CHAPTER 22 | ROCK, ROOTS, AND REBELLION 537
All of these characteristics are on display in grunge, the alternative rock that
emerged in Seattle in the late 1980s and found widespread popularity in the early
1990s. The band that brought grunge to the national scene was Nirvana, whose
leader, Kurt Cobain, born in 1967, was hailed by the media as a spokesperson for
his generation, much as Bob Dylan had been labeled in the 1960s. Nirvana’s “Smells
Like Teen Spirit,” a number 1 pop hit in 1992, sets a mood of cynicism and despair
with its opening words, “Load up on guns and bring your friends / It’s fun to lose
and to pretend.” The chorus articulates disaffection and passivity: “I feel stupid and
contagious / Here we are now, entertain us.” The music, an insistent two-bar phrase
that repeats with no variation other than instrumentation and dynamics, adds to
the mood of futility. This, grunge argued, was the dominant ethos of Generation X.
Only two years later Cobain was dead from a self-infl icted gunshot wound.
If Nirvana took hopelessness to a fatal extreme, other alternative rock acts
were able to tone down the nihilism and achieve remarkable longevity. Pearl
Jam and Green Day are two veteran bands that originated in grunge and have
continued to the present day, modifying their sound and aesthetic stance along
the way. Each band has also sold over 60 million records, making them two
of the most popular and commercially successful acts at the turn of the century.
Therein lies the paradox of alternative rock: as the most prominent and profi t-
able genre in rock today, just what is it an alternative to?
Other rock musicians pursued different alternatives to the glitzy artifi ce of
mainstream pop. One descendant of heav y metal is industrial rock, best repre-
sented by the “group” Nine Inch Nails, actually the overdubbed,
studio-created music of an individual musician, Trent Reznor;
after creating an album in the studio, Reznor assembles a band to
perform the music live on tours. He augments heavily distorted
guitars and pounding drums with electronic sounds and eerily
processed vocals to express a dark, pessimistic worldview. Even
his quieter moments maintain an unsettled atmosphere, as in
“Hurt,” a 1994 song that reached a wider audience in a cover ver-
sion recorded by country singer Johnny Cash in 2002, only a year
before his death.
Another industrial act is Marilyn Manson, a band that updated
the 1970s stage persona of Alice Cooper: both bands used the same
name for the group and for the (male) lead singer, both made pro-
vocative fashion statements, both shared heav y metal’s fascina-
tion with the grotesque and occult, and both were the targets of
outraged moral watchdogs who argued that their music was det-
rimental to young audiences. In a 1996 press conference William
Bennett, formerly George H. W. Bush’s “drug czar,” denounced
Marilyn Manson, along with Nine Inch Nails and other groups,
as an assault on decency. When it became rumored that the Colo-
rado teenagers responsible for the shootings at Columbine High
School in 1999 had been avid fans of violent bands and video
games, Marilyn Manson was so heavily attacked in the press that
the band canceled their performances in mid-tour. But after a
short hiatus the furor died down and the group resumed record-
ing and touring, though in the post–September 11, 2001, cultural
climate Marilyn Manson’s acts of provocation have lost the power
to shock that they had in the 1990s.K Marilyn Manson in
concert: for many parents
in the 1990s a symptom of
civilization’s decline and fall.grunge172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 537 23/01/13 11:20 AM