So we don't hate pop, we hate fake shallow stale empty phony all brawn no brains no substance glossy grossness. Pop is good. Everything has pop hooks. The Beatles are great. Doo wop, Motown, indie pop. The Ramones sound very poppy. I always thought the chorus to In Bloom sounded like a lullaby. Nirvana are verry poppy too. Drain You and On a Plain are two of the poppiest songs I've ever heard. So are Shonen Knife. Just not the pop that's been popular since '98. I love that K Records Olympia happy poppy upbeat childlike stuff. Kurt Cobain got a tattoo of the K Records logo on his arm for that reason. I always wanted to do that too. So here's some good poppy music.
Beat Happening - Indian Summer
The Vaselines - Son of a Gun
Daniel Johnston - I Had Lost My Mind
Half Japanese - Put Some Sugar On It
Teenage Fanclub - Star Sign. I just had to put this one up again.
Lois - Indie. I first heard of Lois by finding out abbout the band Courtney Love that she's in. Not the person, the band. I heard they named themselves that to make fun of her. Good band, and I like her solo stuff too. I think her name is Lois Maffeo.
Courtney Love (the band) - Don't Mix The Colors. I hear this is a Beat Happening song, so I'm dying to hear the Beat Happening version, but I love this version, and it was one that really stuck out in my mind from the three Kill Rock Stars comps.
Flop - The Great Valediction. From Seattle. I keep getting hooked on this one. Sooooo good. And I think I see those sunglasses once again.
The Posies - Dream All Day. From Seattle, but a lot poppier than the other grunge bands.
The Pastels - Crawl Babies
Gin Blossoms - Found Out About You
Dandy Warhols - Nothing to Do
Tullycraft - Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend's Too Stupid To Know About
Crackerbash - Orion. Sort of pop punky.
Bratmobile - Girl Germs. Riot Grrrl indie pop.
Foo Fighters - Big Me
Dinosaur Jr. - The Wagon
Violent Femmes - Blister in the Sun
Pixies - Gigantic. Yeah, Kim Deal should have been allowed to have WAAAYYY more say in writing Pixies songs. But oh well, The Breeders are great too, if not better.
Meat Puppets - Plateau
Dead Moon - It's Ok
Hum - Stars. Ok, I'll add this one and the next two just for the heck of it, since I just discovered them and can't get them out of my mind. It is noisy rock poppy alternative I guess. There's all sorts of poppy music. Apparently there is a whole pack of other Chicago alternative bands that sound similar to Smashing Pumpkins. Perfection.
Lit - My World. Did you know Lit, the band that did My Own Worst Enemy, used to be grunge? I heard this song and was amazed, and was like why didn't they keep this sound up? They should go back to it.
Catherine - Idiot. More Chicago alternative noisy pop Smashing Pumpkinsesque.
So don't be saying us rock people hate everything but rock, for we love everything but what is fake.
Speaking of art, a subject which I always loved and kept close to my heart, I always loved that really trippy, creative, artsy stuff, like stuff you'd see by Rob Zombie or Butthole Surfers, so here's some that I love.
Beavis and Butthead Do America. I saw on the credits that Rob Zombie did the animation for this, and a White Zombie song is playing. I love this one. Pretty trippy, but I guess it's supposed to be since Beavis is tripping out in the desert.
From the Peruvian Chili episode of the Simpsons where homer goes crazy from eating a chili. All the animation is trippy and cool in this one.
Apparently MTV used to play music, and was actually cool, playing weird crazy messed up creative cool artistic cartoons like this in between videos.
Butthole Surfers - Who Was in My Room Last Night. Apparently these guys did lots of acid. I love the artwork and creativeness of videos like this.
Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod. The singer from Butthole Surfers is guest singing on this one, which explains why the art during the cartoon parts seems like they could fit in with a Butthole Surfers video.
Cover of Dookie by Green Day. Ok, I'll just add this one too. I love love love the cartoonish look of stuff like this. I grew up hearing the hits off of Dookie on the radio too.
Ok, so along with a bunch of other stuff Kurt Cobain ripped off from me (too bad he got there first) he has the same taste in art as me, though he can actually draw very well, whereas I never thought I could. Before I found out about grunge, all I cared about was art, and I still love it to death. So here are some drawings, paintings etc. he did that I find to be my taste in art as well and admire.
I so love the weird creative diorama Kurt created as seen in this video, and the weird translucent skeleton man with the little flowers and drops of red wax. So me!
Yep, if ever I were to create art, it would be exactly like this, just like if ever I were to create music, it would be exactly like every Nirvana song. I guess great minds really do think alike.
Ok, so at the very least, I got to grow up on what my dad liked which was 70s and 80s hard rock and heavy metal, which I always loved, like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Ozzie Osbourne, Dio, Guns 'N' Roses, Metallica, Aerosmith, and we also listened to the radio, which had everything, so I also grew up loving, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, The Mamas and The Papas, and I heard all that 90s music in the background of my childhood. Incase I didn't say it already, the way I found out about grunge was that it was Christmas of 2004 when I was 12, and my brother got an ipod for Christmas, but I barely knew what an ipod was, so he said I could check it out after him, so he filled it with music and listened to it for a while, then he showed me how to do it. So I'm scrolling through, and I see all the stuff we grew up on as mentioned above, and then BAM, there it was, bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. My life was forever changed. I started listening to it all, and every other song was like "Oh yeah, I know this!" because I grew up in the 90s and must have heard it around, but after that it was like hear it was, for me to really discover, like no one ever said to me when I was little "you know this song that's playing on the radio? Well pay attention to it because it's good, and it's called Plush by a band called Stone Temple Pilots" which would have been totally awesome, but oh well, but then I started having specific memories of me walking down a strip mall when I was little and hearing that song playing as we passed by different stores and things like that, so I must have at least paid a little bit of attention even though I was little and wouldn't know/remember/care, so it was almost like it was meant to be. So I think it was nirvana first and Smells Like Teen Spirit on that day, and I heard that song, and from the very first second I was like "This is he greatest thing EVER! This is my favorite song, this is what all songs should sound like!" and I was hooked immediately. Nirvana was the main one I was amazed by on that day, and as I was listening to all the songs over and over, I look to my brother and say, "So what is this band? Nirvana? I'm going to have to remember that name!" And he gave me a look as if to say, "Yeah, I knew you'd like them, they are great, huh?" and the rest is history, I never looked back and continued to pick apart that scene. Another great thing about that day was that I finally found All Apologies. All Apologies was the one Nirvana song that I heard in the 90s (yes apparently I had never heard the most famous song of the 90s in the 90s), and I heard it several times before then since I was maybe like 6, and it was always the song that got away, and I'd think it sounded so beautiful and cool when it came on the radio, but I had no idea what it was or where it came from, and now I finally found it! So because I didn't want to find out that these bands were all glossy and get brainwashed into liking them for that reason, because that's all I could figure how all my friends liked all those fake poppers, I held off on knowing anything about those bands for about three months, about March of '05, a month after my 13th birthday, and got to know the music, but eventually I couldn't take it anymore so I started to look it all up, so I found out that those four bands, which were the for main ones that I paid attention to, all came to Seattle, which at first I thought was a coincidence, then I found out they were all called grunge and came from the same scene, so I was like wow, I must fit into this scene if the main bands I like are the main ones from that scene and I didn't know they had anything to do with one another, and then I had to find out the really confusing stuff, like they all got famous when I was born, to my parents generation, and Kurt Cobain was exactly like me, but he died back in '94 when I was 2, to little to remember anything, 10 years before I ever found out about him, and he married that crazy woman that I grew up hating, and the whole scene wasn't famous anymore, but it was funny finding out that they were all grungy and didn't care how they looked, and I was all worried that they'd be just like the bad poppers, since that's all I'd seen around that time, so then I loved the fact that they weren't like that too. So I didn't know they were famous because no kids at school were talking about them, and as I started to look up pictures of them to see what they looked like, I saw their clothes and liked them and wanted to dress that way, but I thought that they each individually had great taste in clothes as well as music, so years later I started hearing that that was the grunge fashion, and I was like, but I've never seen anyone else dress that way, and that's when I started having all the flashbacks of seeing that in the 90s and remembering how cool it all was, since I started blocking out the 2000s when they started because it sucked, so I lost my good memories too, even though I promised myself when I was 6 that I wouldn't ever forget that laid-back vibe and seeing guys with long hair and flannel. Man, the flooded memories, I suddenly remembered seeing everyone in flannel in the 90s, and all the cool teenage girls in movies in the mid 90s had flannel, and wondered why it wasn't like that today, and hearing the music more, and all the piercings and tattoos, and I swear I heard the names Kyuss, Skin Yard, and Shonen Knife, but I didn't know who they were. So around the time I started looking up info about the bands, I was listening to all the Nirvana songs on my ipod, since I got my own ipod for my 13th birthday because I loved my brother's, and at that time the first thing I would do when I woke up was listen to a Nirvana song, and the last thing I would do before I went to bed was listen to a Nirvana song, and I'd have to listen to each song like 5 times in a row because songs are never long enough, so I was listening to the cool guitar riffs, and all I could think was, "man, if I could play music that sounded like that, I'd be the happiest person in the world", and then I thought, "wait, I could play music like that, I could be a musician", and then I thought, "Ok, that's what I'll do, I'll learn how to play the guitar, move to Seattle (since I decided that I'd move to Seattle when I found out all my favorite bands come from there) and I'll form a grunge band" so those are the goals I've had since. So grunge helped me find out about punk, which I guess I already knew about since I grew up loving The Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop, California Sun, and the Clash's Should I Stay or Should I go, and several other The Clash songs, and probably other punk songs, so one day my dad tells me he listened to punk when he was younger like metal, and he listened to Black Flag and Circle Jerks and others, I think this came about as I was listening to Black Flag (which is my favorite punk band) on the computer since I heard of them from Nirvana, and I'm sitting there thinking "Then why didn't you show me those bands as you were showing me Ozzie and Iron Maiden etc.!?!" Like I would have loved to have heard stuff by those bands as much as the heavy metal bands I cherished, but oh well. We mainly just heard the metal bands on the radio anyway, we didn't really have any CDs or Cassettes, until recently I found a Metallica and Iron Maiden cassettes, and once again I'm thinking "Why didn't you tell me you had these?!" because we mainly just heard the hits on the radio. So yeah, here are some 90s alternative metal, industrial, creative metalish etc. types of 90s bands.
Tool - Schism. Tool I love, so creative and good, Schism I heard in the 90s, and is my favorite Tool song.
Kyuss - Thong Song. My hair is Reaaaal looooong. This is the first Kyuss song I bought, and I think I heard I'm Not in the 90s. Recently I keep getting hooked on One Inch man. These guys are from the same county as me, I'm not from the desert part, but still.
Corrosion of Conformity - Clean My Wounds. This one I heard in the 90s. I only re-found it maybe like a year ago, and once again I was like "Oh yeah, I know this!" I love this one.
Helmet - Unsung. I think I heard this one in the 90s too. Helmet is really cool. I have a few more of their songs.
Pantera - Walk. I always hear everyone raving about Pantera, so I swear one day I'll find out more, but this is the main one I know for now. I heard this as a cover by what's there names on the radio. I liked it, and then I found out it was Pantera, so the main song I knew by whats there names wasn't even theirs.
Primus - My name is Mud. So creative. I love this one. Ok t seems like I say that about every one.
White Zombie - More Human Than Human. I heard White Zombie in the 90s in the background of my childhood too. I love their clothes in their videos. They have cool style. And I recently found out they have a woman bassist like Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Smashing Pumpkins.
Rage Against the Machine - Bulls on Parade. I heard Killing in the Name in the 90s and was totally in love with it when I re-found it. I kept listening to it and was inspired by the lyrics. I've only recently heard a few more of their songs. I saw a few interviews with Zack de la Rocha, and once again was like, "Yeah, I've been saying that my whole life!" like I have with all the grungers/generation Xers. Plus I thought he was cute. Not that that matters.
Korn - Freak on a Leash
Ministry - NWO. I think this one has a lot to say too.
Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People. I read the lyrics and I was like "Yeah man!" and I've seen him interviewed before and was like "Yeah man!" so yeah, I always thought it was funny when people call him a shock rocker when I just always thought he dressed like that to show people you should be allowed to look different. I remember seeing stuff like this all the time in the 90s, so maybe I'm desensitized or can see beyond what people call different and antichrist and don't judge anybody until I hear what they have to say. Though I always liked his style too. Kind of goth I guess, which I always liked.
Nine Inch Nails - Piggy. My favorite is Closer, but I have since heard Piggy and love it too. I think I heard Closer in the 90s too.
Faith No More - Epic. Another one I heard in the 90s. I was all excited when I found it again.
Mind Funk - Goddess. Jason Everman was the 2nd guitarist for Nirvana about '89, then he was the bassist for Soundgarden about '90, then he moved on to Mind Funk.
My Sisters Machine - I'm Sorry. From Seattle. I just felt like adding this. My Sister's Machine came off of Alice "N Chainz which was sort of the beginning of Alice in Chains.
Gruntruck - Tribe. I might as well add this one too. From Seattle, the singer died back in '08 of diabetes.
Tad - Greasebox. Ok, since I'm adding a few Seattle grunge bands I'll add Tad, the grungiest of the grunge.
Ok, so it seems metal was also more creative in the 90s
Cover of Dookie by Green Day. Ok, I'll just add this one too. I love love love the cartoonish look of stuff like this. I grew up hearing the hits off of Dookie on the radio too.
Cover of Monsters by Meat Puppets
