Who Wants Honey?

Beck’s “Loser” (1994) and Smashing Pumpkins’ “Spaceboy” (1993) were two songs at the height of grunge that characterized its conflict with heteronomous and autonomous principles of power structures embedded in content of the genre, its impact on social identity, and its subsequent demise in popular culture. Beck’s lyric, “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” and Corgan’s haunting phrase, “any way you chose me, we won’t belong,” spoke to the ironic position of grunge’s central protest against hype. The teen youth of America was growing sick of the spandex and make-up of media and its invasion on punk and metal that marginalized political messages and denigrated gender roles through misogynistic stereotypes. By 1994, grunge had thoroughly been through the commercialism ringer, and by the breakup of Soundgarden in 1997 followed shortly after by the disaster of Woodstock 99’ (read more here), grunge will not only have faded from the popular scene, it will have definitively made its point.

Catherine Strong writes in Grunge: Music and Memory (2010), that “If the ruling class can continue to produce what is seen as legitimate culture, then its power will be easier to retain.” One of the key tenants of grunge was the rejection of commercialization and the exposure of capitalisms effect on meaningful artistic discourse. By the late 1980s, record labels were in the business of handing out huge sums of money to anything that had the slightest chance of being the next big thing, with the understanding that 1 out of 12 would actually turn a profit. The hunger for getting in on this chance to make it big had churned out a star system within the music world that built multi-million dollar stages, lights, and make-up around shallow lyrics, party themes, and reckless drug culture. Pyrotechnics and tight clothes saturated popular music and MTV, and those who had something meaningful to say were quickly folded into the top 100 and given a makeover with a world tour. Grunge rejected this commercialization of music and was ultimately countered by simply making its message, clothing, and persona economically viable. By the end of 1994, designer flannels and pre-torn jeans were high-priced fashion, and magazines were paying celebrities to emulate the style. Strong writes, “As grunge’s authenticity was constructed in the press as being associated with rejection of success as defined within the wider field of power, as soon as grunge started to obtain such success it began to undermine the basis on which that success was (partly) built.”

Society responded to grunge by having Nirvana acoustic shows on MTV, pool parties for Primus, and L7 in Oliver Stone movies. The louder that grunge ridiculed the world’s ability to commodify apathy and irony, the more we connected with it, and wanted more. The only means to do so was within the very system that grunge was fighting. Artists like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Kim Gordan of Sonic Youth put a middle finger up to the networks, and the responded by putting them on the cover of Rolling Stone. This response to the commodity of protest is the very system that marginalizes its effectiveness on society today.

Grunge served as a warning that commercial society was turning the political rebellion of punk rock and the socioeconomic protest of heavy metal into a petty cash crop daydream for the youth. The days of music festivals as a vehicle for upheaval against power structures had long been sold off to commercial interests and network television. The new generation living through voodoo-economics and unsuccessful trickle-down strategies were amidst record unemployment and a prison system designed to profit rather than reform. We were now living in a world order that understood that its ability to retain the status quo was directly tied to keeping the carrot firmly ahead of the artistic endeavors of emerging music influence, and grunge’s exposure of this system was a prime showdown. How could a genre, designed to point a finger and laugh at financial success and power, possibly survive it?

The end of the millennia is filled with cultural references of hope for the new age. Society was enamored with the technological achievements of the 20th century, and the imagination soared when pondering what the next 100 years would bring. This heightened expectation, met with the reality of real-world unresolved conflicts of racial inequality, rising wealth disparities, and unstable political systems sparked the nostalgia culture that immerses the world today. Many of those initial hopes seem unrealized, so the response is embroiled in a sense of longing for a better past. The reality being a past that was simply filled with unrealistic dreams and impractical hopes of triumph without effort. If we can learn anything from studying grunge as a genre of music, it might be that problems caused by wealth inequality are probably not going to be solved by throwing money at it.

Billy Corgan and Smashing Pumpkins made huge waves with the release of Siamese Dream in 1992. The lyrics of the hit single Cherub Rock aptly sums up the plight of grunge. Enjoy the listening example from the album today, and thanks for reading!

Lyric excerpt:

“Hipsters unite

Come align for the big fight to rock for you

But beware