Here in Indiana, my home state, people listen to grunge a lot, people are stuck in the past. Like take me. I’ll put on Superunknown when I’m at work washing dishes. And I feel a fleeting conception as if Megan Jasper is watching me write this. I really hope she’ll think I’m cool. She’s the woman from Sub Pop Records, Seattle, who with tongue firmly planted in cheek unleashed the “Lexicon of grunge” on the unwitting “douche bag reporter” from the New York Times or something. It was the “grunge language” — for every term in the everyday life English language, there was a “grunge” term, like getting grounded was getting “Bound and hagged.”
But to a certain extent, no matter how against the Iraq war you are, no matter how much you rebel against technology with your CD player helping you out, life just goes on. Like look at you, now. You look like sh** compared to what you did a while ago. This chain of events, it funnels you into this thing called the real world, you have to get this thing called a job, JFK is dead, RFK is dead, and the instances in which you don’t care about anything are always laced with sultry episodes of you indeed caring, and getting crushed.
Blood Circus was a particularly antipathetic, and for this reason charming, quintessential “grunge” outfit documented on the movie Hype!, though albeit very authentically “Seattle.” They sound like they don’t care whether they’re gaining radio notoriety. Mudhoney would be one band to which they’re similar, not too many else. Upon first impression, I thought that their music was too simple. They looked like they might have just wrote the song earlier that day, then went up and played it. Still, they were intimidating, and I’m pretty sure one dude is smoking a cig while he’s playing. They weren’t markedly bad, like some of the bands were.
But, I like the Fleet Foxes too, and I guess this is the new Seattle, or whatever. I’ve never been to the northwest, remembering finding people in Frisco a little stuffy and hoyty-toyty, but then, this is by my ballooned Indiana standards of down-to-earth aspects.
Anyway, I mean, what’s the deal with grunge? It’s not really enough anymore, but it once was. You sort of have to slay, like Helmet, or be really hardcore (literally and figuratively), like Iceage, to be enjoyed anymore. The act alone no longer passes as rebellious. And insofar as sound waves carry morality, they do so to the extent that they’re effective, that they’re presently culturally galvanizing — it’s not math, it’s life. Still, don’t count Blood Circus out. At least I’m not.