y'all might want to read this
I went into it to enter a contest to win a Roland groove box and this caught
my eye.
I'm not commenting though, i'll just let you fight about it.
it also had pictures of Kurt Cobain aligned with pictures of the prodigy (two
of the biggest sellouts of the 90's :)
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RAVE ON KURT
from MTV online
Has it really only been three years? Seems more like 30. When Kurt
Cobain erased his life at the height of his superstardom in April, 1994, his
face was already on every magazine cover and his music blared from every
radio and video outlet in the U.S., if not the world. The guitar-driven sound
he helped shape -- part punk, part metal with a smidge of pop -- had turned
underground grunge into commercial gold.
Now, 36 months later, you still see Cobain's mug draped on the occasional
droopy T-shirt, but that's about it. Nirvana's posthumous live album, ''FROM
THE MUDDY BANKS OF THE WISHKAH,'' was released last fall and quickly dropped
off the charts. Even Cobain's larger-than-life legend, which until recently
taunted practically every record release with comparison, seems to be fading
away, if not burning out.
Everybody, all together now: Kurt who?
Seems like rock stars are getting harder to find these days. In fact, the
new pop-culture icon may well be some guy with a computer. I know, because an
important man from a big modern-rock radio station told me so. And if the
music industry wants to sell something badly enough, chances are it will.
Look for some commercialized version of Rave U.S.A. to play amphitheaters in
the summer of '97.
Now, Cobain's friend, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, says with a touch of
derisiveness that you can count on one thing this year: ''Every big rock band
is going to release a record with hip-hop loops and deejay rhythms in it,
their own version of [the Beastie Boys' 1989 Dust Brothers-produced] 'PAUL'S
BOUTIQUE'. U2 has already done it, the Stones are working with the Chemical
Brothers. Everybody wants in.''
And he's right. Even the biggest rock stars of the moment -- industrial
rock king Trent Reznor, U2's Bono, the Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan --
have released new music radiating with techno vibrations.
Electronica taps into many of the same impulses as the punk and
alternative rock scenes did, providing not just a soundtrack, but a culture
and a community. No wonder millions of young people around the world have
rejected what they perceive as the sterile and played-out sound of guitars
for the sensory possibilities offered by a new generation of scratch and
computer gurus.
Although some naysayers are treating electronic music as a fad, it's
actually been around since the 1960s, a vital, innovative and sprawling
movement that cuts across cultures and styles, but which has largely been
consigned to the underground fringe. Electronic pioneers such as Brian Eno,
the German bands Kraftwerk, Can and Neu!, and dub-reggae producers Lee
''Scratch'' Perry and King Tubby created some of the most vital music of the
'70s. Like the punk rockers, these artists challenged all suppositions about
what music is and how it could be made.
Underground electronic movements based in Chicago and Detroit emerged in
the '80s. In these cities, communities of disenfranchised minorities --
blacks, Hispanics, gays -- created styles of electronic music known as house
and techno that provided a foundation for the European rave scene of the late
'80s. Techno bands sell by the millions in Europe, but the sound is just
beginning to catch on big time in North America. (Remember that it took punk
rock more than 15 years after the Ramones struck their first chord to become
commercially successful in America.)
The popularization of techno is not necessarily a repudiation of Cobain.
More than a sound or a look, Cobain left behind an attitude. And in examining
it more closely, it's possible to appreciate that electronica's innovators
aren't all that far removed from the underground guitar rockers who dragged
grunge out of the cellar and reluctantly squinted into the lights of the
Lollapalooza main stage. Most of the techno brigade hates the light, too;
most prefer to perform anonymously, hunched over their turntables, mixing
boards and computers in darkened deejay booths. For every Prodigy, with the
green-spiked Keith Flint dancing like a techno Mad Hatter, there are a dozen
low-key Josh Davises, aka DJ Shadow, whose ''ENDTRODUCING'' was one of the
most entrancing electronic releases of '96.
'I've always been more intrigued with being the director than the
star,'' says Davis. ''I'm getting irritated that everyone is so image
conscious,'' he says, an attitude that he pours into tracks such as ''What
Does Your Soul Look Like'' and the scathing ''Why Hip Hop Sucks in '96,''
from ''ENDTRODUCING.''
Sound familiar? ''All of this attention is getting unrealistic,'' Cobain
said in an interview the week after ''NEVERMIND'' was released in 1991, ''I
never got into this to be famous.'' Just a few weeks before Cobain's death,
Beck had this to say about the example set by Nirvana: ''The whole idea of
rock stars has become ridiculous. I think it's something to make fun of.''
Indeed, the story of '90s rock -- from Eddie Vedder to Adam Duritz -- has
been one of reluctant celebrity, of stars who treat their fame with derision,
if not outright revulsion.
But the star-making machinery just won't quit. The media continues to
obsess over the faces, bodies, haircuts, fashion sense, jewelry, bathing
habits and mating rituals of the people who make art, rather than the art
itself. They say they're merely feeding a hunger that has existed for
centuries: society craves heroes and role models, and our entertainers are
prime candidates. They bring us pleasure, so we become curious about them,
and when we see their face on a magazine cover, we buy it. 'So explain to me
that techno cover again?' the spin doctors might say. 'You want me to sell my
magazine by putting a drum machine on the cover instead of a star's face?
Forget it.'
I'm no rock star, Cobain kept telling interviewers, and his music became
more difficult and abrasive by design. A handful of tracks from the later
tours documented on ''WISHKAH'' show him in a positively avant-garde frame of
mind, refusing to play it safe. The guitar ''solo,'' such as it is, in
''Scentless Apprentice'' is bereft of rock-star posturing. Instead it
consists entirely of vague, disorienting waves of amplifier buzz, suspended
notes hang-gliding through a maelstrom. Particularly on the songs drawn from
Nirvana's last tours in 1993-94, Cobain was pushing his arrangements and
guitar playing into darker, less commercially promising corners, as if
determined to subvert the ''Teen Spirit'' formula of softly strummed verses
and loud, crashing choruses.
Cobain struggled and even played with the absurdity of iconography before
a combination of factors -- drug abuse, a mysterious stomach ailment,
clinical depression -- conspired to crush him. He was at the height of his --
and he would have hated this word -- career, but what he wanted wasn't a
career at all. He wished for a forum to make music any way he saw fit, and by
the end of his life he saw almost everything else as a distraction.
Not just Cobain and Nirvana opted out of the star-fueled merry-go-round.
Grunge contemporaries like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, the Seattle bands
most likely to pick up where Nirvana left off in terms of building a huge
mainstream audience, have become virtual recluses; between them, they've only
played a handful of dates in North America since 1995. Coincidentally or not,
Cobain's death signaled the beginning of the end of the alternative-rock
revolution his music brought into the mainstream. In 1996, the signs of
alt-rock's demise were everywhere:
* Like ''WISHKAH,'' Pearl Jam's 1996 release, ''NO CODE,'' was more of a
rumor than an event, an ambitious, Eastern-flavored disc that seemed to
confuse the band's grunge-gorged following and quickly sank off the charts.
* Alice in Chains' ''ALICE IN CHAINS'' debuted at No. 1 in late '95, but
then the band virtually disappeared while singer Layne Staley wrestled with
heroin addiction.
* Lollapalooza, once the festival for the Nirvana crowd, was headlined
by one of the world's biggest mainstream rock bands, Metallica.
* Seattle-based Sub Pop, the label that launched Nirvana, Soundgarden
and the grunge sound, had become just another pseudo-indie with major-label
ties and no particular sound or marketing focus.
* Rock superstars from Green Day to R.E.M. suffered disappointing sales.
Cobain smelled the rat early on. His liner notes for the 1992 Nirvana
compilation, ''INCESTICIDE,'' said as much: ''I don't feel the least bit
guilty for commercially exploiting a completely exhausted Rock Youth Culture
because, at this point in rock history, Punk Rock (while still sacred to
some) is, to me, dead and gone.''
At the time of his death, the record industry had already begun to send
in the clones; Cobain wasn't even around to see the worst of it, with bands
like Candlebox and Seven Mary Three selling millions of records with
third-hand Nirvana-isms. Now, like grunge before it, electronica is being
pumped for monetary gain by the record industry. Intense record-label bidding
wars prey on unformed bands, forcing intense exposure on a record-buying
public that absorbs pop culture in seconds-long increments by clicking a
channel changer or a mouse.
The music industry, and quite possibly music fans conditioned by rock
concerts, seems determined to create a new legion of techno stars, because
it's the easiest way to build a commercial base for an act. Anonymity is the
enemy of profitability; just as movie stars sell big-budget blockbusters,
rock stars sell concerts, albums and T-shirts. After decades of this sort of
thinking, the industry will be hard-pressed to accommodate a style of music
in which the anonymity of the performer is central to its appeal.
But it's possible that techno will meet an even swifter and unkinder
decline, because the industry may have missed its central point. At a club or
a rave, the audience is focused not on the deejays, but on the music, the
lights, the room. The audience is the show. The record industry still wants a
hierarchy of stars and consumers; techno offers a community. The industry
wants concerts where performers can be worshipped on a stage; the rave
culture presents a party in a field or a warehouse with a great soundtrack. I
bet Kurt Cobain would have loved hanging out there.
Cobain's disavowal of celebrity's mighty responsibilities hastened an
era when it's no longer cool for rock performers to step up and be heroes the
way Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and Bruce Springsteen once were for earlier
generations. But the message he left is an empowering one. More so than his
sound or his look or his image, it is a message that will survive, and it is
this: Rebellion doesn't begin on a stage at a rock'n'roll show. It begins,
instead, when each person in the audience looks at him or herself in the
mirror at the start of each morning. That mirror may have two faces: In this
rave new world, rockers are probably welcome too.
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Greg Kot is the rock critic for the "Chicago Tribune," and has written for
numerous music publications, including "The Trouser Press Record Guide,"
"Rolling Stone" and "Request."
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