For youth like myself, in this thankfully as-yet-unnamed "alternative" community, it's easy to disidentify from all that's going on. With plenty of parental money for indie records, guitars, drums and amps, you can construct a nice little world of sympa thetic friends with sympathetic tastes. Want to get political? Don't bother to leave campus and investigate the ever-worsening poverty it's built upon, just walk out of the dorm and get arrested at the anti-apartheid rally.
The indie bands of those times played the songs you hummed as you painted late at night or sat on the sunny quad reading T.S. Eliot. The heroes of these bands symbolized the surprisingly unironic romanticism of the times. The younger, pudgier Michael S tipe, forever seeking out the space of the mumbling autistic boy in the corner. The younger, much pudgier Bob Mould, who seemed to personify the locked-alone-in-his-room, comic book reading, Dungeons & Dragons playing, Zeppelin-worshipping but still-conf used-about-sex kind-of-shyness. The younger, charmingly lovelorn Paul Westerberg, who even in the spastic days of "I Hate Music" and "Fuck School" was treating songwriting like an artisan's craft, something one sweated over in long, lonely nights in the workshop. Each of these frontmen and their bands were there to be invited in to these safe, private, domestic spaces we'd created, these plush cocoons lined with vinyl and guitars, which we thought we could call alternative.
The major capitals in which these cocoons sprang up - Athens, Hoboken, Minneapolis, Olympia, among others -are the stops on Gina Arnold's tour of American indie music from about '78 to '92 in her new book, Route 666: The Road to Nirva. Arnold's t hesis is all there in the title: the music of the 80s begat Nirvana, in whose multi-platinum triumph all of us 80s veterans should feel free to share as the triumph of "our" values and standards. And for such veterans, reading this book is about as excit ing as rereading your high school yearbook. There are moments when your heart rushes, when a certain photo or scrawled note brings back a poignant moment and lets you recapture a lost identity. Then there's the dull stuff - the forgotten math teachers w ho now just look like people you see on the subway (er, I mean, at the mall or something). This book has its moments of the former (it helps if you were ever helplessly infatuated, and I mean pathologically so, with R.E.M.,the Replacements or even the Bu tthole Surfers or Beat Happening). But it's also got plenty of the latter, people who seem undifferentiable from one another, who found "scenes" whose stories themselves seem interchangeable, all wrapped in Arnold's clunky prose, a mix of overblown music critspeak and those old high school cadences: "Husker Du's brilliance cannot be equaled, but the Replacements were so stupid and contagious. The Replacements were true love . . . "
Still, with its unabashed celebration of fandom, Arnold's book is a welcome addition to a rock criticism canon whose tenor was set by the over-the-top jizz of Lester Bangs and almost run into the ground by the over-our-head phallus of Greil Marcus and hi s "secret history of the 20th century." Early on Arnold, a Silicon Valley native, suggests that part of the reason she's writing is "because nobody respects middle-class white girls from the suburbs." Bitchy, ironic, on the brink of offensiveness, this grab at a subject position is Arnold at her best, bringing a bit of self-consciousness to the story of her thralldom. But this is one of the few moments in the book when it seems like anything's at stake for her.
Every guy in this book, from Calvin Johnson of K and Beat Happening to Bruce Pavitt of Sub Pop, is able to tell Arnold an amazingly romantic story of blindness (I was a dumb hippie), insight (I heard Patti Smith or the Clash or the Melvins), bohemia (I m et all these other people with cropped hair and ripped jeans; we had no money), dreams (we didn't let the dearth of money stop us), and wish-fulfillment (we started Minor Threat, R.E.M., K, Sub Pop). The magic of these stories for Arnold is the same magi c that's embedded in the plastic cover smell and the fantasies inspired by young Stipe et al. People you know, or can identify with, or can get crushes on, basically nice people, getting up on stage or going into a studio to make "private colors and soun ds." Arnold's mental space is the uninvadable space of the dorm or the group house, its exterior alien and dilapidated, its interior painted and postered and made comfy by the sensitive, quirky boys next door.
But as much as we 80s vets would like to remember ourselves as having created and enunciated an alternative during Reaganism, we have to consider how much our resistance meant shutting ourselves off in a kind of privileged privacy while the forces we wer e supposedly resisting, too, were advancing a politics of privacy - the private sector, deregulation, free markets, etc. To appreciate this we, and Arnold, might take another look at the three shy, private boy stars listed above (whose bands make up the core of Arnold's book) and realize that they're all boys, and that at least two of them are, to varying degrees, closet cases. And that's precisely what gets elided in an account like this - that in the fantasy about meeting in this private, utopic space , we become blind to the fact that certain people are still getting more access than others. And that a certain identity is still privileged, and, surprise, it's not middle-class girls. For all its identification with idealistically leftist communities, the implicit message of the 80s scene was that only straight white boys make music. Arnold barely touches on this, and she doesn't even bother talking to bands like Throwing Muses, Salem 66, Fetchin' Bones, etc. who challenged this presumption. She doe sn't even talk to the couple of women in other bands she discusses - nothing from Kim Deal, Kim Gordon or Heather Lewis, for instance.
These gaps stand out all the more in a time when the vast majority of the most interesting indie music is made (and, often, distributed and publicized) by women. Sorry, Gina, but this isn't the result of the quirky white boys' tarring and paving work al ong Route 666. It's because today, when there's a president who does gross things but whom you still kinda like, when million-sellers like Madonna or Nirvana or Beavis & Butthead suddenly seem more critical of the "mainstream" than most of the music arri ving at college radio stations, when it's suddenly become difficult even to say what qualifies as an indie label, being oppositional or "alternative" gets a lot more complicated. Most of all it's the result of a sense that politics doesn't mean whom you vote for or demonstrate with, but how you use your privacy to position yourself with, around or against certain identity categories: man, woman, grrrl, queer, nigga, etc. The celebrity around figures from Madonna to Anita Hill represents the changed conc eption of what privacy means, and have hammered home the idea that our private choices about how we dress, how fey or butch we are, whom we do or don't have sex with, etc. resonate in the public sphere. You can see this conception in action when Kurt Cob ain not only plays benefits against anti-gay ballot initiatives but also talks clumsily about his queer sexuality in public. R.E.M. is the politics of shantytowns, environmentalism and animal rights. Nirvana and riot grrrls are the politics of date rape and outing.
Today's bands understand that there's something political just by being in public at all, that they don't have to sing a song about acid rain to "become" political. Now everybody plays the media as one of their instruments, from the riot grrrl zine/band /label impresarios to Juliana "I'm a virgin" Hatfield. Consequently the networks of distribution, the zines, and the not-necessarily-coherent acts of self-fashioning become as important a part of experiencing a band as what was formerly "just the music."
Don't get me wrong. When people ask me my favorite album of all time I still say the Replacements' Let it Be. But I'm not expecting any of today's bands to produce a desert island disc. You'll never be allowed that desert island fantasy, of just you a nd your record making out on the beach and no intermediary within hundreds of miles, ever again. There's too much music in too many different styles. And their points of enunciation - referential, quotational, conscious of their relation to other artist s out there in the public sphere--mean that you can't take one band or one style or even one medium at a time. Like Bratmobile? To totally get them you have to check out Bikini Kill and the Del Rubio Triplets, read Action Girl, Sassy, and Backlash. Dig able Planets more your speed? Look into not only A Tribe Called Qwest, Coltrane, and Hendrix, but also James Baldwin, Greg Tate, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Sure, the Byrds, the Velvets, and Flannery O'Connor oozed through the moody jangles of R.E.M., but the operative model of influence back then was vertical: the bands were the New Masters, the inheritors of this Pop tradition or that Southern tradition. Today, in the wake of ever-widening self-consciousness regarding the contingency of Great Traditions in general, influence more often works horizontally. What fires the music isn't what tradition a band inherits, but the sideways move they make to get ac cess to tradition(s). What you hear in the music is the actual sifting through of materials, the very sound of the needles, threads and welding irons grafting them together. Some bands still make the easy move over to the great pop/punk tradition that o nce provided the sole map of center and margins. Some do this very well. But more and more, this resonates as a choice rather than an imperative. Consequently, I doubt that any single indie band, no matter what their level of musicianship or understan ding of Revolver and the Banana album, will ever carry a mantle of scene-dominance and cultural inheritance the way R.E.M., the Replacements, Husker Du, and the Minutemen did during the years that shaped the argument of Route 666.
In today's expanded public sphere, nothing really becomes dead weight. Arnold's book, too, is part of the web of available references, as Option readers learned with Kim Deal's "Kill Gina Arnold." The point is that Route 666 is best read as an artifac t of the 80s, not as a document of them. If anything, buy it for that funny smell.
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