Nordic wrote:So this is all just PR, advertising, the usual manipulative bullshit. I wondered "why the headline about being the "most important" and all that rot?", well, they want people to argue about this. You know, just like we are.
Hype.
There was, in fact, a documentary made about the Seattle rock explosion called "Hype". Anybody see that? It played at Sundance and SXSW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype!
Thanks for the heads up. I'd never heard of it.
As for the hype, I was at the show where it moved in. Still have the T-shirt. Rolling Stone reviewed it posthumously two years after (I've since lost the mag, but I remember Led Zep's retrospective release was one of the feature stories) and they mentioned the locust-like descending of music agents upon the scene, in particular that night's venue (an epic two night show of MLB and friends at the central).
Caveat: This is simply my own observation as someone on the ground with interaction with the scene but not the actual artists in any meaningful way.... The heroin came flooding in on the heels of the LA promo guys and the wind changed with it. IMO, they cultivated the depressing stuff, suppressing the true sound which was admittedly a reaction to Reaganism and bad weather ( and as a friend explained to me, you gotta remember, these guys have been doing mushrooms since fourth grade...) but was not as depressive as the rather cynical later packaging of the bands by the mainstream.
Two friends of mine travelled with Tad and Nirvana on their big tour pre-fame. They came home to tell us (while laughing wickedly) "Nobody gets it, they play these venues and people don't know what to do because they don't get it". They still 'don't get it'. I am amazed by the younger people on boards who idolize every word from Kurt, yet still in his words, 'don't know what it means'. In that I pity Nirvana and Kurt. The hype made people
think they could know what was going on, but most of them internalized it as a teenage angst rather than the despair (which has paralells currently) of an adult who is faced with the consequences of Reaganomics, etc and that time and place.
In my own experience, most people didn't think they 'got it' until someone-unseen-else played it on the radio and MTV with all those validating commercials and other stamps of corporate approval AKA fucking hype....
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