I’ve been reading a lot of music biographies lately which got the memories going, which is probably what inspired this post. That and wanting to write something but being utterly uninspired as of late. I’ve been playing a lot of really good indie games that I’ll eventually blog about, but with a deluge of geeky game speak likely to start pouring out of me during E3 this next week, I wanted to hit a different topic first. So here goes.

Ah, the early 90’s. The nations of the former Warsaw Pact shifted their allegiance West as the Berlin Wall fell. Japan continued developing in to an economic powerhouse that many predicted would rule the world’s economy in just a few decades (showing how futile the vast majority of long term projections really are). And grunge took over the music world.

Yes indeed, an entire musical genre named after filth. Not exactly awe inspiring.

Early 90’s Cliff was just minding his own business and listening to a lot of hair metal, when suddenly Nirvana hit the airwaves, closely followed by Pearl Jam.

“What the fuck is this?” I probably exclaimed. “Oh well, time to pop in a Skid Row tape and forget this.” I can only hope it actually was Skid Row (which I still listen to) and not some long forgotten band that never was (Slik Toxik? I owned this? Who the fuck was this?)…though at least I was never so far gone as to think Ratt were good, and didn’t even consider the possibility of listening to Stryper.

But grunge wasn’t easily forgotten. Oh no, it smashed down the door, tied you to a chair and forced you to listen. You could only fight it for so long before Kurt Cobain would force your eyes open to see what was going on (and hopefully what was going on wasn’t Courtney Love drinking heavily and smashing your stuff).

I really wasn’t a big fan of grunge for quite some time. Frankly, Smells Like Teen Spirit and Evenflow were unintelligible nonsense (they still are. Cobain/Vedder could honestly have been screeching anything in to the mic and it would have ‘worked’). Eventually I started admitting that it actually wasn’t bad, though I still maintain that Nirvana were probably 4th in the Seattle pecking order. Pearl Jam were better (though inconsistent), Soundgarden were better, Alice in Chains were better. Billy Corgan probably thinks everything he’s done is better than what any other man in the history of the human race has accomplished, but then Billy Corgan also seems like a cunt. Nirvana weren’t a bad band by any stretch, I just don’t think they were quite at the level of “HOLYSHITTHISISTHEGREATESTTHINGHUMANEARSHAVEEVERHEARD!” that some put them at. Actually, that quoted sentence could probably work as a verse from Smells Like Teen Spirit…

Really, it wasn’t anything new in the world of music. It was a note for note replay of the late 70’s, where punk bands took over and knocked aside the bloated excess of rock at that time. And oh was there excess. Motley Crue decided to follow up the insane level of success of Dr. Feelgood with a bunch of personal acrimony and band departures. Van Halen decided to become even more of a synth-driven ballads band (this is why they started to suck, by the way. Sammy Hagar always takes the blame, but it was Eddie van Halen’s decision to change the focus of the group). Bands like Cinderella and Warrant decided to just keep doing what they had always done : suck. Metallica managed to flourish, but they did so by at least partially experimenting with their sound with the Load album (which I personally really liked). Hard rock pretty much handed over the keys to to the music kingdom. But there was one band that, at the time, was bigger than any other. And they completely fell apart pretty much on the shoulders of one paranoid, twitchy, egotistical dick of a lead singer…

W. Axl Rose (Ooooooh, that whole WAR thing was an acronym used in some lame attempt to try to be clever). Not only was he a wife beating, misogynistic, egotistical piece of shit, he also went completely insane. This is a guy who at one time had several psychics as part of his entourage. He had a woman in staff who went out during sound checks to ensure that the magnetic alignment of the stage and rigging was in sync with his own. He swapped out band members on a seemingly weekly basis. He thought that hiring a dude with a plastic mask and a KFC bucket hat was a good move (maybe he thought the bucket would remind people of Slash’s tophat?).

But well before that, he completely and utterly neutered a guitar rock band that took no prisoners.

Appetite for Destruction is still an album that wants nothing more than to kick you so hard in the ass that you’re giving your own intestines a tongue bath. For a follow up, Gn’R released the Use Your Illusion double album. There was a lot of really good music on there, but it really should have been stripped down to one disc since it was bloated out with horrendous crap. There was Back Off Bitch, a song that actually managed to be WORSE than it’s ridiculous title suggests. This piece of shit had been dreamed up by Axl and a buddy of his when they were kids, and should have been resigned to the dustbin of history like the awful, angsty poetry/journal entry shit everyone writes when they’re 16 and later bleaches from their memory. There were numerous other songs so completely ordinary that I can’t even remember them right now. They made two different versions of Don’t Cry for no explicable reason…the song is actually pretty good, but why did we need two completely separate sets of lyrics? I was going to bag on Estranged, but I realize that the only reason I have problems with that one is that Jake wouldn’t stop listening to it during my time living in his little world. It has become the musical equivalent of Braveheart.

Then there was My World. The good news : it was only 1:25 long. The bad news : it existed at all. Apparently, even the rest of the band didn’t know about this mound of crap until they heard the final album for the first time. Axl raps (yes, raps) to beats that sound like something produced by someone pressing one of those ‘auto background music’ buttons on a Casio keyboard. Really, words cannot express how bad this song is. Listen if you dare.

Ugh. Everyone take a minute and just relax until the douche chills have passed. Ugh. I know I say it a lot, but that mess might actually be the single worst thing ever recorded to tape.

But that wasn’t the song that signalled the end of hard rock. Nope, that particular harbinger of doom was a little ditty by the name of November Rain.

It’s part of an absolutely bizarre and pretentious three pack of videos (along with Don’t Cry and Estranged) that featured what was apparently some sort of a plot line, wine spilling, cars blowing up, weddings that turned in to funerals, Axl watching Axl looking at his own tombstone and dolphins that made no sense to anyone who wasn’t under the influence of a handful of crazy pills. This monstrosity of a song took YEARS to be finished because Capt. Ego just kept layering on more crap.

Background singers. A miniature version of Michael Kamen’s orchestra (I mean it was a smaller group, not that he actually shrank the members of the orchestra. He probably looked in to it, though). About 73 different tempo changes. A string section. There’s a fucking harp in there somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if they included audio recorded of chimps jabbering away to each other at a wildlife preserve in Kenya.

Know what you don’t notice for the most part? Guitars, bass or drums. Those have been pushed in to the background. All of the things that helped make Guns n’ Roses what they were was shoved aside for a bunch of bullshit that Axl kept talking about in interviews as being ‘more important’. November Rain is the absolute death knell of the hard rock era even putting up a fight. They pretty much took those tandem .44’s, turned them on themselves and pulled the triggers. And in a weird way, they kind of did the same to every child of the 80’s. Childhood’s over when you turn on the radio and no longer know what the Hell you’re hearing. It’s just a memory now.