Author: Spitz, Marc
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Ian MacKaye, leader of Washington, D.C., hardcore band Minor Threat, one of the major acts on the D.C. scene, started a new band, Fugazi, in 1987. MacKaye was already famous in the community as the most prominent “straight-edge” Punk, extolling a policy of no drinking, no smoking, no drugs. As Fugazi began to tour, they set about improving the conditions of the Punk rock show itself. They kept ticket prices to five dollars by eliminating what they regarded as the kind of excesses that resulted in the screwing of fans. They sold no T-shirts and rented out alternative venues. The shows themselves were marked by a lack of violent moshing or stage diving, with MacKaye willing to stop a song to hector a particularly brutal fan in the pit.
The year 1988, when Fugazi released their self-titled debut EP (known as Seven Songs to fans), was the era of music videos featuring scantily clad women grinding on top of cars. Sunset Strip hedonism, misogynistic lyrics, and the general notion that women had no place in rock and roll outside of drummer’s girlfriend was being challenged by the voices out of Indie. A highlight of the Fugazi EP was “Suggestion,” in which MacKaye gave voice to a female exasperated by unwanted cat calls: “Why can’t I walk down a street, free of suggestion,” he asks, aligning himself instantly with the likes of Wadd and Haynes, who were personally aghast at the casual use of the beautiful woman as a marketing tool, even among some so-called Indie bands.
“Taking on gender bias was very key to us,” says Wadd. “We had a strict rule about not using women as decorative art on record covers, no cute sixties chicks.” Lyrics that compared women to cars, long a standard in rock and roll, were out as well. Even the label’s name was a sort of fuck-you to the sexist rock establishment. “We’d deliberately chosen it because we knew it would be confrontational,” says Haynes. “Most music journalists couldn’t bring themselves to treat a label with a girl’s name seriously, and that said a lot about the sexism of the music industry and the world in general at the time. Most women in bands were just the singer or the tambourine player, and no women were in positions of power at any record labels. When Clare answered the phone, people would often assume she was my secretary. We wanted to challenge all this.”
The movement had key supporters among conventional media outlets of the day. Just about every new offering from Sarah was welcomed enthusiastically by the still essential BBC DJ John Peel, but in the UK press, some jaded rock scribes felt there was a sort of holier-than-thou attitude that needed to be taken down a peg or two.
It helped that many of these bands were truly stellar; their singles modest masterpieces, among them the Field Mice’s “Let’s Kiss and Make Up” and the doleful “Emma’s House.” Each song sounded different, but like Beat Happening, they suggested first kisses and last kisses, and sonically felt shivery and warm at the same time, like your first bite of an ice cube and the sensation as it melts in your throat.
The Field Mice’s Annemari Davies looked 1960s perfect as well in her sweaters, striped shirts, and vintage sunglasses that would not be out of place in Jean Seberg’s or Anna Karina’s purse. “Happy All the Time” by the Flatmates (signed to another Bristol-based independent label, the Subway Organization), “You Should Be Murdered” by Another Sunny Day (name-checked in a song by Belle and Sebastian), and “I’ve Got a Habit” by the Orchids were other milestone singles. Non-Sarah releases by Loop, Strawberry Switchblade, Spacemen 3, and the Dentists also contributed to the new Indie intrigue.
“We had excellent press for some of the early releases,” says Wadd, “and perhaps more press than we could have expected, really, looking back. But then the people who hated us and despised us became more irritable as we persisted and succeeded.”
In a post-Smiths age, even the most hardened rock writer knew Indie was both good business and the new style; N.M.E. and Melody Maker could take credit for “breaking” these bands and pad their reputation as cutting-edge news outlets. Readership was in decline—these publications needed a new bandwagon to jump on.
One possible turn was toward the Hip-Hop coming out of America. The rise of Hip-Hop superstars, especially Run-DMC and Public Enemy, polarized the staffs of these magazines. Some were thrilled with Yo! Bum Rush the Show, Public Enemy’s 1987 debut. Others worried about practical matters: they couldn’t sell issues by putting rappers on the cover. The Detroit techno and acid house artists that most kids were dancing to in clubs didn’t even have faces to put on the covers in the first place: many of their record sleeves were plain white paper. Indie, with its sweet-faced, fringed, scrawny white kids, seemed the perfect compromise: it was political, progressive, but didn’t frighten anyone by quoting Malcolm X and Minister Louis Farrakhan.
“Indie became a marketing device and genre rather than an ethos,” Clare Wadd now says. In late ’86, N.M.E., under new editor in chief Ian Pye, rallied around “Indie” and quickly recast it to suit its purposes, dispensing with much of the political claptrap and focusing on the fashion and trappings.
A cassette giveaway was offered that collected all the Indie sounds. Promoted by the weekly, C86 (for “cassette 1986”) colored the next half decade of English style, right up until the ascent of Nirvana in 1991. C86 would be a sound (jangly pop, sweet vocals, dreamy lyrics with a 1960s bent), but it was also a certain type of haircut (the Jean Seberg, of course, for women; the David Crosby Byrds fringe for men), T-shirt (Warhol Factory–style striped), outerwear (motorcycle jacket anorak). It was a little bit Punk, a little bit Mod, with almost no overt political stance to be detected. Unlike the C81 tape, which featured ska, pop, Punk, and electronic acts, C86 was far less eclectic, with predominantly Anglo, literary-minded pop from the Pastels, the Soup Dragons, the Shop Assistants, Close Lobsters, the Wedding Present, and an early incarnation of Primal Scream. The bands who were not typical of the then-in-vogue “Indie” sound and look are now lost to history. “It’s subsequently taken on a weird life of its own, which I don’t fully understand! Several bands who were actually on the cassette would not be considered C86 bands stylistically!” Phil Wilson of June Brides says.
Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels appears on C86 and found the inclusion a double-edged sword. “There was a spectacular display of weeds all over the place, and it felt like the N.M.E. was trying to put them in a neat little garden. We had mixed feelings from the start.”
Thus diluted of its ethic by the corporate ogres, “Indie” required nothing from its adherents and, as a result, multiplied a hundredfold. Today, Indie is a junk word, like Mod or hippie, used to inaccurately describe an item for sale on eBay.
“For us, it was very much the N.M.E. jumping on a scene two years too late and slightly missing the point,” says Matt Haynes. The term also became a tool for some rock writers to politely but unmistakably dismiss a band as not rock enough, a little girly. “Even by the time it was released, C86 was being treated as a term of abuse, and most of the writers [at N.M.E.] were embarrassed by it. These days, people tend to think of it as a landmark moment, but . . . I think that’s a slight rewriting of history.”
The biggest liability the C86-era Indie bands faced was the assumption that they couldn’t really play. As with Beat Happening, there seemed to be a thread of self-limiting amateurism running through, with the rhythms a little off and the playing less than virtuoso. Shambolic was the term, affectionately coined by John Peel and adopted by the British press to express varying levels of admiration or dismissal by a million rock writers afterward. That some bands, like Fuzzbox and the early Jesus and Mary Chain, wore a love of ear-splitting distortion on their woolly, mohair sleeves only served to mask, some assumed, a lack of skill. Nobody expected the titanic masterworks that would come as the 1980s drew to a close and the 1990s began. A stew of economic shifting, brand-new drugs like Ecstasy, and the massive hype that Indie drew bestowed a confidence on these once-fringed and retiring front men, and suddenly, overnight, there was a new wave of Brian Wilsons and Serge Gainsbourgs and Beatles, each attempting to use as many newly available studio tracks as possible wit
h noise, noise, noise, sometimes funky, sometimes pummeling, sometimes both at once, always with the swing of cocksure youth. Here is where you get your Loveless, your Stone Roses’ self-titled debut, your Screamadelica, albums that changed lives, defined their times, and inspired new bands to form (and top them) after only a few listens (the unibrowed world beaters in Oasis among them). It was ironic that Hip-Hop divided the N.M.E. staff so much, as the same thing was going on in studios in New York City: hugely ambitious and bold albums like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising and A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory were just as innovative and vast.
Primal Scream, the C86 vets, quickly distanced themselves from that movement and led their once staunchly independent label, Creation, into a point-by-point re-creation of late ’60s–early ’70s Rolling Stones–like debauchery and largesse, complete with an image that suggested the ingestion of harder drugs, a laissez-faire attitude toward groupies, and a fondness for tons of money. It was all very rock and roll but not very Indie, and it made those like Haynes and Wadd of Sarah Records cringe. One step forward, they worried, and two decades back as far as social progress went; any notion of Twee righteousness frozen out by that old time rock and roll.
Those still operating as conscientious Indie outfits could only scratch their heads as they watched. “I used to be a huge Creation fan,” says Matt Haynes. “And still have their first twenty singles and wouldn’t part with them for anything, because they were so much a part of my life, and Sarah wouldn’t have existed without them, but . . . when Primal Scream started wearing leather trousers and pretending to be the Rolling Stones, talking about sex and drugs and rock and roll and groupies and generally being a bit pathetic, I was just so disappointed.”
Still, while the older UK Indie scene was becoming compromised, in part by its own popularity and media attention, the Indie scene in the Pacific Northwest was at its strongest. Beat Happening’s 1988 release, Jamboree, was an international critical hit (issued in the UK on Rough Trade, the Smiths’ label) and one of the biggest crossover successes of its day, pivoting from menace (“Hangman”) to lust (“Bewitched”) to pristine and virtuous child pop (“Indian Summer”). Kurt Cobain called it his favorite album.
Chapter 9
“You’re in High School Again”
1988–1995
This chapter is about Nirvana. In addition to being many other important things, Nirvana was Twee. When Kurt Cobain was alive, he often went out of his way to prove this, so when you say to yourself, “Wait, Nirvana wasn’t Twee, not at all,” think of Kurt and how he would feel if he overheard you.
Everybody loved Nirvana,” says Sean Nelson, the former Harvey Danger front man who relocated to the Seattle area in the late 1980s. “And everybody’s reaction to Nirvana grew to be, ‘Nobody else understands them like I do. Everybody loves Nirvana, but those people are assholes, and I really get it.’ They were the first band where the best way to express your fandom was to not wear their T-shirt.” For a brilliant band, Nirvana had pretty shitty merchandise: their signature shirt was an oversize black tee with a big, yellow, crooked-smile happy face. Who would wear that anyway, if you were a cool and righteous Indie Punk? “It’s part of the Olympian strain of simply not participating in mass culture,” Nelson continues. “It was an easy act to cop: ‘Oh, mass culture and MTV doesn’t represent me in any way. I don’t recognize myself in it. I don’t know who the Gin Blossoms are.’ Of course you know who the Gin Blossoms are. You’ve been in a supermarket! Kurt was just swaddled with shame for having any mainstream success and he went out of his way to shit on that world.”
Nirvana often gets credit for taking the fundamentally intimate and manageable aesthetic of Indie or Twee and, depending on whom you ask, either triumphing over its limitations of reach and appeal or ruining it forever. But at the end of the 1980s, this shift was already under way in music with the audience expansion enjoyed by the Smiths, R.E.M., and the Cure (who had their Twee moments with singles like “The Love Cats” and “The Caterpillar”). John Hughes primed the mainstream for a sometimes reluctant acceptance of the shy, the clever, the vintage clad. The Hughes trilogy of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink—and the bands that gibed with his vision, the Smiths among them—was a kind of Trojan horse for Indie; these were, after all, Hollywood films designed to reach mass audiences and make millions of dollars, suffused with a sensibility intended to self-limit. In the wake of Hughes and Pee-wee Herman came a sort of new mainstream: one with edge.
The era had its superstars—Prince, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Whitney Houston, and the King of Pop, Michael Jackson—and it had its cult heroes—the Cure, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., and the Smiths. At the start of the decade there seemed to be some kind of commercial moat between the two. As the ’80s wore on, that divide dried up and a growing hunger for smarter, shyer, sadder pop stars who reflected real teenage emotion, anger, and confusion increased wildly. While Nirvana was still trying to emulate the Melvins, edge—that catchall word for anything left of center—was already becoming big business, and by decade’s end consumers wanted even more of it. Hughes would come to seem tame. The Smiths would flame out, but the Cure, R.E.M., and Depeche Mode started selling out arenas.
“I felt like Hughes was trying to coddle teenagers and almost suck up to them—idealize them,” says Daniel Waters, screenwriter of 1989’s hilarious and brutal Heathers. “I was more of a terrorist coming after John Hughes. What drove me nuts about the Hughes movies—the third act was always something to do with how bad the parents are and how bad the adults are and when you grow up your heart dies. Hey, your heart dies when you’re twelve!”
Heathers is also almost a throwback to 1960s and ’70s films like If, Harold and Maude, and the more rebellious Kubrick movies prized by the Criterion-collecting Twee Tribe—quicker-witted than most teen films, and saturated with long-bygone things like croquet and pâté and Doris Day (“Que Sera Sera” opens the film). While a black fantasy, it also has the economy and elegance that defined the Nouvelle Vague and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s suburban but strangely urban and sophisticated, as much as any Whit Stillman or midperiod Woody Allen film, or, years later, the TV series Gilmore Girls.
“There were also Easter eggs for the smart teen,” Waters admits. “The high school is named after Paul Westerberg. We couldn’t actually afford a soundtrack so it was kind of a mental soundtrack I made, putting these keystones into the script. It would further embed you into the sensibility of the movie. I was a kid coming out of college. Basically my theory was, let’s write something: when I open up the newspaper, what am I not seeing? And I always wanted to see more of a Dr. Strangelove version of teen films.”
Heathers has no interest in the verisimilitude that Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe tried to achieve in Fast Times, either. Real-life kids in the 1980s and ’90s didn’t talk like the kids at Westerberg High. The dialogue is super stylized and self-consciously barbed.
“I had this poor girl,” Waters says. “I was her camp counselor and she would always say, ‘What’s your damage?’ and I completely stole it—I feel there’s a poor girl walking around going, ‘That was mine.’ I was not trying to re-create the high school experience. I was jealous of Shakespeare. I wanted to write about kings and queens too. High school is the last universal experience we all have, and there are kings and queens.” High school soap and social drama is merely another Trojan horse. “Bring in the cliché, because you can use it as a way to get crazy,” Waters says. Though a commercial flop in its day, Heathers is now one of those rare films that can be quoted verbatim both by those who saw it in its theatrical run and those who own it. Like so many Twee Tribe films, its cultural penetration transcends its original performance commercially.
Tim Burton’s Trojan horse would be a comic-book hero. In the 1960s, Batman was camp. The hero himself, portrayed by Adam West, seemed winded, even lazy, and the television show a
place for C-list stars to earn some rent money. Burton’s Batman, released the summer after Heathers’s 1989 spring offensive, announced yet another new sheriff in town. Burton (who had gothed out Heathers star Winona Ryder the previous summer in Beetlejuice) turned to artist Frank Miller’s stark and intense rebooting of the DC comic-book hero for a template. Miller converted Batman from a prancing caped crusader to the Dark Knight, a twisted vigilante haunted by the death of his parents. Gotham City was now a gleaming, sleek black Gothic hellscape with touches of F. W. Murnau, Todd Browning, and the Swiss painter H. R. Giger (who’d designed the monster in Alien as well as controversial album sleeves for Debbie Harry and the Dead Kennedys). Burton’s Batman probably listened to the Cure’s Pornography in that cave when Alfred wasn’t around. Jack Nicholson’s Joker, unlike Cesar Romero, who played the hero’s nemesis on television, looked like a real killer. With a budget approaching $50 million, unheard of in ’89, Batman could have buried the franchise and done some serious shaking up at the Warner Bros. film division. They basically gave the world’s second most iconic character (next to Superman) to the guy who made Pee-wee Herman do the big shoe dance, a guy who looked like he could have been one of the gawkier side members of the Jesus and Mary Chain.
Also pre-Nirvana, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love married the Goth of Todd Browning’s Freaks with trash-culture satire and produced a literary smash for smart people—fucked-up smart people. Similarly, the popularity of Weetzie Bat, a Trojan horse for young-adult fiction, was another product of the ’89 pop revolution and frightened some parents thanks to its unapologetic sexual frankness, its realistic portrayal of drinking, smoking, pogoing Hollywood teens, and its tackling of the AIDS crisis when even members of Congress were pretending it wasn’t there. A “dark fairy tale,” according to its author, Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie was yet another blockbuster.