#9: 1992

THE NINETIES-IST
Welcome to another edition of Brook Pridemore’s The Nineties-ist. This edition discusses 1992, Pavement sticking their heads out of the sand for the first time, Sinead O’Connor tearing up a picture of the pope, and John Frusciante’s love of herion. For earlier installments, go here.

All eyes on Seattle in 1992, right? Warrant lead singer Jani Lane commented (after the dust had settled) that in August 1991, Warrant had stepped into the offices of Columbia Records to their hit, “Cherry Pie,” blasting from every speaker in the house, giant posters of the iconic album cover all over the place. By the time Lane and Co. made their way back into the Columbia office in Spring 1992, they were practically persona non grata: their posters had been eschewed for an equally large, but bleak poster for the new Alice in Chains album, and that band’s specific, dour sounds were pouring out of the stereo, in place of Warrant’s party rock. Times had changed, and fun dumb stuff was out. Intellectual (or at least faux-intellectual, in the case of Alice in Chains) sounds, ushered in by the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in September 1991, were in. American pop culture had changed for the good, and things would never be the same.

It couldn’t last, though. Within just a couple of years, all of the avenues that had been opened to forward-thinking, eclectic rock groups were closed again. Prefab music came back into vogue. The watershed of rock bands who had benefited from the early 90s boom mostly failed to capitalize on their initial momentum (Sonic Youth being particularly notorious for making a slew of bad albums in the 90s), sinking back into relative obscurity. But many still remained firmly enough planted in the public consciousness to make it impossible for any new upstart scenes to come up.

Look: Pavement came up thumbing their noses at the Monsters of Rock Tour. They were young little upstarts, jeering at the bloated, dinosaur rockers who hadn’t held onto their money and needed to trot out their old hits one more time. It was part of what we loved about them. But how can Tiger-Striped Pajamas (a band I’ve just made up, replace with Los Campesinos, if you need to) get away with thumbing their noses at Pavement, or the Pixies, for cashing in on the nostalgia train? How can I laugh in the faces of Monsters of Folk, when I love M. Ward enough to buy every record he shits out, regardless of the presence of Conor Oberst? The answer is I can’t. Irony is the new sincerity. How can we be sarcastic in the face of sarcasm?

This rampant irony, I’m convinced, can be traced to a single event. Perplexed by this weird little city in the Northwest most people never got within a few hundred miles of, the national media didn’t know what to make of Seattle, WA. In turn perplexed by the sudden upswing of interest in their little city, the indie rock glitterati seized the opportunity to embarrass as many journalists as possible. Anything that came out of Thurston Moore’s mouth between 1991 and 1994 (at least in public) sounds like some Dadaist joke.

The event that I’m most impressed by occurred on November 15th, 1992. Looking to get an insider’s perspective on the Seattle scene, a hapless New York Times reporter called Sub Pop’s offices and bothered sales representative Megan Jasper for slang terms common in the grunge scene. That scene having no real regional slang, Jasper made up a bunch of phrases, my favorites including “swingin’ on the flippity flop” as a euphemism for hanging out, and “bloated, big bag of bloatation” as a euphemism for drunk. The Times reporter then printed as fact, in a sidebar to an article about the grunge scene. Though the new slang never even pretended to catch on, the Times claimed it was the next big thing, going so far as to add the embarrassing tag line, “coming soon to a high school or mall near you.”

On a more sincere note, it was on October 3rd, 1992 when Sinead O’Connor used her moment in the live TV spotlight to tear up a picture of the Pope during a Saturday Night Live appearance. My memory of this event is that most people were shocked and angry at the gesture, swearing that they’d never listen to another of O’Connor’s records (indeed, her career did decline pretty steeply after the appearance. Not even Madonna’s spoof of the event, in which she tore up a picture of John Belushi a few weeks later, did much to help), which is all well and good. But the same people, a couple of years previous, had laughed hysterically when Roseanne Barr had desecrated the National Anthem, which was just a drunken, angry stunt. Sinead O’ Connor made a gesture that meant something to her: the song (an a capella version of Bob Marley’s “War”) and stunt were meant to symbolize the singer’s protest of child sexual assault in the Roman Catholic Church. For her sincerity, she was crucified.

In May of 92, John Frusciante left the Red Hot Chili Peppers, over growing concern around his heroin addiction. This was the second guitarist the Peppers lost to drugs (though Frusciante subsequently cleaned up his act and returned to the fold in 1998), and it’s an interesting precursor for a lot of the tragic ends that befell a good number of 90s rock stars (when you think about it, the 90s are rivaled only by the late 60s/early 70s for drug related deaths in rock music).

Finally, Seattle didn’t entirely dominate the market in 1992. Guns N’ Roses, arguably the Bizarro-World Nirvana, set a world record in June 1992, when their last gigantic hit, “November Rain,” became the longest song in history to enter the US Top 20 (for the fact checkers, my guess is that Meat Loaf’s mega-hit in 1993, “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was pared down from it’s album-length eleven minutes to a more svelte running time). Even though they’d been knocked off their pedestal by the new voice of a generation (and embarrassed, hilariously, over and again), Guns N’ Roses were far from down and out.

Next Week: Janet Jackson’s Janet, the beginning of Michael Jackson’s child molestation drama, and Soul Asylum strike gold with their MTV sponsored ad for missing kids.

by Brook Pridemore