RIP grunge?

Soundgarden -- and a style --
fall from the mountaintop

by Matt Ashare

On April 9, Soundgarden called it quits. And I still haven't run across anyone who seems particularly upset by the news. I know there are disappointed fans out there at some Web site (http://soundgarden.com.?) publicly mourning, comforting one another, perhaps even arguing over whether it was bassist Ben Shepherd's fault. (It's reported that Shepherd walked angrily off stage at the group's final performance, on February 9 in Honolulu.)

But every platinum act has its faithful. I'm sure David Coverdale's decision to leave Whitesnake bummed out a fan-club member or two. And Whitesnake were just another million-selling hair-metal outfit. Soundgarden were one of the last remaining titans of grunge, the gritty flannel sensation that swept the nation only five years ago. You'd think -- or I thought -- at the least that Soundgarden's demise would inspire discussion among the people lunching at the next booth over at Pizzeria Uno, that the guy in line at Star Market might be overheard mumbling about it to his girlfriend, or that my parents might call to ask, "Who is this Soundgarden? Is it a big deal that they broke up?"

Not really, I guess. They were the first of Seattle's finest to be drafted by the majors, back in '88. And they were one of the few two-time Lollapalooza veterans. On a more trivial note, they might have been the first underground band to pull the sneaky faux indie-rock maneuver when, after signing with A&M, they put out Ultramega OK on SST and waited until 1989 to make their major-label debut with Louder Than Love.

So Soundgarden -- a band formed by Robert Plant-like singer/guitarist Chris Cornell, bearded guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron, and bassist Hiro Yamamoto (replaced first by ex-Nirvana guitarist Jason Everman and then by Shepherd) -- were certainly important or significant on some level. They might not have popularized the grunge aesthetic with the same categorical commercial force as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but they were the ones who laid the groundwork for the Seattle phenomenon by proving to the record industry that the scruffy style could be passed off as metal to the hair-spray-addled fans of MTV's now defunct Headbangers Ball. And now? They've become the unwitting bearers of the message that grunge turned out to be every bit as disposable as the disposable pop it was meant to boot out of the spotlight. Perhaps even more so, since its eminence seems to have lasted barely five years.

Where has all the grunge gone? We all know what happened to Kurt Cobain. His bandmates, Foo Fighter Dave Grohl (see opposite page) and Sweet 75's Krist Novoselic (see page 16), are making music that's fun but hardly matches the emotional impact or import of Nirvana. Pearl Jam? That band's collective conscience is so tied up in moral knots that they've begun to alienate even those people who believe in whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. If two months ago you'd asked me to pick the Seattle band most likely to throw in the towel, I'd have said Pearl Jam. Their sales figures have been going downhill since Ten, and their members are all involved in side projects. Soundgarden's last album, Down on the Upside (A&M), didn't have a "Black Hole Sun," but it did just fine. And the Hater excursion of Cameron and Shepherd wasn't half as serious as Jeff Ament's solemn Three Fish.

As for the rest of the Seattle crew, the Melvins (who rubbed shoulders with Soundgarden on the seminal grunge artifact Deep Six, a 1986 compilation on C/Z that also featured the long defunct U-Men, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, and Green River) are back on an indie label (Amphetamine Reptile) after a couple years of poor showings on the majors. But they're as incomprehensible as they are indestructible. And who else is there? The Screaming Trees? Languishing in soured commercial oblivion. Mudhoney? Yeah, right. And the bubblegrunge of the Presidents of the United States of America turned out to have a shelf life shorter than skim milk.

The top half of this week's Billboard 200 tells an even more sobering story for those about to rock. Urban soulsters Mary J. Blige, Celine Dion, and Erykah Badu (see page 22), larger-than-life rappers living and deceased (the Notorious B.I.G. and Heavy D), glossy folk pop (Jewel), and suburban C&W (George Strait and LeAnn Rimes) are the biggest sellers. With the exception of ska poppers No Doubt and Sublime, there's not an alternative rocker to be found in the top 20. The closest thing to Seattle is the faux grunge of Silverchair and Tonic, as well as the Nirwanna-be stylings of Bush in the bottom half of the Hot 100. Mr. Henry Rollins is barely eking out a commercial existence parked down at #196 with his new Come In and Burn (DreamWorks).

Which is not to say that grunge is completely dead or that the Great Northwest no longer supports compelling bands. Three of the best rock albums I've heard so far this year -- Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out (Kill Rock Stars), Built To Spill's Perfect from Now On (Warner Bros.), and Pond's Rock Collection (Work Group/Sony) -- are the work of groups from that region. Only Rock Collection fits neatly into the grunge rubric. Built To Spill's Doug Martsch was doing grungy punk with Seattle's Treepeople a couple of years ago, but he now favors art-damaged psychedelia. And Sleater-Kinney come out of the riot grrrl tradition. It's also worth mentioning that Sub Pop's second-best-selling band (behind Nirvana), the melodi-core Sunny Day Real Estate, are rumored to be reuniting for a fall release now that their drummer, William Goldsmith, has been booted from Foo Fighters.

No, the sound that Seattle chronicler Michael Azerrad described as "a distorted miasma of guitars, sweat, and benign belligerence that was part punk and part outré seventies hard rock and metal, spiced up with vestigial dollops of new wave and goth" (he forgot psychedelia) isn't likely to disappear any time soon. If 15-year-old boy wonder singer/guitarist Ben Kweller and his Nirvana-inspired trio Radish are any indication, then there's a generation of grunge-weaned youth practicing Nevermind riffs in suburban bedrooms across the country, saving up their allowances for Rat distortion pedals and Marshall stacks.

But Radish's debut release also indicates a subtle shift away from the roots Azerrad and many others have traced grunge's origin to. Restraining Bolt (Mercury) sounds grungy, but it doesn't feel like the grunge that erupted from Seattle earlier this decade -- rather it's like fake sweat, which looks like the real stuff in fashion photographs but feels like water from a spray bottle when it touches your skin. What's missing is the sense of a secret shared history that once bubbled up from the churning center of Soundgarden's Zeppelin riffage, Nirvana's barbed hooks, and the lumberjack roar of the Screaming Trees. Gone is the tension between mass acceptance and underground loyalty that gave grunge an element of danger. And lost is the subtle irony of seeing yesterday's ugly ducklings transformed into today's cover boys and girls -- a feeling that was never far from the surface of Soundgarden's sweaty torso.

If you saw last year's Seattle-scene documentary Hype, then you already know that all of those things had been chewed up in the feeding frenzy that followed Nirvana's initial triumphs. The illusion of subversive importance may have hovered around a band like Soundgarden in the wake of Nevermind, but by the time they called it quits, it had become as transparent as the desperate hype currently surrounding electronica. I doubt that had anything to do with the break-up, but I have a feeling it's why nobody seemed terribly surprised by the news that a multi-platinum group with no history of the drug and personnel problems that have plagued other Seattle luminaries had pulled their own plug.

In retrospect, what's really shocking is how quickly grunge was commodified, exploited, and ultimately stripped of its life force -- and how little a once-groundbreaking outfit like Soundgarden had come to mean in the end. None of that was Soundgarden's fault. So it's worth at least mentioning that they were a great rock band.