Greed - Ambitious Lovers

 There is an argument to be made for separating the image of the performer entirely from pop music. The idea that so many of today’s manufactured pop icons are little more than fashion models who happen to have made a record is one that you will hear voiced by many music fans. And there is little doubt that the image of the star has certainly taken priority over the music to the point where people who don’t pay attention to the pop charts can’t hum any of Lady Gaga or Rhianna’s songs but they can damn sure tell you what they look like. They know the image rather than the music, which seems like a rather bizarre situation for a pop singer to find themselves in, where their primary means of creative expression, their art (if they see it that way) is side-lined in favour of…well…marketing. That’s not to say that the music is bad or (in the case of Lady Gaga at least) the marketing doesn’t have some sort of artistic merit of its own, but surely if you are primarily known as a musician, then the music should be at the forefront of your persona.

Johnny And Dee Dee - The Eastern Dark

Australian music often gets a bad rap. In most people's minds, mine included, music in Australia started with Men At Work, ended with Silverchair and was filled out by a few soap stars turning to mainstream pop. Over the last couple of years though, I've seen more and more evidence of a great indie rock scene that was prevalent in australia during the late 80's and early 90's that seems to correspond with the scene in the states. Indie rock in America (and the UK) is covered in such detail that a lot of smaller, more distant scenes get lost somewhat in the process. For example, Evan Dando and the Lemonheads are lauded by the press and the fans and quite rightly too. But much less attention is paid to Smudge, the Aussie band who were a big influence on Dando during the 90's and whose front man, Tom Morgan, was Evan's Writing partner for a while. Have a listen to their song Divan and see how similar it is to the Lemonheads' 90's albums.

Dü Hüskers - The Hang-Ups/Vertigo

It's hard to underestimate how much impact Hüsker Dü made. They are often credited with single handily inventing indie rock, along with being one of the most interesting and clever bands in hardcore punk. Though they were short lived, lasting less than 9 years, they managed to wield more influence on music than any other underground band of their time.

One of the jewels in Hüsker Dü's crown was their Eight Miles High single. A cover of the Byrds' sprawling, psychedelic classic, the single seemed to condense everything that was great about Hüsker Dü into one song. It is loud, it is fast and it is filled with anger and emotion. Bob Mould's performance on this single is possibly the finest of his career. He shouts the lyrics until they are indecipherable yet still manages to maintain the melody and catchiness of the song above a wall of guitar noise. Grant Hart's frantic drum rolls and Greg Norton's uncomplicated yet intriguing bass part provide the perfect grounding for Mould's frenzied and distorted attack. The track is a high point in an illustrious career. Why then would you want to take on the task of trying to replicate it? Well, it turns out that Du Huskers, the split single by The Hang-Ups and Vertigo, inevitably falls short but it makes a half decent go of it nonetheless.

Book Review: Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm

There isn't any shortage of documentation of Rock music history. There is no shortage of books, films, magazine articles or detailed compilation albums of the history of every scene in every town that has ever had a few bands play there. While this is a wonderful thing for the completists, historians and nerds it can leave a casual observer somewhat overwhelmed as each different document has a different take on each story, often influenced by the opinions of the writer. How are you to know what the real story is? Well unless you were there you probably never will know all the details. Mark Yarm's Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History Of Grunge brings you the real story from the mouths of those that were there. Whilst not the first book of its kind (see last year’s Grunge Is Dead by Greg Prato) it is far more detailed than most.

Everybody Loves Our Town is very thorough in its coverage of the punk scene in the northwest of America. Starting with the U-Men, it covers the more influential acts that started in what was a rather desolate corner of the country in the late 1970's and early 80's. When Grunge took over the airwaves in the early 90's it would be easy to think that you couldn't throw a stone without hitting a fan of the music of Seattle but just 10 years earlier, there really were almost no punk-rock bands in that area. If you wanted to be part of any “scene” you would have had have headed south to LA, as some people like Duff McKagan (who had played in various bands, including The Fastbacks) did.

Face - Big Chief

I've heard it argued by people (especially with the recent 20^th anniversary of Nevermind) that Grunge was the last big movement in Rock and Roll. Since 1994 when Kurt Cobain chose to remove himself from the equation, there has not been a sub-genre that has equalled the resonance that grunge had with the general populace or even just the music press. And it's true that “the Seattle sound” was one of the last local scenes to make itself known to the world in such a big scale. Like Liverpool and San Francisco in the 1960's or New York In the late 1970's or Manchester in the late 1980's the Northwest scene exploded and then died down a few short years later. Like all of these local scenes that were suddenly popular, bands that didn't sound a whole lot like each other were all pigeonholed together based on their geographical location. For example, Mudhoney and Pearl Jam are a world away from each other in terms of the tone of their sound and their style, yet as they are both Seattle bands from the late 1980's and early 1990's they are “Grunge”. Even bands that were not from the Seattle area were given the label, just because they happened to be loud, indie-rock bands from America. It's a tag that many bands have tried to shrug off but some of them bear more similarities to the genre as a whole than many of the bands who originated in the Pacific Northwest.