Aloha Kakahiaka

2004-11-02 | ROUTE 666 REVISITED: BACK ON THE ROAD TO NIRVANA

Rock and roll fans are beginning to act like Red Sox fans before they won the World Series. They just want something to complain about.

I read a lot of music magazines, and a great majority of them mention how rock and roll is dying multiple times in each issue. And a great majority of that majority are magazines that cover mainly rock and roll music.
Also discomforting is the fact that a lot of rock and roll musicians themselves are speaking of the so-called R-N-R demise.
People weren't complaining about the state of Rock N' Roll when Kurt Cobain was still alive. Are we living the curse of the Kurdt as I speak? In my opinion we are not. I think there is still an amazing number of bands who are making more than relevant music consistently.
I think what's happening is that a lot of the really good musicians (and unfortunately some of the really bad ones) were also huge fans of rock n' roll and huge fans of Nirvana as well. And when Kurt died, it added a lot of emotion to people's music, mainly a lot of sadness, which doesn't really rock, but is equally effective in the quality of music. There has been a lot more pretty and sad music ruling the playlists of our greatest current bands, and some people may be mistaking this for the lack of good rock music, instead of focusing on good rock bands playing simply good music, that is so good it doesn't really make a label necessary.
But a lot of bands who used to make music like this before the demise of the g-runge era, seemed to be thrown for a loop post-Nirvana. These bands started trying to capture something as powerful as Nirvana, by becoming as avant garde as possible, possibly on accident. Even friends of the band, and/or bands coming from that corner of the U.S.A. seemed to lose their steam, not by association as far as fans were concerned, but their music was naturally affected by the death of Kurt. Some people waited longer to put out albums. I'm sure a few quit. Some feared success because of what happened to him, and decided to deprive the world of their music, or just started making inferior music until the labels and MTV started ignoring them. Then came punk rock, which was commercialized almost immediately, and then boy bands, and then "punk" pop groups who were pretty much boy bands with guitars posing as punk rockers. And frat boys posing as grunge bands. You can tell a rock band is bad when they label themselves "grunge" or "post-grunge". The term "grunge" was dead before it was used by mainstream media, because none of the cool people who were involved wanted anything to do with it, but even those of us who despise the term understand that there's a certain type of band who deserves to be dis-honored by being called "grunge", and another type of band who shouldn't even be allowed in the same state as them.
But anyway, a big problem I see, is the quality musicians keep whining about rock music being dead, and they keep going further and further away from it, instead of trying to improve it. Lately it would be refreshing to hear a semi-decent to great band try and re-capture the Nirvana sound purposely, just to see if anybody cares. The problem with Nirvana fans like ourselves is that we kind of don't want to touch that legacy. While we're home we worship them, but we don't want to tarnish it by sharing it with non-worthy people, and I guess that's why we don't want to remake their music. Also we think we would have trouble trying to duplicate the excellence of it, and people would dismiss us for it without even knowing our true intentions. I guess that's why so far it's only been attempted by bands that have already been dismissed because they flat out suck, so why not try and rip-off one of the best bands of all time and sell some records? They deserve a certain credit for that I guess. And I don't want the good bands or myself to rip them off. I just want them and I to force ourselves to be heavily inspired/influenced by their music again and not worry about if it's dying or not. Let the DJ's make dance music, or become one.
I have so much more to say on this issue, but I fear no one is listening, and I know I'm not getting paid for it.

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