Married and Buried: Punk As A Four-Letter Word, Part One

Posted in Music, Retrovirus, We Miss The Nineties |

By Less Lee Moore

When others become misty-eyed with nineties nostalgia, I never know what to say. I’ve often felt like my memories of the decade are far removed from theirs. Although I liked some of the so-called “grunge” music, I resented the media co-opting of the word in an attempt to cash in on youth culture. It’s only recently that I started to feel like I may have been more attuned to the zeitgeist than I realized.

During the early years of the nineties, I was in the throes of a musical ennui, searching desperately for something to erase the bloated years of the late eighties. Then I discovered a band that would revolutionize my musical tastes: Redd Kross.

(You thought I was gonna say Nirvana, didn’t you?)

I was familiar with their pop trash aesthetic from the Lovedolls movie soundtracks, but it wasn’t until I heard Third Eye that I began to love them. Attempts to purchase everything they ever recorded soon followed. I thought Neurotica was brilliant, particularly “Play My Song” which I think sums them up best, even today: “We are not stupid boys but we want to do it wrong.” That was the most punk rock thing I’d ever heard, even though the song came out in 1987, not 1977. After Phaseshifter came out in 1994, the deal was sealed.

Redd Kross: Neurotica

Every band Redd Kross referenced, whether seriously or sarcastically, became a new clue in a musical scavenger hunt. This was a band that took much of the music I loved—The Beatles, hardcore, classic rock—and smashed it to a million pieces, gluing it back together with a fascinating mixture of things I either never heard before or didn’t fully appreciate: Os Mutantes, The Runaways, Cheap Trick, and The Cowsills.

Through Redd Kross, I started listening in earnest to bands like Teenage Fanclub, Shonen Knife, The Muffs, and Pat Smear. I became so enthused about music again that I started a fanzine, the most exhilarating and educational endeavor I’ve ever embarked upon.

In the October 2007 issue of Chart magazine, Aaron Brophy declared that “grunge is dead: let’s keep it that way.” I’ve never read a Brophy editorial I didn’t like, but this one rattled me. While I support his protestations against “grunge nights” at Toronto dance clubs and bars, I think his reference to grunge as “an endless stream of Stone Temple Pilots songs” is way off the mark.

And this is where Nirvana comes in.

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