MANIC POP THRILL
by Rachel Felder (Ecco Press)
My dad knows every easy listening station between Connecticut and Chapel Hill, they're all written down on the Mobil trip routing sheet that guides our fall and spring moving rituals. We swap control of the radio back and forth during the 12-hour journey, between my alternative rock tapes and the soft sounds of Bette Midler and Billy Joel.
Rock critic Rachel Felder examines the difference between my tapes and my dad's lite hits in her new book Manic Pop Thrill, a history of alternative music named after the debut album by That Petrol Emotion. The hodgepodge of bands considered alternative are actually as diverse as the United Nations General Assembly, Felder writes. Her book attempts to distinguish the different strains of alternative music and answer the question, "Alternative to what?"
Alternative music, writes Felder, "makes congruent statements: pop music doesn't have to be safe and lightweight and disposable - it can roar and seethe with real emotions and problems." Alternative to what? The musical slickness and lyrical simplicity of one dimensional women like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, the by-the-numbers, lowest common denominator product of Elton John and Rod Stewart. But by defining the underground as what it's defined against, Felder fails to articulate a distince vision of what alternative music represents.
She's right - Elton John and Bryan Adams pander to the lowest common demographic. But Felder succumbs to fuzzy A-B-C--F logic in defining alternative music as the opposite of the mainstream. Lots of alternative pop is just as safe, lightweight and disposable as the status quo tunes she abhores. The raw feeling of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" stands out when sandwiched between airbrushed pop from Whitney or Mariah, as Felder points out. But wouldn't the Cranberries' "Linger" fit between them seamlessly?
If Felder believes the alternative label presupposes weighty lyrics about real-world issues, she's not listening very closely. Some of the bands she lianizes as alternative - my Bloody Valentine, the Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr. - aren't especially literate. Other alternative bands, such as Nirvana and Superchunk, have celebrated that very lack of meaning; "There's nothing new and we know it's true/And we're cooler than you," goes the chorus of Superchunk's "Cool," a manifesto for the maxed-out postmosdern age.
Felder writes with enthusiasm, knowledge and dancing adjectives. Her discussions of the musical roots behind different alternative strains are comprehensive. She understands how underdogs and the unrequited are attracted to the underground, how lonely teenagers discover bands like the Smiths, and then discover themselves and each other. Unlike recent Nirvana biographies and Gina Arnold's Route 666, Felder brings some critical detachment to the book. The focus is the music, not backstage anecdotes.
But she ultimately can't focus the same critical eye more broadly upon her own precepts. There's some truth to the argument that musical taste is transmitted through hegemonic cultural institutions - people don't freely choose their preferences because radio stations, MTV, major labels and mall superstores play and stock such a small spectrum of popular music. This may or may not be Felder's
position. Nevertheless, she makes little attempt to explain why alternative taste is right and easy listening wrong. My father, I imagine, will remain unconvinced.
Ultimately, Nirvana represents the same market-tested, image-controlled, commodified consumer culture as Whitney Houston. So do the Doc Marten shoes that Felder describes as essential scenester footwear. What kind of counter-cultural requires $90 shoes as a condition of authenticity? Just who's reifying who? The alternative culture Felder describes is so one-dimensional it seems to be just another kind of conformity.
Agile social critics frequently discover that the secret to understanding subcultures is to mine their subtleties and contradictions. This is what makes writers like Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus such perceptive observers. Felder barely even tries. She never approaches the depth of Hebdige's classic Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which is still the finest description of the never-ending slam-dance between the mainstream and the underground.
Hebdige wrote: "The creation and diffusion of new styles is inextricably bound up with the process of production, packaging and publicity that must inevitably lead to the diffusion of the subculture's subversive power . . . Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions, by creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones."
Seemingly the only way to escape this trap would be for the underground to refuse to define itself by defining what it's against, which Felder fails to do. If alternative music were something other than "not Top-40," it would be more difficult to co-opt. This is what the new indie label pop communities have managed to do, and while Felder mentions some of them, she misses their real meaning. Labels like Merge, K, Shrimper, and Simple Machines have located their resistance by re-inventing vinyl (and cassettes); they've demoncratized music by teaching people how to put out their own records and brought together like-minded bands and fans for festivals. They define themselves through their community. It's this refusal to define oneself as the other side of something else (i.e. the mainstream), but as one's own movement, that requires those who would like to take part to do so on the subculture's terms.
The underground is a process, not a place. It is always shifting and continuously under construction. Felder describes the sight and sound seamlessly. But misses the larger political, social and cultural questions that require more thoughtful, subtle analysis than mere reporting. (David Daley)