulls, and other lightweights.
You are so sick and twisted! Head Over Heels by Tears for Fears is an incredible song.
Though I went to see them live a few years ago, and while they put on a great show -- I was impressed at how strong their voices still were -- it was ultimately a turn off, because the lead singer acted like such a pretentious twat through-out the whole show. As if he thought he was dark emo Jesus or something. I have no idea if he was ALWAYS like that, or if he's just turned into a warped person from making too much money singing the same songs for 35 years. Perhaps he turned into a hostile self-aggrandizing hipster after being made fun of them for so long. As they say, people eventually become what they fight against.
Oh noes I insulted the teeny bopper bubblegum pop you love, I must be “sick and twisted,” like a serial killer, sob!
Sorry for coming to this so late, but Tears for Fears a 'teeny bopper bubblegum pop' band?! Not that there's anything wrong with good teeny bopper bubblegum pop anyway: it was my way into music and I've always loved it, even when my main preoccupation was playing in HC, anarchopunk and noise bands in the eighties and nineties - as, to varying degrees, did plenty of the other people I knew who were involved in those scenes - but calling Tears for Fears 'teeny bopper bubblegum pop' is just daft. Apart from the fact that they were great and both great musicians, their debut LP was, to quote wikipedia, a 'concept album focusing on themes of child abuse, psychological trauma and depression'. And they were gloomy and weird as fuck - haven't you heard 'Pale Shelter' or 'Shout'?
Well said
I would've named some of the worst offenders and bands, but I don't want to give them any shout outs. The sinners I'm talking about know exactly what type of artist I'm talking about.
If you think this is a new thing you have never heard The Velvet Underground, or Billy Holiday, or a minor key requiem mass.
Neil Young father of Grunge is definitely a Patsy. Listen to the song Ohio about Kent Street. And long before that he sold his Soul to or Controllers so he could stay in the USA. He came to my city in the eighties promoting nuclear weapons and Regans Star Wars. And he wrote in his book he use to hang out with Charles Manson. Probably had the same controller.
Haha, I suppose I'm living a happier, fuller life not even knowing, so I'm not going to look them up. Give me Louis Armstrong, Chicago, or the Gypsy Kings.
52 year old white make here and unrepentant lover of the Smiths, the Cure, Radiohead, and Neutral Milk Hotel. You'll never take me alive. Sad bastard music 4ever!
You had me at Radiohead. May I offer you some Primus?
Sure, we'll sail the seas of cheese!
As a member of Gen X, I'm just happy people are noticing us. There's no such thing as bad publicity...
I’m 46. I don’t ridicule people for listening to pop, and haven’t for decades now.
I grew up in a working-class household in an upper-middle-class suburb. Among my peer group, the angry and depressing music was dominant. Maybe we had our reasons, since no one paid for us to drive anything but the shittiest of cars, no one was gonna pay for us to go to college, no one paid for extracurricular activities for us like sports or private music lessons.
We all started working as many hours as possible the minute we turned 16 because otherwise there was no social life for us. Mom didn’t drop us off at the mall with $50 to blow on whatever when we were teens.
Grunge, metal, industrial also sounds great when you’re high or you’re taking psychedelics. If I had had to listen to a Mariah Carey record on acid I would have had a psychotic break.
Most of those grunge acts didn’t come from happy homes or happy neighborhoods. Nirvana was born in a depressing logging town. Lot of those guys had shitty working-class childhoods where the future wasn’t very bright.
But hey, at least we got to make extra cash by selling drugs to the upper-middle-class kids.
You might be surprised. First time I took acid is the first time I listened to Phish...Rift specifically...and it blew my mind and I loved Phish after that (was never much into the hippy thing previously). So if you HAD been listening to Mariah...well...you never know.
I also drove a piece of shit car that stalled every time it rained, broke down about once a month (and then I'd just have to wait on the side of the road for a kind stranger to tow me to a gas station, since no cell phones then), had no AC, and that I had to wrap a rubber band around the ashtray in order to keep it in 5th gear or it would pop out on the highway.
We all worked shit jobs, I didn't know anyone without a part-time and summer job back then. But funny bc to me they were great times.
I have had so many women DM me saying thank you, it was so awful back then how terrible the music snobs were. And yet here on this thread I find out that there are 50 year old guys still holding onto their ridiculous musical pretensions from 30 years ago which is just WILD. But many are being big enough jerks about it that they have only reminded me and further convinced me of exactly how insufferable it was back then. Not like nowadays when everyone can listen to whatever they want.
I submit that AIC and Soundgarden is far from pop. Talented af. I took acid and listened to AIC - Dirt for the first time. Connected would be an understatement.
Love this take
I stopped reading Freddie a while ago, because every post is the same 10,000 words rearranged, but it occurs to me I have no idea what kind of music he actually likes.
I actually like Freddie's writing a lot and he is one of the first writers I subscribed to. But I'm not a fan of being an adult and still not getting over one's overwrought teenaged angst, including treating musical tastes as some serious life and death matter. It is right and good to look back at your teenaged self and find yourself absurd and embarrassing and laugh at what a moron you were. And it's wholesome to look at today's teenagers, as an adult, and think they're idiots. Because all teenagers are. It's not healthy to be upset that one is not a teenager anymore, or that they don't respect and admire your musical opinions. They're not supposed to. They're supposed to roll their eyes at gross, lame 40 year olds, and 40 year olds are supposed to consider teenagers to be moronic barely human animals. That is the natural and wholesome way of the world.
Completely agreed. Freddie is actually kind of one of my heroes, and I'm reasonably sure that I am or was one of his 'founding' Substack subscribers, whatever that means. I don't think it's correct or good to never change in your opinions (certainly my own views have evolved to the point of incoherence since I stopped being a talk radio pilled shithead), but I can definitely respect someone who pulls it off. That probably goes double for Freddie, since his views are so eclectic, not to mention avowedly (if not necessarily recognizably) card-carrying commie. It's just rare to find someone so unreformed after so long, not to mention all the very real shit he's been through and taken responsibility for (!!), that you have to pay attention, at least up to a point.
It's been fascinating to watch him, anchored to the core of the Earth, as the horseshoe of ideology and politics contorts itself around him. That's probably the main reason I read him for so long, but it has been that long, and I have read X hundreds or thousands of his pieces, such that now I can basically game out every one of his new pieces in my head by the headline.
But equally, one of my points in writing the above was that I never took his writing on music seriously, for exactly the reasons you identify, and certainly his musical opinions (beyond hating a strawman version of 'poptimism') never made an impression on me. My favorite artist is, legitimately, Carly Rae Jepsen. I own every one of her albums and the B sides and everything. She fucking kicks ass.
Agree with you on all of this. Though I guess I will credit him with educating me about the very existence of poptimism in the first place, which I've only heard of because of his pieces on it. It is very alien to my mind to care remotely what a 20 year old thinks about music or is listening to, so I did find his poptism pieces rather fascinating. And that allowed me to write this polemic and bring out the ire of the furious Gen X army of the Extremely Serious About Their Very Serious Musical Taste Guys. I had no idea so many were still devoted to the cause! I had thought Freddie was the only one I was poking fun at, but I guess not.
In a recent post i remember he name checked a fair amount of underground metal in a way that I found surprisingly credible. i.e. Electric Wizard.
I love Freddie but that was a hilariously accurate description of some of his writing lately.
it's not like he hasn't written time and again about bands he likes
Heh, I just wrote a takedown note about my generation that fits perfectly with this. I'll share it here since it's pretty funny and all too true of so many of my generation.
Well said. And believe me, I haven’t written about my generation in this thread but I don’t spare it either. Gen-X is the most insecure, vain generation in history. We grew up with no power to change anything at all (being such a small generation), so we immersed ourselves in trivial opinion wars: what bands you liked defined you. Do you listen to sophisto-rock like the Talking Heads or Sonic Youth? Well you clearly are more intelligent than the common rabble. Do you prefer The Pixies or Nirvana? It really matters. Or are you one of those Cro-Magnons who like prog rock? Pathetic losers — can’t get laid.
Are you a wigger, a hipster, a longhair or a hey-ma headbanger? This is what matters. All that matters. Do you wear straight leg pants or do you taper them like a New Waver? Oh, you like New Wave, you’re a pretty cool liker of the second wave British invasion. Morrissey or The Cure? Both? Philistine.
Guns and Roses? Working class trash. Nine Inch Nails are so sophisticated.
What drugs do you do? Coke? Pathetic. Weed and acid, mushrooms? Okay you’re alright. Heroin? Whoa man, you gotta watch that shit but it is pretty fuckin’ chic.
As crazed as the Boomers are, and they are certainly crazy (if we can speak of a generation as a unit, which we can’t but I will anyway) Gen-X are the pathetic detritus left over from all the fun the Boomers had at Woodstock, and their key-parties before/during the first decades of their adulthood when they got real jobs and had us earlier Gen-X who they mostly hated and constantly talked down to for being frivolous and trivial. And they were correct.
This is so 100% right on. Pretentious fucks we all were! I truly had assumed that everyone had gotten over this long ago, but clearly many have not based on some of these comments. I can't remember the last time I asked someone, or anyone asked me, "what kind of music do you like?" as if it was some deeply meaningful and important questions that would impact their assessment of your character. Honestly I had forgotten just how insufferable all this used to be...until reading through some of these comments and now I remember why I've nursed this grievance bc of the ridiculous excess of snooty vanity.
God, so much of my lifelong anger at Pretentious Music Dudes makes sense now. I (41 in a few weeks) hung out with Xers almost exclusively until I was around 30. So many Music Dudes openly hating anything I listened to that wasn't properly deep. So many more who felt like they had the responsibility of being my official tour guide into the world of Real Music, so graciously bestowing upon me a more refined taste in music. God, I hated them and their attitudes so much and I didn't even realize how much happier I've been since they became more obscure, haha.
For real. The amazing thing is that I obviously wrote this in jest and just *assumed* that every adult had left behind their tortured teenaged pretensions several decades ago. But reading how hostile and STILL up their own butts about their deep musical choices some of these guys are has made me take my own roast more seriously. Like maybe they actually ARE kinda evil.
I haven't had to have much interaction with these dudes in a while, and oh boy, this comment thread brought me back, lol. They really never did grow out of it, and they're big mad.
There was a Portlandia sketch about gen-x music pretention - it takes place in the Women for Women Book Shop as I recall, where a bunch of parents with kids in a kindergarten class have a meetup and they get all pissy about the album collection the teacher keeps at school for the kids. Brought me back.
Oh for sure. I haven't thought about this shit in years, decades really, but I spent an hour or so ragging on Boomers earlier today and felt it only fair to offer a little balance.
Wtf. For real? Ouch dude. Show me where the Alice In Chains album hurt you.
Here comes the rooster to take a chunk outta my ass.
Lollll
I think we liked Guns'n'Roses precisely because it was working class. It was born of an opposition to stardom and glamour. I think it was the last attempt to reject Factory Musicing, the manufactured stars, the entertainment industry as industry. It eventually failed but it had a certain authencity that is fun to remember. I guess it depends on the circles, because in mine no one would say "sophisticated" or "philistine", the working class aesthetic was take seriously, especially by those who weren't, it was fun to get out from my overly rigid middle class parent's house and wallow in the mud.
Absolutely. Guns and Roses rocked the fuck out of us. I wasn't trying to criticize any one band (well, maybe Sonic Youth) just saying how uptight some of gen-x could be about these signifiers. Honestly in high school it was fine. Only when I went to college did I start to see this annoying behavior. But then colleges are generally full of insecure dumbasses so there you go.
Floored to see a gen X self takedown . As an older millennial I always felt like I missed the actually cool generation, and started off with a large back catalogue of gen x music, most of which I like to this day. I remember an infamous metal/hardcore blogger from a 10-15 years ago who was Gen x and seemed to throw himself under the bus a lot though 🤷
You know, that was about the time globalization started, good paying manual jobs got sent overseas, our communities started dying, and we started hearing what toxic pieces af garbage we are for being white and male. What precisely would you expect from young men at the time?
Anyway, Eddie Vedder is like a TDS woke tard now, and most of the rest are dead or irrelevant, so I'm not sure they need to go to jail too, lol.
BTW I'm still a better dancer at 51 than most of the k-pops and swifties, so jokes on them.
This reminds me of a conversion I had in my twenties with another girl where I said, "Isn't it weird how guys think they *own* music?"
And they do think that. They think it's something you need their permission to access and not just something everyone is free and entitled to.
The tyranny you describe was real. I remember a man at a party in Portland demanding-- DEMANDING that I renounce my love for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and he actually stood there tapping his toe waiting for me acquiesce. When I didn't he acted like this is the first time his demands weren't met and then he said, "Well, then your opinion on music is invalid."
Of course there were many, many more stories like this. I learned around 18 to just start saying "More for me" over and over and over when the subject of RHCP or anything fun came up.
And you wouldn't believe how persistent they were, even after being shot down a dozen times. "But are you aware he's not a good singer??"
"Don't care. Is to me."
"But.. But.. But... But... But"
And why did we suffer this? Like you said, it was where the boys were.
However, looking back I wish I didn't waste my time crushing on these nihilistic losers.
I was afraid of handsome jocks, but maybe I should've given them a chance, they liked fun.
"Well, then your opinion on music is invalid."
Absolute classic. Encapsulates the whole ethic of the times so perfectly.
100% with you on being afraid of jocks too, while wasting years of my youth trying to impress pretentious too-cool-for-school skateboarders. The only explanation I have for this behavior is that I truly was brain-washed by all the movies of the time, which universally portrayed jocks as meathead asshole sadists and borderline rapists, and suffering melancholy pale skinny boys as the nice ones. I'm sad to say that it took me until my 30s to realize this was completely false and an inversion of the truth. Basically it was just the same miserable guys writing screenplays about how they thought the universe should be ordered, back then.
I too was very impressionable around movies. You can imagine the personality I cobbled together after watching Donnie Darko, The Secretary, Girl Interrupted and High Fidelity.
(Love the movies, but not a playbook for life!)
That dude sounds mad based.
Game recognize game 🙏
It wasn't just in music that this happened. It was across all of the arts. I was an aspiring writer at the time. I knew my writing wasn't nearly ironic, meta, or tragic enough for what was being passed around at the time. I saw the same thing going on with visual arts and philosophy. They called it "post -modern" but I agree with you, it was just a way to destroy expressions of joy and beauty.
I think you had to be around for it, and not a miserable person yourself, to understand how much this really was a reigning ethic at the time.
https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelnewberry/p/manipulating-millions-the-role-of?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2f2dg4
As a lifelong metalhead and prog rock fan I am not exactly sure which side of your divide I'm on, but boy do I have my own axe to grind about alternative rock and its cult of mediocrity, ugliness, and failure. Because the alt rockers and their incelcore garbage also crushed my favorite music into the mud and claimed it as a victory over "hair metal". Cultivating musicianship was "pretentious", because nobody really would do something difficult just for the sheer joy of pushing oneself, or watch somebody do something difficult to witness excellence. Making men and masculinity beautiful was "gay" (OK, I admit heavy metal definitely is a bit gay, but suck it up you wusses!), men were supposed to look, sound, and smell bad. Mystery, metaphor, and ambiguity were "unrelatable", everything has to speak directly and plainly to the narrow worldview of a Midwestern suburban proto-incel. Speed was prohibited, as it might speak to some inner exuberance and affirmation of life, hence Pantera. The unabashed dorkiness and earnestness of prog rock and '80s power metal had to go too, as the incel is nothing if not forever embarrassed, cringing at what other men think of him.
You want some rock and roll? Listen to Queensrÿche doing "Take Hold of the Flame" in Tokyo in 1984, that's some rock and fucking roll.
Hard agree. Actually they were far worse about metal and hair bands and glam rock than they were about pop. Liking those bands made you basically irredeemable scum. And again I'd say that's a lot bc they were too fun. They really had a puritan like objection to showmanship and energy.
I remember my dad telling me a story about how he attended a Yes concert and during the climax of "The Gates of Delirium" a laser shot Jon Anderson in the chest and he pretended to die on stage, only to appear again for the "Soon" denouement (this was a 20+ minute song). He framed this as ridiculous, but to me it sounds awesome and I wish I had been there (unfortunately it was around 12 years before I was born).
Queensryche-- oh my god that takes me back! I haven't heard that name since college, but I had a roommate for whom it was the soundtrack of his life. Side note: that roommate interned at Polygram, and convinced me to get an internship at Virgin, where I ended up meeting Eddie Vedder before he landed the Pearl Jam gig. This was circa Mother Love Bone. (But the band we *really* bonded over was Jellyfish, which has nothing to do with anything in this thread!)
I'm glad you brought up Yes, since my Substack ("Flights of the Moorglade") is literally named after the proggiest of prog music. It's a band I've seen probably a dozen times. I was thinking about them while reading this piece, because their 70s "excesses"-- Tales of Topographic Oceans in particular-- are often cited as one of the catalysts of the punk movement that followed.
Anyway, thanks for the walk down memory lane ; )
Yes has a very odd cult following...I've never been able to identify what the common thread is between the Yes lovers. Don't get me wrong, I love Owner of a Lonely Heart as much as anyone, but my husband is one of the Yes obsessives, and it does puzzle me a bit.
I literally have this Note saved in my phone! "How to describe the typical Yes fan? The guys around me in the crowd an hour before the show? Whatever I say about them I say about me..."
And with that, I will selectively stop quoting ; )
Oh come on, that's a huge tease! 😉
Geoff Tate, greatest rock singer of all time.
Interesting. I can add that what you described may have created a vicious cycle: depressed sexless losers create depressing, sexless music -> depressing, sexless music creates more depressed, sexless losers.
As a younger millennial, I started listening to mainstream pop in early 2000s. However, by middle school, the mainstream has shifted into techno and hip-hop, which became unbearable for me. I always struggled to fit in, and at the time listening to rock, grunge and metal was still an option, and I gave it a go. In hindsight, I think it made me more alienated, depressed and sexless, and, quite possibly, significantly contributed to my teenage inceldom.
Socially, it seemed like rock/metal/grunge worked only if you ended it in a small, tight-knit group of friends from the same subculture (the girls would usually branch-swing between long relationships with the boys from the group). Unfortunately I never got to join such group, most of the time it was just me + a couple girls I was friendzoned with.
Ah ha, nice try millennial! You're just trying to curry favour with the boomers to skip the hierarchy, now that it's rightfully ours. Yes we had our angst and depressing music but there was also catharsis in the moshpit (perhaps more often a male aggressive type but not wholly), then there was dance music and ecstasy - did you forget that period? As for that generic overproduced stuff you call music, well it's almost as tragic as you not being able to buy a house!
I am one of these sinners & I feel you have seen into my black soul. I repent!
I forgive you. See, all we need is enough honest repenters, and Taylor Swift will lose her wings!
Liar Liar. Women aren’t capable of forgiveness.
This was hilarious and so true. I missed the worst of it, coming of age to Spice Girls and the boy bands, but still had to sit through so much of the damned awful stuff when hanging out with the 'cool guys'. There was still plenty around though, I mean Papa Roach? Come on dude.
Yes the Spice Girls, Britney, and Backstreet Boys were the vanguards of their coming downfall...that wasn't my favorite era either, and they were critically acclaimed at least. But I really feel the grunge-sters ruined my time in high school!
The late 90s were probably the worst era of pop radio ever; the "rock" was super lame and formulaic (Creed, Matchbox 20), the pop was soulless crap (Britney, NSync) and even hip hop had left the musical/lyrical diversity of the early 90s and gone the lame single sample Puff Daddy route where every song was about how much money you had.
I don't like how rock has basically died and hip hop has gotten even worse(at least for male rappers) but when I listen to pop radio with my tween daughter it is SO MUCH better now than it was when I was in high school.
I agree with you that late 90s and early 00s was the absolute worst. 1999 may actually be the worst year ever of what was on the radio. All crap pop of former Disney stars and that awful Maxim magazine type skateboarder pop rock.
I’m more impressed that these apparently proto incels were capable of ruining the time of what sounds like a hot/cool girl in high school. Like what were you even doing in their basements lol
It was a weird time. You have to understand there was honestly an enormous amount of cultural/media propaganda basically saying that anyone who was outgoing, athletic, or popular was basically an evil borderline racist who spent all their time beating people up and bullying them, and that all the shy sensitive weirdo guys were the real gems. Almost everything that came out of Hollywood was kind of crafted in that message, and I was like 12 so I believed it. FWIW they gave the same message about girls. Heathers, Mean Girls, every teen movie and show was about how weirdos were all heros and outgoing popular happy people were evil. I think maybe it was a reaction to the early 80s. Or maybe just that the artistic types who write screenplays and TV shows and music were portraying their view of the world.
That should've said borderline rapist, not racist. Though actually, probably that too. I truly thought all jocks were completely evil back then.
Tbh the media propaganda hasn’t changed in that regard. I guess it’s changed from “popular jocks” to “white/male/straight/christian” in general. Heathers and mean girls are like two decades apart? I loved both those movies .
It was pretty angsty though as I said in another comment there was catharsis in the moshpit (if you could handle the sweat ;)
Yeah all my friends loved the moshpit. Hell, half my friends had their own garage bands, I actually had forgotten about that until right this moment typing this. I was way too much of a wimp for that myself though. I don't mind sweat, but I wasn't about to take a chance on busting up my pretty face. ;)
You absolutely got the worst of it. The only good part of the 90s was the first. Yes Papa Roach is terrible, but they are a far cry from Nirvana or The Smashing Pumpkins.
I was that guy back when.
While some stuff - the first Pearl Jam album, forex, from the 90's is still in my collection, outside of EDM and some great soundtrack stuff (the crow, cool world), the 90's is mostly a giant hole in my collection.
There's a lot more 80's, a fair bit of classic rock and prog, and a lot more post-zeroes EDM/prog and gloriously cheesy symphonic/power metal. Not much K-pop but I don't knock it, but a fair bit of Japanese bands in various genres too.
Why?
Because I may have been that gen Xer back then, in the long run it was just too much of a downer. So angry all the time. Sometimes said or down or angry is appropriate. But dwelling in it all the time?
Yes I’m a gen-x male, but the aesthetic of grunge was co-opted into some of the worst music possible. But I’m here to say that prior to nevermind, the scene was glorious. Also lots of my faves were women: L7, PJ Harvey, Bongwater, Liz Phair, the Royal Trux and Sonic Youth fronted by Kim Gordon. This stuff was an escape from the ubiquitous corporate pop spectacle. You can harsh on Fugazi, but ‘suggestion’ truly made me much more aware of how appallingly women were treated. Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, and Sebadoh were all angst but did a lot of musical exploration. Sometimes they might have been a bummer, but ain’t that the blues.