The Breeders and a song that we all love but don't understand

First off, thanks to everyone who read and commented on the last entry, particularly my burgeoning Irish and Swedish readership. We’ve almost reached double digits! I might have the most read blog on the planet given that I am literally twenty years behind the curve that I was once on the forefront of. Anyway, some replies to the Nirvana / Motley Crue feedback.

• I used the Nirvana / Motley Crue comparison mainly because it has become the cultural default for explaining the death of hair metal and the rise of grunge. It’s not fair as there are a lot of other bands responsible for the change (I even called out Faith No More as an example). But obviously no cultural change hinges on a single song or artist.
• I agree with Dennis in that hair metal wasn’t the only genre that got pushed to the side. I wouldn’t say that thrash metal went away (Slayer was kept in cryogenic status only to be awoken every other year to be told that it was still 1984) but yeah, it was a seismic change. I also want to make clear that I don’t consider any genre of music to be inherently bad. Artists can be good or bad, the music industry is evil, but genres just are.
• I’ll always hold the opinion that if Kurt Cobain went with his original idea of having In Utero be a polka album that his life would have turned out differently. Fame definitely led to his death. Well, that and heroin.

Still, Nirvana would have always been a hit. Hell, Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana” is legitimately a good song. Instead, today we are going to focus on a band whose success didn’t make sense then, doesn’t make sense now, but yet no one ever questions it. In other words….

How in the world did The Breeders have a platinum album?

 Figure 8: A PR agent decided this was the best group photo

Let’s start with a little history. The Breeders were originally formed as a side project for Kim Deal of The Pixies and Tanya Donnelly of Throwing Muses. In other words, a band that featured the girl who played bass in The Pixies and the other girl in Throwing Muses. Kim brought in her twin sister Kelly because, hey, who doesn’t like twins. Josephine Wiggs played bass and they brought in a guy on drums because it was nice to have a weird variation on the rule that every college band in the early 90’s was required to have a female bass player. 

Anyway, they released an album “Pod” that is known only for being one of Kurt Cobain’s favorite albums. Not that it was a bad side project but The Pixies and Throwing Muses had reached a level of success in that they would have their video played on 120 Minutes every other month. A side project wasn’t expected to sell. When it came time to record their next album Tanya had decided to form Belly and go out on her own. Which A) makes Belly’s “Star” and The Breeders “Last Splash” an interesting comparison and B) requires a confession on my part.

I have had a crush on Tanya Donnelly for over thirty years. Meaning I still have a crush on her to this very day. She reminds me of the first girl I ever fell for, and you never get over that first love. (It’s her eyes. I can’t explain it.) So, I am in no way unbiased here and have decided that watching fan videos of Belly’s reunion shows is slightly healthier than my reaching out to a woman on Facebook and saying “Hey, do you remember meeting me in 1990?”

Figure 9: Editor’s Note: It is not known why the author requested the inclusion of this image

Belly had a pretty successful debut with “Star”. It sold around 800,000 copies with “Feed the Tree” being a number one hit on the Alternative Charts and reaching 95 on the Billboard Hot 100. Over the past 16 years, the video of “Feed the Tree” has two million views, so they still hold a place in the heart of many a Gen X’er.

It’s not too surprising that this song was successful. It is a very good power pop song which uses a wonderful colloquialism in ‘Feed the Tree” that works much like “Losing My Religion” in that it gives the song a deeper and more mysterious meaning than it deserves. Tanya has a good voice with a very interesting warble which provides a great uniquely flawed quality to the piece. The video is classic 90’s alternative rock with the band playing in a forest for no apparent reason other than the song has the word tree in it and the camera is not allowed to stay still for a single second. No wonder we all ended up with ADHD. And finally, did I mention that Tanya Donnelly is very attractive?

All in all, a pretty clean package for an alternative hit. Good song, good video, with enough radio and MTV backing you have yourself a gold record. And now we have The Breeders with their hit song “Cannonball”, which in comparison sold over a million copies, hit 44 on the Hot 100 (though only 2 on the Alternative charts surprising enough) and whose video has an astounding 25 million views over the past 13 years. So, this video gets 2 million views a year which is what Belly has in 16 years total. It’s clear which song had the lasting influence. But why?

Ok, after some distorted vocals we start off with what is simply one of my favorite bass riffs of all time. It’s what we all know and love about the song. Admittedly, it’s not one of those bass lines or melodies that you dance to but it just rocks. That said, I have absolutely no clue what this song is actually about. The most memorable lyric is “I’ll be your whatever you want. The bong in this reggae song.” Much of the time the guitars and vocals are completely distorted. Kim Deal is wearing the exact same white tube socks that I wore in gym class in 1983. I still remember a friend in college noting that the male drummer provides the eye candy by wearing a basketball jersey. The video is classic 90’s alternative though with a bowling ball rolling down the street because, uh, it looks kind of like a cannonball. But nothing about this looks like it should sell a million copies. How does a song about nothing and featuring a band that is trying to look as unglamorous as possible still get played on YouTube two million times a year?

It’s the bass line, isn’t it.

Well, that and the fact that Gen X had a surprising appreciation for goofiness and being yourself. If there is a vibe to the song and the video it is just goofy. Yeah, the lyrics are meaningless. Yes, the band seems uninterested at times, or decided to play dress up, or just have a blast goofing around on set. But it seems so real and relatable. You feel like you could hang out with The Breeders. You knew girls in college that reminded you of the Deal twins (though hopefully without the drug addictions). We didn’t always need deep meaning and we certainly didn’t need bands formed by focus groups and dressed by designer labels. We were honestly fine with just a good, fun song.

And we still are. 

 

The Death of Hair Metal or How We Went from Motley Crue to Nirvana

I think we can all agree that the epitome of late 80’s hair metal is Motley Crue’s “Girls Girls Girls”. It passes every trope imaginable. 

For example, you have a band name that

• Is deliberately misspelled
• Contains unnecessary umlauts

Figure 5: Logo also curved for unknown reasons

Then we have the band members themselves, each touching upon a unique aspect of hair metal.

• Nikki Sixx on bass whose last name has two x’s in order to be extra cool. He also died of a heroin overdose but don’t worry, he got better.
• Mick Mars on guitar whose name is not only an alliteration but he is also named after a planet for some unexplained reason. I presume he got the gig over Uriah Uranus.
• Tommy Lee on drums giving us someone with two first names as well as later fame from a leaked sex tape.
• Vince Neil on vocals who in addition to having two first names was also behind the wheel during a car crash that resulted in the death of the drummer for Hanoi Rocks. Sadly, the drummer did not get better.

And then we have the song “Girls Girls Girls” itself. A song about strip clubs with a video filmed in a strip club and which is almost certainly being played in a strip club at this very moment. I’d say there was subtext here but I’m barely sure it even counts as text.

Then we have the video itself, which was the closest thing to porn that one could get with basic cable in the 80’s. Seriously, I was thirteen years old in 1987 when this video came out. It was a time when a teenage boy would watch old Benny Hill episodes in secret because they were considered risqué. This was more like an entry into a totally different world.

However, in hindsight the video is much more evocative than I recall and not because of the hard-working dancers. In fact, while they are the most memorable portion of the video, they might be the least important. The video can be separated into five distinct sections

• 52 seconds of the band riding motorcycles.
• 55 seconds of the band hanging out in the club without a woman in sight. Often they are reacting as if their eyes are going to pop out of their heads cartoon style. Based on this section alone one could ask if Vince Neil had ever seen a woman before this video shoot.
• 50 seconds of the band in the club at least sharing the screen with a woman. Sometimes interacting but a lot of it is Mick Mars playing a guitar solo in the dressing room with none of the dancers paying attention to him. To be honest, Mick Mars doesn’t seem to be paying attention to anything across the entire video.
• 105 seconds of strippers who back in the eighties we would describe as being attractive and / or able to dance.
• And 12 seconds of what I can only describe as Vince Neil sitting on a chair backwards as if he is the youth pastor that you really shouldn’t let give your kid a ride home.

Figure 6: “Hello teens! Have you ever thought about how Jesus is like cocaine?”

So, despite the fact that all anyone remembers of this video is the strippers they don’t even make up half the video. About 20% of the video is just the band trying to look cool riding motorcycles. This is admittedly tougher than it looks given that they spent more time on their hair than did any of the dancers. But, to any ad executive wanting to sell products to white males aged 18 - 34 this video was a goldmine. It had to be the ultimate lead in to a commercial break. Sure it objectified women and seemed to exist solely to upset Tipper Gore but it was a guaranteed hit. No wonder the album sold over 4 million copies. 

Fast forward four years and now you have Nirvana entering the scene. Now, as a band name Nirvana would still fit a hair metal band. Sure, it is properly spelled but if someone said in 1987 that they were seeing Nirvana at Whiskey A Go Go it would be safe to assume that the lead singer was more Aqua Net than man. And yes, Kurt Cobain is an alliteration while Krist Novoselic uses an alternate spelling of Chris but the drummer is named Dave of all things.

Figure 7: Either three names or a nickname such as “Diamond” Dave is acceptable under the hair metal naming accords

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is what is typically considered the death knell for hair metal, but I don’t believe that is accurate. Not that it didn’t play a massive role in bringing Gen X to the fore but more that it isn’t as much of a seismic change from what had come before. Obviously the Pixies had already done the soft loud soft musical style and there were more than a few bands that were taking a more classic punk edge to their music. And the video shows what had changed and what hadn’t.

Instead of a band dressed in leather and denim Nirvana looks like, well, a bunch of guys from Seattle. Instead of a strip club the video takes place at what appears to be a high school pep rally. A janitor appears rocking out to the music for no apparent reason. But you still have cheerleaders fulfilling the need for scantily clad women (tattooed cheerleaders from Anarchy High School but still cheerleaders). The assembly ends in a riot complete with fire and someone stealing part of the drum kit. It certainly was speaking much more to teenage angst than Motley Crue but if you want to talk about standard white male imagery you have your culturally mandated levels of sex and violence.

It wasn’t “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that killed hair metal. If all it took was one good hard rock song then we would spend a lot more time discussing the merits of Faith No More. However, the follow up of “Come As You Are” not only made hair metal obsolete but ushered in the entire new Gen X world view into the mainstream culture.

It begins with one of the most memorable guitar riffs of my lifetime. (Yes, I know that it is stolen from a Killing Joke song, which honestly ties it to a completely different time frame and culture than what was before.) You then have the image of a gun floating in water. “Come as you are. As you were. As I want you to be.” Kurt Cobain sitting in a chandelier. A dog with a cone around it’s head. The band is constantly shown distorted by water. They do not look like rock stars. They do not look like they are about to become the most famous people on the planet. They look wounded and dangerous.

A baby swimming after a dollar. “Well I swear that I don’t have a gun.” Kurt swinging like a madman from the chandelier making you wonder if he wants to destroy the set or itself. More water flooding the set. The poor dog looking up in confusion. It is one thing to not follow up a breakthrough hit with the requisite power ballad. It is another to create a video that creates a visceral reaction of concern and fear.

And then there is the last image. An image that I will claim to my dying day exemplifies just what my generation is about at its core. After a minute of Kurt singing about not having a gun the scene shifts to the three band members lying on the grass as the song fades out. Kurt slowly leans into the camera, kisses the lens, and then falls back collapsing on himself with his hands folded as if in prayer. It is an image of sensitivity and a rejection of all of the cultural norms that had filled the airways before it. No hair metal act could do this and look sincere. Hell, Phil Collins couldn’t have done it and looked sincere. But Kurt immediately made it feel as though you were seen and that all of this performative 80’s nonsense was done and it was time to present the truth no matter the cost.

I’m confident that Nirvana would have been popular at any time period. The fact that you can buy their t-shirts at Target now is proof enough. I don’t consider them to have hits that would only exist due to Gen X. I just think Gen X would not have been the same without them.

But First, Some Ground Rules

As with any deep dive into popular culture, music, generational norms, and all of the other ways one can dance about architecture it is best to set some ground rules and definitions before we get stated.

1) I might as well get my biases out in the open first things first. I’m a, uh, heterosexual, cisgender, white male born in the United States to two college educated parents in the latter half of the twentieth century. Or in other words, I best represent the machine that people were raging against. Anyway, my views on music, Gen X, and culture in general are going to be biased towards what I was watching and listening. There are pretty sizable gaps in my musical world and I’m admitting it outright. All I am saying is that on the plus side I have the same ethnographic makeup of a music executive in the early 90’s. On the minus side, most of the evil in this world has been created by people with the same ethnographic makeup of music executives.

2) If this blog takes on a more academic tone at times than my usual writing there is a reason for it. Despite the fact that I have completed enough liberal arts courses that one could count them on one hand after an unfortunate chainsaw accident I have built up a list of graduate thesis topics over the years and this series (including one topic in particular) covers a lot of them. Basically, if I ever end up actually doing my combination sociology, history, statistics, and economics graduate work this will be the foundation.

3) The thesis statement of all this is that in the short sliver of time that Gen X held sway over popular culture it produced a set of musical hits that were not only massively different than what had come before but also covered an incredibly diverse and eclectic group of artists. Songs that thirty years later you wonder how in the world did they become hits or acts that are still playing major venues when you’d think that they would have never escaped the coffee house circuit. As I said in the first post: how does an unknown Tori Amos sell two million copies of strikingly personal music at the same time as Paula Abdul has a hit song that features MC Skat Cat?

Figure 3: Mr. Cat was unable to be reached for comment, possibly due to the fact that he is a cat.

4) Defining generations is one of those constantly debated things that as an outsider I get to avoid to a degree. For the record, I hold by Strauss and Howe’s definition of Gen X being those born between 1961 and 1981 (while I have issues with a lot of their work, naturally.) I personally tie whether you are Gen X or not to the following: How old were you in the Fall of 1991 when you first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”? I had just turned eighteen and was a freshman in college, so I consider that to be the prime age. 1981 is a little late in my view (a ten-year-old wasn’t really a target market for Nirvana) while going back to 1961 lets us include Henry Rollins in Gen X while excluding Madonna, which just feels right.

Figure 4: Mr. Rollins could be reached for comment. However, the transcription software is still deciphering the interview and was not finished in time for this post.

5) As for how I define this Gen X pop culture window I book frame it on one end with Nirvana and their utter elimination of hair metal. On the other end you have the Spice Girls releasing Wannabe in 1996 and ushering in the girl band / boy band pre-produced pop culture that took over everything in the late 90’s. There is obviously an earlier impact before Nirvana, and some after the Spice Girls, but I consider 1991 - 1996 as the brief moment in time where people listened to Gen X.

6) It’s impossible to talk about this time in music without talking about MTV, music videos, and the commercial image of artists. Expect some detailed analysis of videos and why some struck gold while others are laughable.

7) If there is one thing that I cannot stand when talking about music it is discussing what defines a hit, specifically if someone is a one hit wonder or not. The Billboard chart does not always match the cultural zeitgeist, and it certainly doesn’t capture the lasting influence of songs. Chuck Berry is officially a one hit wonder with that hit being “My Ding a Ling”. It is a stupid way of defining music.

Instead, I am going to opt for the following test. Are you down with O.P.P.?

Since 95% of the people reading this responded correctly I can easily state that Naughty by Nature had a hit. If everyone can recognize the song, I don’t care how much it sold.

Anyway, those are the ground rules. Next time, we begin with Nirvana, the death of hair metal, and why you should watch music videos with a stopwatch.