From Fugazi to Olivia Rodrigo - The History of Rock Music (Part 13)

0:30 What's good, everybody? Welcome back to the history of rock. Big one today. We're going all the way up to the modern day, so let's get into it.If you want to read along, go to lovemusicmore.substack.com to check out the accompanyingarticle where we'll go even further.

1:10 That's going to be a long one, but let's dive in.So last time we were talking about the basement, unseating Michael Jackson with Nirvana, great photo that I added to the Substack of Kurt Cobain wearing corporate magazines still suckon his t-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone. I think it's a great moment to mark how

1:32 the counter-culture, the anti-establishment becomes the establishment, and how that inversionkind of changes what rock is, and in my mind splinters it into a million different pieces,which we're still living through today. In a lot of ways, Nirvana was kind of the end ofthe rock, quote unquote, monoculture, but even that has been kind of oversimplification.

1:55 In a lot of ways, you can look at somebody like the pixies and think about Serfenberg,or you can go back to these early garage-y underground scene.

2:06 We talked about CBGB,and I want to talk a little bit more about that CBGB punks scene because that also splintered,where we had Blondie, Talking Heads, but then we also had acts like Bad Brains and Cro-Mags, Stimulators, where my conversations with Andy Shernoff of the Dictators and Harley Flanagan of the Cro-Mags

2:29 and stimulators, they show a different path where punk continues to turn up and up and up,and reflect more and more attitude. That continued into that hardcore scene, but I want to starttalking about post-hardcore. There's a band called Rites of Spring.

2:52 They kept that noise, but they started to sing more about vulnerability, personal pain, and they're kind of that bridge between hardcoreand the emo core.

3:05 This whole genre, subgenre conversation, specifically from hardcore, post-hardcore, emo, pop punk.

3:13 That whole lineage is hotly debated as what to name, what I am not the expert to talkabout all of that, but give me some grace as I at least try to point out some of what I see it as the evolution of that side of music.

3:32 This is kind of like the Washington DC vibe, and eventually one of the members of Rites of Spring joins Fugazi and talk about an underrated band. They areplaying this intense, heavy music that everybody sends them.

3:54 One of my favorite bands, Mother Mother, Cage the Elephant, a lot of these acts, Blink 182, they talk about their Fugazi face, and that's a huge partof pretty much all rock that comes from then is we have Pixies, we have Nirvana, Fugazi.

4:12 They're allkind of said in the same breath, and that DC and then the Pacific Northwest scenes are happening at the same time as opening up of rock music. You can tell a lot of the stuff that we've been talkingabout has been a certain type of masculine energy, but this is the same time that Riot Grrrl comes in.

4:36 Punk was this catalyzing force for music, for culture, for zines self-publishing, and Riot Grrrltook that energy and turned it into a feminist plant the flag moment, a moment of taking back powerand using rock music, using punk music to connect community forcefully.

5:00 And you see this continue even in the modern day, there's a big Riot Grrrl scene in Russia where with the Ukraine warthat was a big part of that early phase where musicians were getting arrested and fleeing the country

5:17 and a lot of them were playing shows and passing up pamphlets inspired by this time. It's the samething like Sleater-Kinney, where they carry that lineage into indie rock and Carrie Brownstein

5:33 and Corin Tucker. Add this dual guitar thing in dig me out in 1997. It's so post-hard core andthey don't have a bass player. When you look at that whole scene, the lack of bass player continues onfor quite a few acts.

5:50 And really if you look back far enough, the doors were kind of maybe the original version of this, but other modern rock like the white stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black keys.

6:06 No bassist. Opening up this kind of alternative where the attack of the guitar can then go reachdown into the lower registers, you can play with octave pedals, you can play with bigger fuzz,and you can use the kick drum to fill up a lot of that lower register and still make it feel big.

6:27 But it's a hairier, messier, more open kind of experience. And I think it also reflects kind ofwhat rock is figuring out as it's splintering. When you have the biggest act

6:45 inverting from the underground up, I think that it opens up the sense of like, what do we want towrite about now? Because not everybody can just be a Nirvana cover band in the same way that Nirvanaclaimed to be a pixie's cover band.

6:59 And one of the ways that you can do that is by messing withlineups by adding in a principal violin player like Yellowcard by switching to this twin guitar attack.

7:11 And as this pop scene evolves, you have an entire kind of infrastructure start to build aroundthe pop punk world where you have things like Warped Tour, you have indie bands like Fueled by ramen, and you have giant acts like Blink 182 emerge. In 2001, Tom DeLonge wrote aboutstay together for the kids, one of the early songs.

7:34 And he was saying that essentially, rock music isn't about the music, it's about the emotion. He was listening to Fugazi at the time,

7:46 and he sang in a weird San Diego accent, similar to how I speak, but a little more exaggerated.And it was, it was special combining the heaviness of the music the game before plus the emotional

8:04 that was brewing in places like the Midwest and in emo music. And you combine it with sing songy asthey've said in interviews, profanity laced nursery rhymes.

8:20 I think that's what they've called themselves.That combination of Washington DC, Pacific Northwest, and then San Diego became something just deeply accessible, particularly to teenagers.

8:36 And the way that theywent about their music also felt like Nirvana, but taken to 11, to quote from spinal tap, a little bit of Nirvana like de-gaft. Nirvana just had the energy of we hate corporate.

8:57 And Blink 182 did as well, but they manifested it through dick jokes and weird skits on stage. It was goofy,it was funny, but it was taking punk energy and then applying it to the kind of teenage suburban punkthat I know too well in San Diego.

9:17 And all of these kind of tangentially related acts, incredible acts like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Paramore. I want to talk about Hayley Williams because she'sone of my favorites. She was 16 when Paramore signed to Fueled by Ramen, one of the biggest and mostinfluential labels in terms of discovery at that time. And Hayley Williams talked aboutworth to her and how misogynistic and rough being in that world was.

9:47 But I would say she ended up emerging as the queen of it. When I think about this time ofmusic, I think about her incredible vocalist, incredible band, every single one of their albumsamazing. And the lineage continues.

10:07 When Olivia Rodrigo released her song good 4 u, it sounded so much like Misery Business, I want to pair more songs, that Olivia Rodrigo's team hadto retroactively credit Hayley Williams and Josh Farro as co-writers for the song.

10:23 So isn't thatkind of crazy to think about CBGB, Washington DC hardcore, Blink 182, Paramore, and then all the way out to this breakout singer-songwriter of the year. And I think it's a good perspective of howrock kind of evolves through this entire time. Is it's a lot harder to chart? This is why mostrock histories don't even talk about this part.

10:47 Is it's a lot harder to go from A to B because the monoculture dies. The internet cut happens and music starts to proliferate in a veryunexpected way and becomes more democratized. More people can make music.

11:01 There's moreindie labels, digital recording changes this, just like we've been talking this entire time across this blog about how technological change drives genre change. In the same way whenyou have like even Pixies in Nirvana being able to record records for less than a thousand dollars.

11:21 You can do this now, obviously, you can record records on your iPhone. And that opens up a differentkind of energy that you can put out into the world. And then different types of scenes can formaround it like Warped Tour, like Fueled by Ramen, and like Napster, the file sharing service.

11:40 But the Pixies grammar, loud, quiet, loud, and the boy and girl vocals. And the combination ofdifferent parts of rock history like the surf guitar that's inside of there, that sticks around.It ends up becoming part of the common thread of all of rock.

12:02 In the same way that everybody after the Beatles is influenced by the Beatles, I think everybody after Nirvana andPixies is influenced by Nirvana Pixies. One of my favorite artists, Mother Mother, great example,Vancouver Band, they formed in 2005.

12:20 And back when I saw them, I saw them at the Casbah in San Diego and there was like ten people there. I was so close to the stage that when Ryan, the lead singer,hit his guitar against the mic stand, the mic was falling down, I caught it, I was able to hand itback to him. Then they went viral on TikTok. Their Hayloft. And they signed to a major record label.

12:43 Like this is all part of it, right? Is that they were on an indie label doing their best andtouring Canada and getting some government support. Like I've talked to some of my guests on my podcastwhich is a really cool thing about Canada. They signed to the big label and magically theygo viral. Not saying that there was a little tilting of the scales.

13:06 I think that one of the things that having the money and the resources of a big label for an act like this is maybe they didn'tstart the fire, but they sure poured fuel on it. And so when Hayloft went viral, it was reallyinteresting to see what's going to go viral next.

13:27 What's going to be what makes mother mothers sound get adopted. I was wondering if it was going to be their popular, more recent stuff, the stuffthat they put out with the record label and it wasn't. It was their honest work from their earlyfew records.

13:41 And in an interview when they were talking about their favorite records, obviously Surfer Rosa by the Pixies, it wasn't just an influence. Ryan called it the new truth. He said withoutthat record, he couldn't even picture what the band would have become.

14:00 Modest Mouse is a really good example too. Absolutely foundational in my musical journey. Like if you've only heard float on,I would invite you to listen to all of the rest of their music because it's amazing.

14:18 And you can hear inside of it the Pacific Northwest sound. Isaac Brock sighted Pixies asfoundational. But he brought it into a kind of a different space with the storytellingabout strip balls and Bukowski elevated but visceral at the same time.

14:44 I'm just going to keep going through some of my favorites. It's just a case you haven't heardthis music. Like this is my chance to be like this is who to listen to. Saint Vincent, Annie Clark

14:55 came up through polyphonic spree and Sufjan Stevens touring band then made strange mercyincredible record than herself titled one of my favorite records of all time which also won theGrammy for Best Alternative Music album. And she plays guitar in a way

15:14 the similar way that I like the Joey Santiago kind of angular view of guitar but she hasvirtuosity at the same time which I think is such a cool combination where you have somebodycoming out of the school of guitar solos are lame who's really good at playing guitar solos.And so then you end up getting a new kind of guitar soloing grammar because it's almost like

15:39 it's fighting with itself. And I love that kind of music. And she has some incredible

15:45 videos where she kind of like demos her sound and she shows how to get more dissonanceinjected into your playing. So you can play something called a minor second like the jaws,the inside. But at the same time it's very, very wavy and weird on the guitar

16:02 and showing how you can inject that into your playing. I've ripped that off a million times.

16:06 But I also think that St. Vincent's a good example of like as a queer woman from Texas

16:12 she is taking rock in that Riot Grrrl sensibility and that punk sensibility and the pop songwritingand the modest mouse sense of introspection and looking out at America as a Texan. You know sheis taking all of this and claiming rock and putting it on a different direction.

16:33 Just like when she produced Sleater-Kinney's the center won't hold in 2019. It all comes back together.My favorite example of this too is David Byrne, Love This Giant the collaboration recordthe two of them had. It is a connection back to CBGB but it's also connection back to the Beatlesbecause there's wonderful horn parts that these horn parts are distorted and roomy.

16:57 They're reminiscent of glass onion. They feel they feel like an inverted band like a like a second line like NewOrleans but from hell. It's marching up.

17:12 It's rather than the funeral possession it's coming right out out of the depths. And the goofiness of David Burns and the effortlessness of St. Vincent'scool comes together just to make this beautiful art rock thing that changes I think the way thatalternative rock which I suppose you would call that indie alternative.

17:38 Changes the way that it's presented on stage as well. There's a theatrical system with the choreography that DavidBurns brings to St.

17:46 Vincent and then you also see some of this with artists like Beck where they willgo on Saturday Night Live and they will play like a dinner table and all of the musicians will be playing found percussion or playing their forks on their cutlery and glasses and things like that

18:08 playing different rhythms. This isn't the same theatrical of a Led Zeppelin but it really isthe same sense of shock. It's just made smaller.

18:19 It's made more intimate, more reflective of somebodyelse's life and it also is using things like the recording studio and advances in filming and and miking live situations so you can get more intimate. Another good example Cage the Elephant,another one of my favorites I was just listening to their second record.

18:41 Thank you Happy Birthday and it is so obviously Pixies, Nirvana inspired. There's even a song called Aberdeen

18:50 that's Kurt Cobain's hometown and the song has got like just straight up a rip off of where is my mind

18:59 and I love it too because the singer Matt Shultz is basically like God I don't know what you'retalking about it's about um it's about Scotland it's total live but it's like that's the energyof this entire musical genre right but he also did openly tell interviewers he wanted his

19:22 yells and yelps to sound like black Francis from the Pixies. Garage Rock continued all of this Iguess is vaguely indial alternative but things like the strokes Arctic monkeys playing local gigsbut they get freaking huge absolutely massive rock and I think that's such an interesting look atyou go from clubs and basements and dancing and you huge and you sound more and more and more

19:49 like classic rock of your like Arctic monkeys are perfect example of like listen to the earlystuff they'll listen to their later stuff and you can hear the change in venue.

20:00 Clashes kind ofsimilar but like when an act gets big enough boom your stadium rock muse I think is a perfectexample of this like they carry on the big hair don't care energy of 70s rock and roll but they don't necessarily start there. It's almost like all roads when you get big enough lead to the samedestination.

20:21 Let's talk more about the Beatles and their branch because Pixies Nirvana obviously both listen to the Beatles there's some very interesting quotes of Kurt Cobain basically bashing Paul McCartney and completely saying John Lennon's the only one to listen to I completely disagreewith that by the way on the record but think about the White Album, Sergeant Pepper is the studio as an

20:42 instrument kind of concept and then think about Radiohead. Radiohead unlock the ability for peoplelike myself to make the music that we do because bedroom pop is essentially just an extensionof okay computer kid a and in rainbows and so it's Coldplay.

21:05 So it's a it's a hell of a fork in the tree of music but Radiohead was you know extremely important about adding drum programmingbringing some virtuosity a lot of virtuosity back into it but that producer toolkit

21:24 ends up allowing the singer to treat their voice like an instrument to be processed and that's howyou get Bon Iver that's you get James Blake that's you get Frank Ocean's blonde it's

21:37 which by the way guardian compared blonde directly to kid a and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead played guitar on it and same with you know their engineer I love that Radiohead's entire teamjust ends up being on everybody's stuff because it's Radiohead like a lot and continuing theDIY energy once Radiohead was done with their EMI contract they released in rainbows as a digital

21:59 download with the pay as you want pricing so you can type in zero and download the entire album

22:06 really interesting how you know the paid like a plumber kind of energy and then Radiohead saysyeah pay us if you want to also very different from what acts like Metallica which we're goingheavily against pirated music Radiohead just said we'll lean in sometimes there's no beatingthe technology sometimes I think about that with AI too like I just don't want to end up looking

22:32 like Metallica because it wasn't a good look and anybody that's seen Metallica in South Parkit's just got a like ruined part of their ethos and their mythos I guess andin rainbows is the ultimate like a few let's go I think Tame Impala. Kevin Parker is a really

22:54 interesting example of how the Beatles and Radiohead birth people that are like ready to

23:05 track themselves overdubbing on cassette decks and then can make entire records on their own

23:13 that's what I do being the studio band and then you figure out how to do it live later likeMac DeMarco's similar to right one man recording project slacker pop and Mac DeMarco said his one of his favorite songs is a backseat of my car closing track from ram fromPaul McCartney rams a really cool example about DIY and recording yourself

23:43 and that song specifically is credited by Mac DeMarco about the recording fidelityhe likes the way that it doesn't sound perfect so take that Kurt Cobain Paul McCartney's pretty cool too

23:58 let's talk about the direct inheritance Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl after Kurt Cobain's death, driving around the Irish countryside trying to figure out if he wanted to play music again

24:09 he apparently came across hitchhiker wearing a Kurt Cobain t-shirt and he realized he couldn'toutrun this so he booked himself a week at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle played every instrument himselfmade a hundred cassette copies and gave it away to their friends naming the project foo fighters

24:30 fake bad name hundred cassettes turns into worldwide success arena rock and again it's likeeverything takes you back to arena rock if you're if you're powerful enough and you're playing arena asyou got a sound a certain way I even saw it with Vulfpeck who if you've seen them there like a tight

24:53 room centric like like small room centric funk band funk revival trying to do like pretty Bernard Purdie shuffle kind of stuff Steely Dan-esque stuff but with the Motown energy and the feelings ofyou know like throwback soul but it's like heavily compressed and also very modern great musicbut it's really funny to see them live because it just turns into rock again like it's a rock show

25:18 and I think that that's one of the interesting things about recording is it can mask how rock certainthings are even my own music like I make rock music it just comes out as bedroom pop but I guarantee youget a big audience in front of me the whole thing is gonna get pretty heavy it's just the way it goes

25:38 and also I want to take a moment to reflect on woodstock 99 and I think that this showsa good example of kind of where rock has gone as well wherenow the people that are making

25:52 rock music the gets you know best rock performance best rock song best alternative music albumat the Grammys is boygenius three queer women winning the rock categories with like a 90sindie folk rock album really blending a lot of stuff incredible act I've seen them live three orfour times I really love them divisive in some ways because it's like is that rock it's like

26:19 hell yeah it is in my opinion but contrast that to like woodstock 99 and I think it's reallyinteresting to think about how far we've come in terms of rock representing different peopleand being accessible to different folks and being like how Riot Grrrl opens up kicks down that door

26:37 and says this is not music this is emotion like Tom DeLonge was saying that's the tree evolvingand I think about the wavy's incredible music event award show celebration communitythey're saying we're not we're the opposite of wood woodstock 99 I don't remember who it wasthat stuck with me one of the presenters and woodstock 99 was just this absolute

27:04 like destructive terrible like this is an incredible documentary about it don't need to rehasheverything but it was trying to do what woodstock was before but it missed the piece and love partentirely and it almost felt like that in the same way that spinal tap was kind of the deathknell of hair metal woodstock 99 feels kind of like the death death knell of a certain type of

27:30 energy in rock not entirely but like even just going to see hardcore shows today like I sawa Cro-Mags show and yeah there was somebody who was you know on some stuff and trying to tear itup hardly planning and kicked him out it became this day of this night of love like it's heavymusic like people are mashing people are pushing each other but everybody picks each other back up

27:58 and I really liked that rock has finally gotten to that point and that's the community experiencethat I've gotten to experience with it not saying that's how it's always been have some friends herein San Diego and they went to early red hot chili peppers shows in Tijuana and they said yeahpeople were just getting completely beat up completely messed up and that was part of the energy of

28:19 the show and like the band was like well like you know this very testosterone like fighting backand forth with the crowd and pumping that out and that was kind of like what would paid and whatbrought the the crowd it's funny though also to think like arena rock red hot chili peppersone of the biggest rock bands of all time and you see them and there is like a corporate energy

28:40 now to that act and I think I'd like to think though that there's there's a path that we're all onand simultaneously building that can create very honest very raw emotional music but do it withinthe lens of community and diversity and support each other and welcoming more people in

29:04 because gatekeeping rock it's just so two decades ago and I hope that this history of the rockgenre that I've been doing opens it up to you two and shows where we come fromwhere all of these acts connect we're all playing the same power chords we're all using the sameinstruments we're all singing about the same human humanity and human experience it just happens

29:31 to be a really powerful genre to do that and to write within it's a genre of the guitar the genreof drums and whether or not it's electronic guitar you know like it programmed in your youryour computer now it doesn't really matter it's saying we have these tools and they feel likeenergy themselves how do we wield them and how do we create community around them and how do we

29:57 stay true to our history because the coolest music the best acts the ones that really stick aroundin the last are the ones that know their history and the ones that can build unexpectedthrough lines like pixies with surf rock those are the ones to stickthose are the ones that have legacy I hope you enjoyed this history of rock

30:23 if you have additional things you'd like me to write or talk about let me know on lovemusicmore.substack.coma lot more on there as well this was a hefty post but I am happy to support that rock did not diebut it did splinter and who knows where it'll go but in the same way that any genre kind of

30:45 flows we saw this with hip hop too there's a life cycle but that life cycle doesn't go towards deathlife cycle goes towards community and welcoming others and then splintering yet again it always splitsbetween mainstream and underground and then it inverts where the underground gets so cool that peoplecannot ignore it anymore and then that ends up on the arena stages and then it ends up being more

31:09 like mainstream again and that's just the life cycle this is the way it goes something about popsomething about rock something about the loudspeaker if you'd like to hear my music you can go scoobertdoobert.pizza to check it out or search me on Spotify scoobertdoobert I'd appreciate it if yourated this five stars and told your friends about this podcast and while this marks the end of my

31:33 history of rock there are plenty of rooms per side quests so I hope you stick around and reach outto me if you have any ideas I'll be here subscribe here and on sub-stack and I'll see you again next week