I am of the firm opinion that this is among the great moments to be a fan of all kinds of music. While there are still those a bit younger than I am who mourn the end of the free-download moment, with, first MySpace allowing young bands, good and bad, the opportunity to provide fans with music, and iTunes providing relatively cheap and easy access to all sorts of music, we have arrived at a moment when, for this music fan, the opportunities are there to hear anything you want.
So, I suppose because I am enthusiastic about the possibilities in our current moment - separate from the usual discussions over styles, genres, corporate control, popularity versus authenticity and the like - I can be forgiven for finding so little goodness in this.
Hole. What can you say about Hole? Time was I would have said I liked Hole. That I was a Hole fan. After all, I like nineties alt rock, female singers and counter-intuitive stances, so what’s not to like about saying you like Hole. Not long ago, however, I actually listened to Celebrity Skin and was hit by the realization that I didn’t even recognize many of the songs. I’d never owned a Hole album! I wasn’t a Hole fan at all. I was a Hole poseur. I knew their MTV hits, but none of the deeper cuts even off their hit albums. The whole thing was a fraud, an illusion. How did this happen?She admits upfront that she was only familiar with Hole's "MTV hits" and wonders "how did this happen"? The rest of the article spirals out of control, with the topic of authenticity, the old chestnut of Kurt Cobain and Billy Corgan writing Hole's best albums, and even the "death" of rock and roll being offered up as if these were settled topics.
The simple answer, for me at any rate, as to why hip-hop beat out rock in the 1990's is two-fold. Those who bought the whole "alt rock" scene in the early 90's realized pretty quickly they were being conned (when Hootie and the Blowfish is offered up as alternative, you know something's wrong); more important, there was more creative energy in rap and hip-hop in the 1990's. Starting with NWA's Straight Outta Compton, then moving through, in particular, Dr. Dre's nurturing of up and coming rap artists (in particular Snoop Dogg, and later, Eminem), we had some seriously creative work being done. While Diddy did, indeed, exploit Biggy Smalls death, the reason he could do so is Biggy's work was, in many ways, flawless.
Rock, happy to say, did lay dormant for most the decade, at least on radio and at the major labels, who invested much more in hip-hop. Yet, as the rise of Napster at the end of the decade showed, there were audiences out there. The Sturm und Drang of the 1990's was largely the last gasp of a corporate model that Napster helped show was no longer tenable. The audiences for music are, by and large, far more fragmented despite relatively robust sales for music by, say, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and others. This fragmentation is not a sign of an elderly music no longer relevant; rather, it is a sign that we no longer need be guided by corporate sponsorship and radio airplay to decide what "good music" is. It takes a bit more effort than familiarizing oneself with the "MTV hits" (as if that phrase means anything anymore), and claiming that the Beastie Boys taught white people how to rap but the reward is worth the effort.
Hole didn't kill rock and roll, is far more symptomatic of the corporate disease that forced so much good music off the official radar than of larger and largely false questions of authenticity, and in retrospect, can be enjoyed if for no other reason than good, campy fun fifteen years later. If the author of this particular article would pay attention to more than hits, and the Beastie Boys (which do have some interesting music out there, to be sure), she might discover that her entire lament is rooted in the reality that she allowed herself to be conned.
