Running Underground With the Moles

Harvey Danger & the End of the Alternative Nation

Every genre of music that has held sway over the pop charts at any time has a body of mythology built up around it. Looking at rock mythology, in particular, the grunge explosion of the 1990s is perhaps the last universally-accepted chapter of the great rock music canon.

As the legend goes, the release of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit in the fall of 1991 brought down the facade of the phonies, spurring a sudden, dramatic seachange in popular music. The dated synth pop acts and arthritic hair metal bands that had bogarted the charts for the previous fifteen years were wiped off the airwaves overnight. Poison, Duran Duran, Warrant were replaced by flannel-clad, greasy-haired rockers from the Pacific Northwest with Chuck Taylor sneakers and seemingly-endless reserves of disaffected angst, all directed at everything-and nothing-in particular.

Of course, it didn’t play out exactly like that in real life. Smells Like Teen Spirit failed to chart initially, only picking up steam a few months after the song’s release after a campaign of heavy rotation on MTV. The song became a hit by the end of the year, peaking at number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and remaining in the top 100 for an impressive, yet still modest twenty weeks in total. The album Nevermind did eventually climb to number one on the albums chart, but not until the following year.

One thing that marked grunge, in comparison to other genres, was its distinct lack of a easily-distilled sound. Bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains were all lumped under the “grunge” umbrella. However, these and other grunge acts really had little in common with one another sonically beyond the presence of crunchy guitar. Some leaned more into the influence of ’80s hardcore and noise rock acts, while others shared more ancestry with the burgeoning jam band scene of the time.

The confederation of bands that would eventually embody “grunge” had been kicking around basement spaces and bars in the Northwestern US since the mid-eighties. They continued to gain momentum and grow in popularity and exposure over the next several years before bursting onto the national stage in 1991. The genre itself eventually peaked in popularity around 1994, coinciding with the tragic death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.

The Present Now Will Later be Past

Looking back, the rapid rise and decline of grunge does seem to be a standout moment in the history of popular music. “Alternative rock” had already joined the lexicon by the time Smells Like Teen Spirit dropped, with Billboard having introduced the “Alternative Songs” chart in 1988. However, it remained a largely underground phenomenon in those early years, with only a handful of acts like R.E.M. coming anywhere close to “mainstream” success. That all changed with the fabled grunge revolution.

Of course, the inherent irony of alternative rock going mainstream was not lost on the performers caught in the middle of the moment. Cobain had a famously troubled relationship with fame and his status as the “voice of a generation” and a soon-to-be cultural icon. So much, in fact, that his complicated feelings about authenticity and the commodification of his art, his image, and his life, are believed to have been central motivations for his 1994 suicide.

Cobain was not the only grunge rocker to have such feelings. During the nineties, perhaps the greatest sin one could commit as an artist was to “sell out;” to be perceived as inauthentic and motivated by money and success, rather than a primal urge to create. The alt kids of the era gleefully interrogated their peers for any sign of inauthenticity with the fervor of a Maoist struggle session.

How can any art predicated on being defiantly and insistently opposed to “selling out” manage to keep to those bona fides in a capitalist system? The answer is simple: it can’t.

By the late-nineties, “alternative rock” had already become a joke. Many of the original grunge-designated bands had broken up or simply fallen off the charts. Record labels had already managed to synthesize a much more marketable, reliable substitute in so-called “post-grunge” bands like Collective Soul and Bush, as well as later lab-spawned chimeras like Creed and Nickelback. These acts offered the same kind of marketable buzz ballads, but without the annoying pretense of of any “authenticity” which need be maintained.

Other acts labeled as “alternative” were starting to fade from the limelight as well by 1998. Smashing Pumpkins’ best years were behind them, the Britpop bubble was bursting, and alt-rock pioneers like The Cure and R.E.M. had long since been relegated to the status of “legacy acts.” Describing alternative rock as “alternative” was beginning to feel more and more like a joke buried under so many layers of irony, it was no longer possible to even discern the original point.

Into this moment, enter: Harvey Danger.

The Trivial Sublime

Harvey Danger was first formed in 1992 by a pair of University of Washington students. Seattle was, of course, the epicenter of grunge, though the band didn’t really fit in among the grunge acts that became the city’s claim to fame.

After kicking around the local scene for a few years, bandmembers Aaron Huffman, Jeff J. Lin, Sean Nelson, and Evan Sult finally released their debut album, Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, in 1997. Allegedly recording the album across three sessions on a budget of $3,000, the album serves up a batch of tightly-composed, raw ’90s alt-pop. Merrymakers was hailed by local critics, and became a favorite of college radio stations around the country, but didn’t exactly take off on release. In fact, by the end of the year, the group had retreated into a temporary hiatus and even considered the idea of going their separate ways.

Then Flagpole Sitta finally hit.

The second track on the album, Flagpole Sitta still stands out as a difficult song to pin down. It’s infectiously catchy, but with an abrasive edge. It’s a bit jammy, but with roots firmly planted in post-punk. The composition is driven by melodic bass riffing, while the guitar serves to provide a wash of background noise to fill out the sound. On top of this we have vocalist Sean Nelson’s rambling, highly evocative lyrics, delivered in a sing-songy-yet-snotty manner, that seem to perfectly encapsulate that moment of time in alternative rock.

Nelson would prove to be a pioneer of the irony-poisoned “literary” lyricist archetype that would dominate the indie circuit in the aughties. This is a point illuminated by his collaborations with later indie darlings like like Death Cab for Cutie and The Decemberists. His career is a rogues’ gallery of idols to a generation of anxious English majors. This is evidenced by the manner in which Nelson is able to maintain an aloof, self-effacing tone while expertly delivering a clever-clever dick joke as the song’s second verse:

Fingertips have memories

Mine can’t forget the curves of your body,

And when I feel a bit naughty,

I run it up the flagpole and see

Who salutes but no one ever does.

Verse after verse, the song reads like Nelson’s from-the-front reporting on the state of alternative rock, such as it was, viewed clearly from the trenches in the late-nineties. This is perhaps made most clear at the song’s bridge, which opens up into punchy bass backed by ethereal, clean chords and cymbal rolls:

I wanna publish zines,

And rage against machines,

I wanna pierce my tongue,

It doesn’t hurt, it feels fine.

The trivial sublime,

I’d like to turn off time,

And kill my mind.

You kill my mind.

In these lines, we see Nelson listing off cliches of “alt” subculture in an undifferentiated tone that can be best described as “barred out.” This is where the real brilliance of the song shines through.

The Obligatory Capitalist Realism Connection

The signifiers mentioned in the bridge of Flagpole Sitta are all things that might have, at one time, actually meant something. Publishing zines is a treasured method of distributing information in the punk subculture. Rage Against the Machine is a band that spent their career penning fiery, anti-imperialist polemics with explicitly leftist messaging. Yet, when recontextualized, all these things are drained of any meaning they might have once had. Even the detached, distant way in which Nelson lists off these items suggests that they have no real meaning behind them. They’re all things which one can absently mark on an alt-culture bingo card.

As I mentioned in another post, the symbology of rebellion, even of explicitly-anticapitalist rebellion, can easily be recuperated by capitalism. It is a machine designed to metabolize any input, with no regard for the content of that material. Self-conscious rebellions has, time and again, been recouped and assimilated by capitalism, drained of vitality, commodified, and repackaged. The aesthetics of rebellion and alienation can be scrubbed clean of any of the political potential that might have once existed there and be resold to a mass-consumer market. In the process, these things become symbols divorced from meaning.

This process didn’t begin or end with the grunge moment. It repeats endlessly; new styles, art movements, and ways of thought present themselves as potential antitheses to the mainstream. They are then co-opted and assimilated by the hegemonic cultural borg, losing any vitality and meaning in the process.

“Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time,” Mark Fisher writes in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? “‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.” This describes the the process observed during this period of “alternative” cultural hegemony. What, after all, can alternative art be when it, and the things to which it is supposedly “alternative,” are for sale at the same store?

Harvey Danger drummer Evan Sult is on record, saying that the song was written in response to the Seattle music scene of the era, and the impact that the scene had on mainstream culture writ-large. The song is self-conscious parody of a scene which was ambling, zombie-like, drained of life; alternative in name only. But, even though the band were writing in response to a specific moment, the sentiment remains relevant into the present.

The Agony & The Irony

Smells Like Teen Spirit and Flagpole Sitta serve as perfect bookends to the alt-rock moment. It began with this primal voice of angst and alienation, rising from an unlikely source. Then, just a few years later, a band from the same-ish town (Nirvana were technically from Olympia) give us this song that encapsulates what alt rock had become: an easily-encapsulated aesthetic. It was something which could be replicated with a trip to the mall. The vestiges of the genuine article were indistinguishable from the facsimile.

Both bands indulged in that distinctly Nineties practice of saying one thing, then immediately undercutting that statement with a contradictory one. They did this for different reasons, though. Cobain used verbal irony to highlight earnest disaffection and alienation from the world around him:

Come as you are, as you were,

As I want you to be.

As a friend, as a friend,

As an old enemy.

Take your time, hurry up,

Choice is yours, don’t be late.

Take a rest, as a friend,

As an old memory.

- Kurt Cobain, Come as You Are

In contrast, Nelson seems to do so as a way of parodying the cliche which alt-rock had become. The verbal irony highlights the schizophrenic absurdity of rebellion-turned-ritual.

I’m not sick but I’m not well,

And I’m so hot ’cause I’m in Hell.

- Sean Nelson, Flagpole Sitta

Even the song’s title references the early-Twentieth Century pole-sitting fad; proto-frat boys climbing up flagpoles and staying there as a test of endurance. The point? There was none. Like viral challenges spread via Tiktok a century later, flagpole sitting was ultimately a pointless and stupid prank. The listener is left to question: does anyone still take this stuff seriously? Is it even possible to do so?

With Flagpole Sitta, Harvey Danger serve the role of the jester in the alt-rock court, speaking truths to which no one else can cop. Where have all the merrymakers gone, indeed?

It’s So Hot, ’Cause I’m in Hell

The fate of grunge and alt-rock belies the inherent contradiction at the heart of the matter. To impact culture, one must reach the masses. But, to reach the masses within a capitalist superstructure, one must play the game. And, to play the game, one must make oneself susceptible to recuperation by capitalism.

One artistic movement cannot be enough to ever really defeat this process. It’s no surprise, then, why pessimistic, sarcastic cynicism would be the natural response of the underground in the late Nineties.

We were all looking for something real and authentic; something which could transcend the crassness of mass consumer culture and reach people through the power of art. And, as we saw first-hand, even a deliberately confrontational attempt at creating said art can, and will be, metabolized, stripped of nutrients, and shat out.

“The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,” Marx wrote of the experience of the Paris Commune in 1871. The same principle applies to matters of culture. Where the bourgeoisie onced maintained cultural hegemony by protecting the interests of other classes, they now do so through their ability to quickly recoup anything which pretends things can be otherwise. At this point, we’ve been robbed of our inability to even imagine an alternative.

Is this to say that fighting the hegemony of the bourgeoisie is a hopeless venture? No, of course not. However, it does speak to the broader fact that artists will not succeed at attempting to transform bourgeois culture while working within it. Cobain learned this first-hand, and it directly contributed to his decision to end his life.

“Changing the system from within” is a fantasy story that people have told themselves for generations to justify an undaunted pursuit of the comfort of security afforded by the bourgeois lifestyle. It has nothing to do with any actual capacity to change anything-cultural, political, or otherwise.

Yes, a change is gonna come. It won’t come from within “the industry,” though. The art that becomes the cultural reflection of a bold new politics must be as disconnected from the old way as the politics they represent.

Alt culture is dead. Long live alt culture.

Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com on April 11, 2022.