Revisiting The 1992 MTV Video Music Awards!

Turning the clock back 26 years ago to a simpler time; when Dana Carvey was still funny, MTV actually acknowledged white musicians existed and, for some reason, the monster from Alien was used to sell Pepsi Cola.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

We're just a couple of hours away from the 2018 installment of the MTV Video Music Awards, which is kinda' ironic, since I'm pretty sure MTV hasn't actually played a real music video on the network since sometime in early 2002. Of course, you young 'uns are totally oblivious to the fact that people have been busting MTV's hypothetical testes since the mid 1990s about not playing enough actual music, but nowadays, the channel's marquee event seems to genuinely be the only time MTV shows music videos whatsoever. And needless to say, my, how the annual ceremonies have changed over the years.

For the 35th running of the bulls(hit), the nominees for best video have a recurring motif. Go ahead, take a look at this list of contenders and tell me if you notice a trend. Give up? That's right, there isn't a single WHITE artist in the running for video of the year. In fact, Ed Sheerhan, Shawn Mendes and Demi Lovata's vegetable ass are the only white people nominated for anything near the upper deck of awards categories, with the bulk of the white musicians quarantined to the "best rock video" category, which includes such low T-count favorites as Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park and Imagine Dragons as the contestants. Really, this year's MTV awards show might as well be called the MTV People of Color YouTube Circle Jerk Awards, which hell, it probably will be called in about three or four years' time.

You don't have to go back that far to see just how different MTV — and by proxy, the music industry, and by proxy, American culture — was just 26 years ago.

Back then, the awards show wasn't driven by rap or hip hop or pop or techno-electro-autism music. It was a very rock and roll-driven awards show, as evident by that year's list of best video nominees; Van Halen, Def Leppard, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers — all four of them bona fide Rock and Roll HOFers, and all four of whom played a style of music that is virtually extinct in today's musical landscape.

But as you will soon see, that wasn't the only thing that made the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards a world different from the 2018 tomfoolery. Lucky us, I actually have a three-hour plus video taped the NIGHT the show aired live, complete with all of the original commercials intact right here, just waiting to be rewound and reviewed. So how about we put this sumbitch in the old Sanyo VCR and rock and roll, kids? Yeah, I don't care ... I'm reviewing the show anyway, you fuckin' sods.

The show begins with Dana Carvey impersonating George H.W. Bush. He does some one-armed push-ups that look more like he's humping the floor, then he leads the audience through a half-hearted rendition of "We Will Rock You" before he throws it to those "Georgia Peaches" The Black Crowes, who perform ... I don't know, one of their songs ... to officially kick start the program. Shit, they had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Guns and Roses and Michael Jackson in the line-up, and THIS is what they used for the curtain jerker?  Sheesh. Anyway, this is obvious fast forward material, so I'm not even going to bother with the superfluous play-by-play.

After all that noise we cut to out animated intro (pretty sure it was from the same guys who did Liquid Television, but that's something I can neither confirm nor deny) and then we throw it back to host Dana Carvey ... who is shedding an electric guitar on his way to the mic stand. He does a terrible Ah-nold impersonation making fun of the People's Choice Awards and wonders aloud what musicians are looking at to the side of the stage during performances. Of course, this being 1992, he also throws in a Rodney King joke and talks about being denied pussy by En Vogue. Then he talks about the show making Japanese people horny as Eddie Murphy (in an unbuttoned shirt) comes out to announce the nominees for best male video. The nominees are Eric Clapton for "Tears in Heaven," John Mellencamp for "Get a Leg Up," Tom Petty for "Into the Great Wide Open," Bruce Springsteen for "That Human Touch" and ... Weird Al Yankovich for "Smells Like Nirvana." Uh ... one of these is DEFINITELY not like the other. Anyway, Clapton wins and, surprisingly, doesn't dedicate the moon man award to his dead child who inspired the song. Well, that was weird.

Cue a video of Carvey pretending to be Johnny Carson while Phil Hartman pretends to be Ed McMahon. Anyway, they're pimping the annual Viewer's Choice Award hotline, and it's time for our first commercial break of the evening.

And right off the bat we've got a five star find with a one-minute long Pepsi commercial featuring two stereotypical Gen X teens getting chased by the xenomorph from Alien 3. This is followed up by a Taco Bell commercial pimping their new 79 cents supreme nachos.  And proving this truly was a different era, instead of commercials pimping Teen Mom 2, we get a spot in which MTV pats itself on the back for showing more than 1,000 music videos per week. How bizarre. Then there's a commercial promoting condom use because you might get the AIDS. And on cue, that's followed by a P.S.A. starring Jesse Jackson talking about dat ray-cissm to promote "Rock the Vote '92." Strangely enough, they let him say "nigger lover" on air, which would almost certainly get bleeped out in modern broadcasts. 

Back to the awards show. Dana Carvey throws it to Shannon Doherty and that one guy from Northern Exposure, who walk out to the podium to the Screaming Trees. That HAS to be the most 1990s sentence ever written. That one guy tells a terrible joke about Orson Welles and we roll out the list of "Best Director" nominees. I don't even feel like listing this shit, but the winner is the guy who directed the video for Van Halen's "Right Now." LOL at Sammy Hagar not being able to get over the guardrail. Nobody says anything interesting at the podium, but then again, I really don't think any of us expected them to, did we? 

Carvey does a "Church Lady" impersonation to introduce Bobby Brown, who appears to arise from a giant pair of ass cheeks. Also, he's wearing this weird leather get-up that makes him look like a Basham Brother. And if you understand that reference, goddamn, do you need to get out more. Yeah, I don't have much to say about this performance, either, other than the fact it feels like a throwaway performance from In Living Color ... and no, not that is most certainly not a compliment. Oh well, at least that five minutes on stage means for at least five minutes he wasn't beating up on Whitney. Also, he lets out a fleeting "fuck" at the very end of the song and one of the dudes from the Red Hot Chili Peppers tries to give a hostess a nonconsensual hickey on live television. Oh, how I miss the 1990s so.

Commercial break number two. There is a goddamn BIZARRE bumper featuring animated origami recreating the Rodney King beating (basically, it looks like something out of a Tool video) with some sort of abstruse pro-human rights message at the very end of it. Thankfully, this is followed by a Nike commercial in which Godzilla does battle with Charles Barkley, and an even more nostalgia-goading ad for a Sony portable CD player. Hey, scoff all you want now, back in the day that shit was ENVIABLE as fuck for consumers. Then there's a Levi's commercials where I think a dude admits he's gay and a follow-up black and white spot where this dirty dude rubs on skanks to promote Guess cologne. This is followed by literally the ONLY Heath bar commercial I've ever seen in my life, and it is '90-tastic, as anticipated.

We return and now Dana is in full Garth regalia. Yep, he even does the "extreme close-up" shtick and everything. He makes fun of that guy from The Black Crowes for being too skinny and says Wayne couldn't be there because he had diarrhea, so he breaks out a giant Mike Myers cardboard head and cracks a "that's what she said" joke about ten years before The Office was a thing. Then he shakes his dick at Cindy Crawford and says he wants to be "in vogue," which may or may not be a subtle allusion to WANTING TO RAPE THREE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN. He does a cheap hometown pop for UCLA (the awards show being broadcast from their pavilion, naturally) and he asks what the hell a "bruin" is, naturally and says he can't figure out why USC named their team after condoms. We cut to the Pontiac Silverdome, where U2 is doing a LIVE performance. Bono makes a crack about Garth blowing chunks on Kurt Loder and he asks Bono if he eats Lucky Charms and he says he only eats the blue stars. Bono asks Garth if he wants to play drums on the next song, and sure as sugar, there's a drum set right there on stage for him to join 'em. So you've got Garth playing the drums in L.A. while the rest of U2 performs in suburban Detroit ... all thanks to the magic of television.

Before we had to commercial, there's a skit where Andrew Dice Clay tries to enter the awards show but David Spade won't let him in because he's banned for life from performing there. Yeah, long story, but here's the facts if you really want 'em. Honestly, I'm just surprised MTV was STILL running with that joke three years later. I 'spose people just had longer memories back then, eh?

Commercial break 3. First we pimp Liquid Television, then there's a commercial for the 1993 Toyota Corolla. LOL, now that shit's a hunk a junk today. Then there's a spooky commercial for TDK that shows an up-close dilating eyeball. Very Un Chien Andalou-like, for sure. Then there's a Pepsi commercial where these two old bitches lez out over Cindy Crawford and there's a bumper lamenting the death of free expression in the U.S. and then there's a dramatic recreation of an Anais Nin poem, of all things. Believe it or not, the whole thing was to encourage literacy, even though it was telling a narrative about some chick trying to distract her husband while her adulterous lover flees the house. How weird.

...come to think of it, this is probably the best thing Pinhead has been featured in outside of the first Hellraiser movie.

Back to the show. Presenting the award for best rap video is Ice T and ... Kirk and Lars from Metallica. Holy shit, Ice T is STILL the lightest skinned person on stage, somehow. Lars rants against "the family values" crowd and Ice T makes an oblique reference to "Cop Killer" before we roll out the list of nominees — "Tennessee" by Arrested Development, "The Choice is Yours" by Black Sheep, "Jump" by FUCKING KRISS KROSS, "Good Vibrations" by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch and "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot. Holy shit, that is the WORST list of nominees imaginable. Lars says the award goes to Barbara Streisand, then Kirk says it goes to Bill Clinton before Ice T says Arrested Development won. Well, it was a shitty list overall, but that was clearly the best song out of the five, without question. They thank "god, the creator," which I'm pretty sure is the only time you'll hear the Judeo-Christian religion referenced this evening, and then it's back to Dana Carvey.

Our host has returned in his civilian wardrobe as he throws it to DEF LEPPARD, who perform a rousing rendition of "Let's Get Rocked." Well, I, for one, had no clue that Def Leppard was *still* that big as late as '92. I mean, wasn't hair metal supposed to be dead in the water by this point? Fuck, who are they gonna' wheel out next, Trixter and Firehouse?

Next up we've got a couple of ADD vignettes starring Dennis Leary talking about how much Seattle's music sucks and the Bay City Rollers and Billy Idol having community service, for some reason. Then Cindy Crawford pimps House of Style in a very Leary-like promo and then there's a blue jeans commercial featuring more homosexuals playing hacky sack. There's that Taco Bell ad for the 79 cents supreme nachos again and, about an hour into the show, we FINALLY get our first vintage Sega ad. Let' see — I spotted Sonic 2, The Amazing Spider-Man, Taz-Mania, Kid Chameleon, Streets of Rage 2 and Joe Montana II, among others. Charles Barkley pretends to rap to Public Enemy for a black and white commercial for Nike. Jeez, what was it with Gen X and all of that monochrome shit, anyway?

Dana Carvey introduces Jean Claude Van Damme and Halle Berry to give out the award for "best music video from a film." Which I take it they mean "best music video featuring a song that was included in a movie," but I suppose that shit is pretty unwieldy. The nominees are "Tears in Heaven" by Eric Clapton, "Try a Little Tenderness" by The Commitments (fuck, you are OLD if you remember that movie), FUCKING "ADDAMS GROOVE" by MC Hammer and "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen — which, of course, won because it was featured in Wayne's World. Yeah, who'd thunk THAT song would've won with fuckin' Dana Carvey hosting the awards ceremony?

And that's our segue to a performance from Nirvana. You know, the one where Kurt Cobain started off singing "Rape Me" but then he pussed out and they started doing "Lithium" instead. All I can say is it is fucking WEIRD realizing that Kurt Cobain and Def Leppard were still considered genre contemporaries this late into the '90s. Anyway, this is your typical live Nirvana performance, which means, yep, it's not very good.  The set concludes with the band destroying their equipment, letting this one dude stage dive and the bassist (I forget his name, but he looks like Andy Kaufman) grabbing the microphone and saying "Hi, Axl" over and over again. Yeah ... long story.

We throw it back to Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman pretending to be Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, and there's a great bit where they make fun of Nirvana's lyrics for being a bunch of nonsense.

Here's another commercial where MTV pats itself on the back for playing 1,000 music videos a week. And there's that Alien 3 Pepsi commercial, and En Vogue singing about the ingredients at Taco Bell. Eh, I prefer Johnny Cash's ode to the fast food franchise, personally. This is followed by a Sony compact disc commercial and a teaser for Bruce Springsteen Unplugged. And hey, why not another condom commercial, and a PSA where Rosie Perez decries racism and AIDS and gun violence so people will vote George H.W. Bush out of office in the fall. Yeah, things really haven't changed over the last 28 years, have they?

Well, in that get-up, he's DEFINITELY not "turtley" enough for the Turtle Club.

Get ready for maximum LULZ as Vanessa Williams and Mark Wahlberg come out and Wahlberg is in pure-D Marky Mark wigger mode, complete with a University of Michigan sweater and a New York Mets hat. Shit, he DOES look like John Cena. Alright, here's the nominees for breakthrough video of the year: "Silent All These Years" by Tori Amos (and you already know how I feel about her), David Byrne's "She's Mad," the Chili Peppers' "Give It Away," and Van Halen's "Right Now" — i.e. "The Crystal Pepsi Song." Anyhoo, the Chili Peppers win and Flea hops on the podium and he immediately begins to simulate masturbating on the audience. Then Anthony Keideis or however you spell it starts talking about how true art can't be qualified with an award, but then I remember he's also a Bernie Sanders supporter, so like fuck he has any idea what he's talking about.

Now Elton John's doing a performance and his glasses make him look cross-eyed as a motherfucker. Anyway, Elton John has never been my musical cup of tea, so I just kind of fazed out for about five minutes. Way to be a showman, guy — as crappy as Bobby Brown's music may be, at least he had the decency to distract us with a bunch of half-naked hoochies shaking their asses in front of the camera during HIS performance.

And if you thought the Alien 3 Pepsi commercial was a weird horror crossover, just wait until you see David Spade COCKBLOCK Pinhead from Hellraiser at talent check-in desk. Even better, I'm pretty sure the brought in Doug Bradley himself for the skit. Eh, it's not as good as watching Jason freak out Arsenio Hall, but it's still pretty entertaining stuff.

Time for another 1993 Toyota Corolla commercial and a Taco Bell commercial highlighting their 59 cent burritos. And just when you think things can't possibly get any more early 1990s, here's a commercial for Singles, a movie so bound to its chronological roots that I'm pretty sure the reels of the film itself REFUSE to convert to DVD. Then there's a commercial for TDK video cassette tapes. Kids ... you might have to ask your parents what that is.

Dana Carvey returns to do a Ross Perot impersonation and throw it to Pearl Jam, who then proceed to play a very lachrymose (if not wholly uninspired) rendition of "Jeremy" — complete with Eddie Veddar doing his best Stephen Hawking impersonation in front of the microphone. Shit, of the big four grunge frontmen, who would've thunk that *this guy* would be the only one still alive in the year 2018? Also, I love how Veddar improvs and says "I don't need no mom and dad!" and pantomimes HANGING himself with the microphone cord at the very end of the number. Think you'll be seeing that in the 13 Reasons Why era? 

And that's a lead in to another musical performance, this one from the Chili Peppers, who do the opening of "Under the Bridge" before seguing into "Give It Away Now" while a buncha' hoochies in cheerleader costumes and dudebros in Rasta beanies headbang in the background. Meanwhile, Ice-T is just hanging off to the side, mean-mugging the camera and it's fucking hilarious. Then again, this *was* right around the time of the whole "Cop Killer" controversy, so just having his face on TV, I guess, constituted some kind of subliminal "fuck you" to the system. Or, uh, something like that. 

Alright, time for more Sony CD player equipment commercials. And more black and white Guess Jeans commercials and Mountain Dew spots where people windsurf. Yeah, that was a thing in the 1990s, believe it or not.

Hey, who's ready for a short film based on Kafka's "Metamorphisis" about a dude getting turned into a cockroach to promote literacy? Yep, nobody. 

Back to the show. Dana Carvey does a Casey Kaseem impersonation before throwing it to a live video feed of Michael Jackson performing "Black or White" in London. Which, I suppose, is as good a time as any to remind our readers here at IIIA that Michael Jackson used to hold marriage rituals with underage children and show them pornography at the Neverland Ranch. Yeah, what a loss for the world of the fine arts, I know.

Then the surviving members of Queen come out to give the "Video Vanguard" award to Guns N Roses. Well, say what you will about their music, but considering videos like "November Rain" and "Don't Cry," you really can't say they didn't do their part to advance the music video art form. Shit, there's no denying "Estranged" holds up a lot better than a good 95 percent of the videos that came out in the early 1990s ... lest we forget the likes of Gerardo and C&C Music Factory, naturally.

Dennis Leary does a promo about whether or not there's a band from Seattle called "Aneurysm" and then Michael Jackson does a "Rock the Vote" spot where he commands viewers to vote for "the children." Sometimes, they just make it too easy, don't they?

Now cue a Spike Lee directed commercial for Nike where black and white basketball players do a parody of the famous racial slur montage from Do The Right Thing. No, for real, and here's the evidence.

Time for a Bryan Adams performance. Again, he's not my cup of tea but you at least have to give MTV credit for offering a pretty diverse array of musical acts on the show. I mean, we've had a pretty healthy mix of alternative, hard rock, hip-hop and pop, which is certainly a better, more diverse mix than what you'll be hearing at the 2018 VMAs. Fuck, do they even HAVE a "Best Rock Video" category for non homosexuals any more?

Luke Perry of "90210" fame comes out and introduces Howard Stern ... who, in case you didn't know it by now, comes out dressed as "Fartman." Yep, this is the same scene that was recreated for Private Parts right down to Stern showing his craggy, cottage cheese-looking butt cheeks to cable viewers all across America. Naturally, that's a segue to the nominees for "Best Metal/Hard Rock Video," which is a genre MTV hasn't acknowledged exists for at least the last 15 years. Anyhoo, the nominees are "Let's Get Rocked" by Def Lep, "Enter Sandman" by Megadeth (J/K), "Everything About You" by UGLY FUCKING KID JOE and Van Halen's "Right Now." Considering Metallica is the only band that can even remotely be considered "metal" or "hard rock" in that lineup, let's consider it a partial win for cosmological justice that they ended up taking home the Moon Man trophy.

What the ... Howard Stern, being controversial just for the sake of being controversial? I DON'T BELIEVE IT!

Then Howard Stern flies over the crown on an Owen Hart-like cable and continues to fart all over the audience. You know, I never thought I'd miss stupid, juvenile horse shit like this ... but compared to all of this holier than thou, SJW "Best Fight The System" Award culture, I'd be ECSTATIC if the worst Viacom was throwing at us was Howard Stern's exposed anus.

We get another Johnny Carson/Ed McMahon skit, then a weird Claymation PayDay candy bar commercial and a Sega commercial featuring a cameo from Saddam Hussein (no, really) and a trailer for Hellraiser III. Well, that's about the most early 1990s sentence I think I'll ever write in my life, probably.

Madonna does a "Rock the Vote" spot where she says voting is "better than sex" while draped in an American flag. And yes, even in 1992, her ass already looked all shades of used-up.

Now it's time for a performance from En Vogue ... or, as we call it in my native tongue "a great time to go take a piss."

Curious about the videos that won MTV's international awards? Well, over in Asia top honor went to Chrristina for "Jring Mau Glua," and from the looks of her, I wouldn't mind her Jringing mai glua, if you catch my drift. MTV Australia's winner was "Man Alive" by Diesel (who somehow looks even gayer than Kevin Nash.) The Cure's "Friday I'm In Love" wins in Europe, and the winners in Brazil and Panama are ... eh, like anybody gives a fuck.

Dennis Leary and Cindy Crawford are on stage and Leary says the first thing he does every morning is "shave his ass." They're here to present the award for Viewer's Choice. This leads to a brief Ren and Stimpy cartoon, which causes the audience to MARK THE FUCK OUT. I mean, they probably got a louder pop than Kurt Cobain and Elton John, and I'm not even joking. Anyway, the Chili Peppers win it for "Under the Bridge" over Van Halen, Nirvana and Def Leppard. The lead singer thanks Satan and Luis Bunuel in his acceptance speech, but he totally lost me when he thanked Rollins Band. I mean, even joking around, there's a way to make things TOO absurd. 

David Spade tells Ringo Starr to take a hike in another vignette that really isn't that funny at all. 

Then Aerosmith gives us a lesson on free expression in a P.S.A. that also involves dogs licking each others' balls and a dude pissing all over a canvas, which concludes with these two skanks in bikinis holding a giant condom. Then we get another Heath bar commercial. Yeah, I know ... you don't really need this commercial play-by-play, but what kind of neo-archeologist would I be if I simply fast forwarded through them?

Carvey returns and he introduces us to the next batch of presenters ... Magic Johnson and KRISS KROSS. Fuck, now that's a name I haven't thought of in FOREVER. Anyway, it's a hoot watching Magic try to read the teleprompter en route to announcing the nominees for best female video, which is preceded by a short clips from Aeon Flux. The nominees are Tori Amos for "Silent All These Years," Annie Lennox for "Why?", Madonna for "Holiday (Truth or Dare)" and Vanessa Williams for "Save The Best For Last." LOL at Magic Johnson being unable to read the cue card and one of the little kids from KRISS KROSS having to say "it's Annie Lennox." She comes out looking like the dykiest dyke of all-time and acts nervous as hell on stage. She is still alive, isn't she?

Well, speaking of things that most certainly are NOT alive, Eric Clapton is up next to perform "Tears in Heaven," which really, is the greatest ballad ever written about window latch awareness. 

 We get another cavalcade of Taco Bell and Mountain Dew commercials and then there's another pretentious, black and white P.S.A. to promote literacy. Nobody turns into a cockroach monster, so it's nowhere near as entertaining as the last one. But it does include a guy calling his infant daughter a "bitch," which I suppose ought to count for something.

Dana Carvey says this is the longest award show ever before going to the presenter-less best alternative music video nominees. We've got "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "Alive" by Pearl Jam, "Give It Away" by the Chili Peckers and The Soup Dragons with "Divine Things." Holy shit, one of these is most definitely NOT like the others. Nirvana wins and a Michael Jackson impersonator is escorted to the podium by two cops. He announces he is retiring as the "King of Pop" and now wants to be known as the "King of Grunge." Well, that was weird as fuck; even Dana seems downright befuddled. 

Boyz II Men and Wilson Phillips come out to announce the next whatever the fuck is going to be announced. OK, it's the award for best new artist. This should be fun. It's Tori Amos for "Silent All These Years" (again); "Tennessee" by Arrested Development; "Teen Angst" by Cracker; and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." How is Nirvana a "new artist" when their first album came out almost four years earlier? One of the soulful negroes from Boyz II Men plugs their new Christmas album and what do you know, Nirvana wins this award, too. This time, they actually take the stage to pick up the Moon Man statuette. Dave Grohl is smoking a cig and wearing a hoodie for the band The Obsessed. Kurt Cobain thanks his family, the record label and tells the audience to not believe everything they read before making big bug eyes at the camera. Long story, short? Kids, don't ever do heroin.

Peter Gabriel and Annie Lennox (I think that's Peter Gabriel, anyway) are out to name the nods for best group video. Following a pre-Beavis and Butthead Mike Judge short of some guy screaming for Lynyrd Skynrd, the nominees are read. It's En Vogue, RHCP, U2 and Van Halen. And U2 wins it for "Even Better Than The Real Thing," even though it's easily one of the shittiest music videos made for anything, ever. We cut to U2 backstage at the Pontiac Silverdome, where Bono is dressed like Macho Man Randy Savage in WCW circa 1999 and he tells Peter Gabriel he can't wait to hear his next album and he lets Annie Lennox know she sounded great on The Arsenio Hall Show a few nights ago. Then he calls Gabriel a "mad bastard," which I think is a compliment in Ireland, somehow. Then Bono sprays champagne all over the place, thus making him the first Mick in history to ever WASTE a bottle of alcohol.

There's a "Choose or Lose" P.S.A. and that commercial where Charles Barkley plays basketball against a Godzilla pastiche plays again. 

Mick Jagger is our next presenter. Yep, even 26 years ago he looked old as fucking shit. He thanks Woody Allen and Mia Farrow for making "rock and roll marriages look so blissful." Get it, it's funny because Woody Allen was probably molesting his own daughter at the time! Anyhoo, he's here to dole out the big "Video of the Year" award, which is weird because there's still 30 minutes left of TV time left. The noms: "Let's Get Rocked" by Def Leppard (featuring some truly horrific CGI); "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; "Under the Bridge"; and "Right Now." And the winner is ... white men, because not a single woman or minority was nominated! I keed, I keed. But for real, though, Van Halen won and shit. Sammy Hagar explains how "Right Now" is really about "the appreciation of reality" and right now is indeed "reality" happening. Then he says "fucking" and the mute him a second too late so you can still hear it.

Dana Carvey tells the audience that Sammy said "clucking" and that's our cue for the big night cap performance of the evening — a piano duet between Axl Rose and Elton John for "November Rain." I've never been the biggest Guns N Roses fan, but I've always been partial to the song. Probably because I got a blow job to it way back in the day, but still. Also, it's hard to hear this one and not eventually think about the old ECW November To Remember shows, and if that don't put a smile on your lips, quite frankly, you can go fuck yourself. 

And that's when Dana Carvey comes out one last time to tell us the University of California "rocks" and that the show's over. The end credits roll, and the highlights include the boys from Def Leppard showing off a guitar with Bela Lugosi's face on it and Dana Carvey busting Pauley Shore's balls while in character as Garth. But just you wait! We stll have the official VMA POST-SHOW with Kurt Loder and Anna Soren to churn through! She notes how many of the speakers had their shirts open during the awards, which, yeah, is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect a THOT to notice, no matter what decade it is. Then Kurt interviews Sammy Hagar and he chides Howard Stern for ruining the show with his Fartman antics. In probably the only legit LOL moment of the night, Loder asks Hagar if he didn't think Stern was "a happening guy" and he replied "no shit." Remember, this was back in the day when profanity was SUPER forbidden on broadcast TV, so I'm sure the censors were having a fucking FIT backstage during this one. Also, I totally forgot how much Hagar looked like Dee Snider back in the day; shit, can you imagine how balls out Van Halen would've been with DEE on vocals? Just a thought, ya'll. Just a thought. To be honest with you, the rest of the post-show isn't much to talk about. I'd say about half of it is just a replay of the performances from earlier, and the interviews with the likes of Peter Gabriel leave a LOT to be desired. We get one more commercial break, and then the awards show restarts from the beginning, which, obviously, is my cue to call this project a DONE DEAL.

You can tell it's not the 2018 awards show because they're not making out while a morbidly obese Eskimo transsexual makes a stand against Donald Trump and "alt right Nazis" in the background.

That was way weirder than I expected it to be. It's pretty bizarre to think that at one point Van Hagar and Def Leppard were overlapping with Nirvana and Pearl Jam as musical equals in terms of popularity, but what really struck me about the whole were two things. First things first, the obvious one: damn, did this show have a LOT of white people on it. Indeed, outside of the rap/hip-hop/R&B category (which was pretty much used here as a catchall for black music, and even then it had Marky Mark in there fucking it up for everybody else), there just weren't that many bruthas or sistahs on the program. Alas, in today's hyper-multiculturalist society, the awards show in 2018 has turned into the exact opposite, with a good 61.3 percent of the total U.S. population getting completely ignored in this year's top awards category. But hey, when has anybody ever given a shit about the under-representation of Caucasians in anything?

Secondly, I was taken aback by how depoliticized the whole product was, which is pretty surprising considering it was an election year. Granted, the thing did have a pretty pronounced liberal bias, and it was crystal clear that the suits at Viacom were trying to push some sort of political agenda with all of the ads about Rodney King and Rosie Perez screaming at stuff. But by and large the identity politics stayed out of the music, and Dana Carvey did a pretty admirable job keeping the hot button social topics of the day out of his rantings and ravings. This ... I doubt will be the case in 2018. Just call it a hunch.

Of course, the real reason to even bother rewatching the tape — available here, if you're curious — is to just wallow in the ephemera of it all. To be fair, the musical performances are pretty forgettable, but goddamn, is it reassuring to see all of those old school Taco Ball and Pepsi commercials. That, and there was some pretty high quality WTF value there, what, with the guest appearances from Pinhead and the eponymous Alien for no real reasons. 

Was the whole three and a half hour show really worth rewatching? Eh, probably not, but at least it reminded me of how different things are now compared to how they were a quarter century ago.

And as obvious by the lineup at the 2018 VMAs ... well, I'll let you tell me which general epoch in society was more enjoyable to be enmeshed in.

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Let’s Face It: Kurt Cobain Sucked.

Two decades after the Nirvana front man’s self-administered demise, we reflect upon the grunge icon’s hallowed legacy. And as it turns out, he probably doesn’t deserve any of the reverence. 

It’s an illogical statement, I know, but I’ll say it anyway: I’ve more or less always been a pretty big fan of Nirvana, but at the same time, I’ve always detested Kurt Cobain.

Yes, as a ‘90s child, I’ve always fostered a certain affinity towards the “Nirvana sound,” if you will, but I never really bought into Kurt’s retroactive deification, either. From a musical standpoint, Kurt was clearly the least talented of his bandmates, and his faux-philosophical, anti-Guns N Roses, new-new-wave, ultra-liberal shtick more or less opened the floodgates for a million, billion wusses like Trent Reznor and that crybaby from Radiohead to make miserable, woe-is-me alternative the default setting for mainstream rock to this day.

Here, on the 20th anniversary of Cobain’s suicide -- or, depending on how much of a crackpot you are, the date Courtney Love either killed her husband or hired somebody (but not that dude from The Mentors, of course) to do it for her -- I believe it’s a most opportune time to reflect on just how overrated Kurt Cobain was, on every conceivable level.

First and foremost; Kurt Cobain was a shitty guitar player, a fact that doesn’t keep him from routinely being ranked on top 100 all time greatest guitarist lists, you know, just ‘cause. With a voice that sounded like dual recordings of Edward Furlong’s screaming outtakes from “Terminator 2" and Pepe Le Pew doing a drunken karaoke ballad, Kurt’s “signature” singing style was similarly a less-than-impressive display. It may not have been as imitated as the “Vedder Voice,” but seeing as how easily fourth-rate alt rock acts like Seether and Puddle of Mudd were able to faithfully recreate that soulful Cobain howl, I think it’s safe to say we weren’t dealing with an all-time crooning legend, either.

As for Cobain’s music, I think the entire Nirvana discography is horrendously overrated. Cobain himself absolutely hated “Nevermind” and “In Utero,” considering the first to be an overproduced turd and the second a reluctant compromise between him and the record company. All in all, the band was responsible for perhaps only one and half truly decent albums -- the beautifully unpolished “Bleach” from 1989 (a grimy, under-produced classic that stands out as the band’s one truly uncompromised release) and the glorified B-side collection, “Incesticide” -- and before you give that one too much credit, just recall that half that album more or less consists of cover tunes, which is also a criticism you can lob at the band’s much revered “Unplugged” set, too.

For a composer that’s frequently hailed as the voice of a generation, Kurt’s lyrics were suspiciously cryptic, disjointed and largely apolitical. Whereas Bob Dylan at least referenced social issues in his “decades-defining” songs, Cobain’s lyrics were really just a grab-bag of fragmented poetry pieces, seemingly tossed together at random. In fact, he actually said that’s how he wrote his songs, on numerous occasions. For an alleged voice of an entire decade, old Kurt’s music had astoundingly little to say about anything at all.

As far as the much-acclaimed “Nirvana sound,” by now, we all know it was mostly just a restructuring of classic rock tunes -- “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is basically just “Louie, Louie” and “More than A Feeling,” only played faster and shittier, while even early Nirvana tracks “Spank-Thru” convey a certain Credence Clearwater Revival-esque vibrato. Cobain’s adulation/imitation of the Pixies is well-documented, so there’s really no need to drudge up how much of the Nirvana discography is derived from “Surfer Rosa” and “Doolittle.” However, I’ve always thought the Nirvana’s “iconic” sound was actually more of a rip-off of Steve Albini’s post-punk outfit Big Black -- just take out the synth and amp up the distortion, and you’ve more or less got “Nirvana” before there was a “Nirvana.”

And of course, how could I talk about Kurt Cobain’s revolutionary “creativity” without talking about the second-most iconic track off  “Nevermind?” A song, by the way, that is a direct rip-off of the Killing Joke song “Eighties,” which itself is a rip-off of The Damned’s “Life Goes On.”

Compared to the glut of Seattle-area bands, I still find it weird that Nirvana, out of the deluge of groups, is the one that gets the most credit for kicking off “The Grunge Revolution.” Yeah, “Nevermind” is said to have been the turning point, but a lot of people tend to forget that both Soundgarden and Alice in Chains’ big mainstream breakthroughs were released long before Nirvana’s 1991 opus. And any number of bands -- from The Melvins to Green River to Mother Love Bone -- could rightly lay claim to pioneering the “grunge movement,” years before Nirvana was even a fully-formed idea in Kurt Cobain’s noggin. The theory I’ve developed over the years was that the Grunge Takeover had always been something of a ploy by David Geffen and his kindred to supplant the dried-out hair rock movement, and Nirvana was just the right act at the right time to get all of the engineered publicity to turn the tide; with enough mass marketing and enough sound mixing, really ANY of the Seattle area bands could have had a “Nevermind” sized breakthrough. Clearly, Cobain’s ascension as pop icon had a whole hell of a lot more to do with luck than it did talent...and most certainly, ambition.

And what about Kurt Cobain, the individual human being? Well, for starters, he was bold-faced hypocrite, the kind of soul that liked to champion himself as a defender of women’s rights when he himself admitted to once molesting a developmentally disabled girl in his youth. His notebooks were filled with hateful diatribes against “jocks,” decrying their meat-eating dispositions, when Kurt was responsible for intentionally killing cat when he was a kid. He routinely mocked the macho excesses of the hair metal movement, even though he was pumping lethal drugs into his veins habitually and publicly priding himself on his own sexual conquests, too. And the ultimate tragicomic punch line to the Cobain life story? After literally making a fortune regurgitating the same-old, same-old “my parents are sell-outs and the break-up of our family royally screwed me up” drivel, he then proceeded to become a sell-out himself who voluntarily decided to break up his own family by blowing his brains out.

A lot of people like to speculate how Cobain’s music would’ve progressed had he not played the shotgun clarinet that fateful spring morning in King County. Odds are, he probably would’ve progressed down the Metallica path, abandoning the tried-and-true Nirvana sound for something a little more radio-friendly. Legend has it that the never to be “last” Nirvana album was going to be a stripped down, mostly acoustic, “Automatic For the People”-inspired detour, which is exactly the kind of thing you hear before a band starts playing half-hearted, bland-ass music that clearly indicates the outfit’s lack of good ideas anymore. The “In Utero” studio follow-up, as such, would have likely been Nirvana’s “Monster” -- a critical flop that signified the slow, boring downfall of the formerly influential and inspiring.

Of course, that scenario skirts perhaps the most important aspect of who and what Kurt Cobain was, and that was a sad-sack junkie. In reality, any fantasizing about what Cobain would be up to “today” is just pointless, since had Cobain not offed himself when he offed himself, he no doubt would’ve been dead before he turned 40, anyway. Perhaps the allure of Cobain is that he had the good sense to kill himself at a time when it was still fashionable and attractive -- going down at one’s peak is a hallmark of the legends, while disappearing into a decade of drug dependency, only to resurface as a bloated, O.D.’d corpse five years after last releasing an album just makes you Layne Staley.

What is Cobain’s lasting legacy, ultimately? Well, for one thing, he made suicide and flannel shirts fashionable -- at least one of which is still considered en vogue at the moment. And his stardom went a pretty long way in “normalizing” heroin addiction as a common occupational trait among rock stars. Musically, he’s probably the most culpable party responsible for the rock and roll industry’s shift away from good-time, nostalgic party and driving music to music more befitting anti-depressant-fed teens that paint their nails black and cut themselves on the third floor of their suburban mansions. Yes, he was responsible for eliminating the grandiose vapidity of Guns N Roses from the national consciousness, but nobody really brings up the fact that all Nirvana really did was replace it with a more nihilistic form of grandiose vapidity.

At the end of the day, though, I suppose Nirvana had some good songs, and if given the option of listening to a decade of bands that sounded like Silverchair and Oasis or a decade of bands that sounded like Trixter and Firehouse, well, shit, the answer ought to be downright obvious. But all of this retroactive mourning and retroactive reverence -- now stemming from youths who weren’t even born when Cobain made the choice to end his own life -- that he gets?

Well, that’s just stupid, and unfortunately, contagious.

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Book Review: “X Saves the World” by Jeff Gordinier

…didn’t we have enough reasons to loathe Gen Xers already?

Well, in case I needed another excuse to detest Generation Xers and everything their utterly pointless culture values or ever believed in, I recently read this book by a guy named Jeff Gordinier called “X Saves the World.” It’s a manifesto from 2008 - you know, shortly before the worldwide recession kicked off and made damn near every argument he puts forth in the book mute, anyway - and to give you an idea of how smug this Gordinier fellow is, look no further than the tome’s subtitle - “How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.” Per Gordinier, the baby boomers are a bunch of vapid sellouts (which they are), and a majority of the millennials are a bunch of self-absorbed, technology-addicted numbskulls (which I’m most definitely not contesting.) The part where Gordinier’s book takes a major, major nosedive is when he makes the grand proclamation that Gen X - and only Gen X - stood for something, never abandoned their ideals and ultimately had a more profound, positive influence on the world at large than the flower children or iGeneration. This, surprisingly, is a declaration I have more than a few issues with.

Let’s begin with a really arbitrary issue put forth by the book early on, and that’s drawing the lines where generational succession begins and ends. Per Gordinier, Gen X consists of everybody born from 1960 until 1977, while Generation Y entails everybody born from 1978 until 1994. As before, this is a very arbitrary method of designating one generation from another, and one that’s prone to a ton of cultural overlap. Not surprisingly, Gordinier claims the grunge rock/Silicon Valley boom of the early ‘90s as a triumph for Gen X, even though, by his own definitions, a lot of milennials were on the ground floor of many of those pop-social revolutions. Nirvana and Windows 95 may have been watershed moments for his generation, but what do you know? Those same cultural relics had just as much contemporary influence on MY generation, too. It just seems as if Gordinier spends half the book, running around stuffing names into a burlap sack and yelling “mine!” over and over again. That’s fine with me, though; if Generation X wants to keep mass media runoff like Quentin Tarantino and Beck all to themselves, I say it’s a fate you deserve, by gum.

Gordinier kicks off the book with an interesting little tidbit: that overrated Canadian pop-creation Douglas Coupland lifted the term “Gen X” from a 1983 Paul Fussell book called “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System,” which is actually a reference to a hypothetical “creative class” that Fussell considered to exist beyond the parameters of both economic stratification AND age delineations. Unfortunately, that’s about as sociological exciting as the book gets, as Gordinier spends no time at all jumping headfirst into non-sequitirs about blasting The Dead Kennedys at ice cream stands and how much Queensryche sucked after that.

The early parts of the book focus on pretty much all of the stuff you’d expect; the Velvet Revolution, the Stock Market Crash of ‘87, “Nevermind,” Richard Linklater, Michael Dell, so on and so forth. He talks about Gen X icons like Tarantino and Beck, claiming that they shared a common set of characteristics - they had encyclopedic memories of pointless things, they had no desire to change the world, and since most of them spent a good bit of their youth either jobless or working dead-end service gigs, they had all the time in the world to dream up works of art that were astoundingly devoid of political or social meaning. According to Gordinier, the fact that these works had no primary message was a sign of artistic merit. Just remember that for when we come to his tirade against millennials, will you?

And so, we come to Woodstock ‘94 (complete with a couple of outstanding lines from John Popper, he of Blues Traveler fame), and segue into the great post-modern cinema boom of 1999. With films like “Fight Club,” “The Matrix,” “American Beauty,” and “Being John Malkovich,” Gordinier claims that the Gen X “spirit” hopped from alternative rock to mainstream film, as hip-hop montages and cut-and-paste visuals became hallmarks of big-budget filmmaking. He claims that the films were all about a certain “stuckness,” that is, the inability to escape from certain environmental factors and ways of life. You know…not at all like “boomer” classics a la’ “The Graduate” or “The Last Picture Show,” or anything.

Gordinier then talks about how he spent some time in Prague, and how he listened to The Scorpions sing “Wind of Change” a million-jillion times. He ate dinner with ex-communists, and cited Gen X works like “The Good Soldier Svejk” as instrumental in the war against “totalitarian kitsch.” He then notes the irony in hindsight of wondering how people could ever place “comfort above principle.” This leads to Gordinier dropping perhaps the only truly memorable line in the entire book: “sometimes the best way to make people care about money is to give them some.”

I think you know what’s coming up here. The Dot.com boom goes off, and Gordinier talks about how many wilting Pearl Jam fans inched ever closing to fulfilling the “sum” - that is, a point of economic security where they could just slack off all day without having to worry about being evicted. He notes how the invasion of MBA capitalists forever changed how Silicon Valley operates; and just when it looks like Gordinier is going to have to open wide and swallow some crow, he decides to shift gears and instead rag the hell out of Gen Y.

He calls the millennials both a caste system where “idiots rule” and a “monoculture” of the vapid. Thanks to already-irrelevant cultural texts like the Backstreet Boys, Paris Hilton and Us Weekly, he claims that ours is a generation of narcissistic brats without any inkling of what “soul” feels like or resembles. There’s a great segment where he blasts Good Charlotte for being a band lacking any “iconoclastic purpose” - this, after he spent the first fifty pages of the book explaining how great bands like Nirvana were because their music was so apolitical and asocial. And then, there’s his tirade against “American Idol,” which culminates with the author listing shit acts like The White Stripes, Cat Power, Los Lobos and Aimee Mann as “American originals” alongside Robert Johnson and Miles goddamn Davis. No, seriously.

While the first 100 or so pages of the book are a wee bit self-fellating and prone to absurd generalizations and hypocrisy, the last 70 of the book are just painful to slog through. Gordinier talks about seeing “LOVE” in Vegas, where he mocks the baby boomers in the crowd for having the audacity to get old and sickly. He talks about how the Oct. 19, 1987 stock implosion was SUPPOSED to signal the death of the yuppie, but he then changes his tune and says that nowadays, pretty much ALL Gen X adults live like yuppies anyway. His solution to this “selling out conundrum” is utterly preposterous: we can regain our soul, kids, if we invest our creative energies in cross-country poetry reading tours, reading chapbooks, and buying up as much anachronistic technologies (vinyl, typewriters, etc.) as possible. Do you catch the irony there? That these assholes, according to the author, anyway, had SO MUCH INFLUENCE on creating today’s computerized infrastructure that, today, the only remedy to combat the over-computerization of society is to regress to the technological and social state of the baby boomers!

I’ll give Gordinier a smidge of credit, because most of his assertions are at least plausible - plausible, but not necessarily logical and almost never practical. He states that blogs are the natural progression of fanzines, and that YouTube is the end-result of college kids in the 1990s getting a hold of public-access credentials. Name checking “The Colbert Report,” “The Daily Show,” “South Park,” and “The Onion,” he asserts that modern humor is almost entirely rooted in what can be considered “traditional” Gen X irony and sarcasm. He talks about how Gen X adults have founded post-political causes, which includes “The Yes Men,” this thing called “Edible Estates” and a program called “Architecture for Humanity.” At one point, he even says some really under-developed shit about how Barack Obama and Cory Booker are fulfillment of the “Gen X”  ideology…somehow.

Of course, Gordinier concludes the book by acknowledging that his generation, through and through, has sold out. All of the kids that were into Husker Du have kids and Pinterest accounts, and to help crack through the “Gray Ceiling,” he advises fellow Gen Xers to harness “group power” and go about changing the world in “stealth mode.” Citing Henry James and James Brown, he says that inaction is his culture’s greatest obstacle, and ultimately concludes the magnum opus by wallowing in his tortured suburban existence and citing the influence of his generation’s most important anthem… “Don’t Look Back” by Boston.

Although you really don’t need me to tell you this, this book is pretty much pointless. If there’s any message to be found here, I guess it’s that Gen Xers had no small part in forging the current social climate we live in…which, according to Gordinier, still sucks. He chides baby boomers for leaving Gen Xers a shitty culture, but does the author even CONSIDER taking the blame for leaving behind a shitty culture for the Millennials? No, not one iota. He champions his cohorts for slogging and being disenchanted and refusing to “sell out to the man,”  but upon eyeing those same sensibilities in Gen Y, he thinks its corny and insincere. He has no understanding or empathy with their economic misfortunes, even though the class of 2007 faces a job market twenty times worse than that experienced by the class of 1987. He totally writes off Gen Y, because he considers their entrepreneurial spirit “lacking” and their pop culture experiences “lackluster.” But Gen X? Well, they had it right, and by golly, when you really think about it, they’re responsible for all of the really great things we have as a modern civilization today.

It’s a short-sided argument, and it’s presented in a manner that’s more irritating than enlightening. There are some decent chunks here and there, but overall, Gordinier’s book - and by extent, both his argument AND his generation - are completely empty, disconnected and beholden to a central ideology that simply has little to no weight on the world at large nowadays. There’s going to come a day where I’m a middle aged sell-out, and I’m going to see Gordinier and his kin - probably lugging around oxygen canisters - at that Cirque de Soleil interpretation of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And when I do, I’m going to have very little qualms in mocking their nostalgic longings, even while they‘re coughing up phlegm during the trapeze performance of “Come As You Are.” After all, we DID inherit our sense of compassion from the Xers, no?

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The Absolute DUMBEST Alternative Rock Lyrics of the 1990s

Counting down the grunge era’s most idiotic libretto

You know, I really like 1990s alternative rock. I mean, a lot.

The thing is, even though it’s probably my favorite style and chronological point in music, that doesn’t absolve the genre from a few shortcomings, the most obvious of which was that, for the most part, the lyrics where incomprehensible, pointless, or  in many instances, just flat out stupid.

Sure, it’s pretty easy to look back on, oh say, the music of Cake or The Presidents of the United States of America and retroactively say that they were singing about some fairly stupid shit, but at least bands of the like tried to incorporate a little semblance of structure and narrative to their tunes. Granted, it may not have been exquisite poetry, but when you heard that bald a-hole singing about moving to the country so he could eat a lot of peaches, you kind of knew what he was talking about (presumably, he wanted to move to the country, most likely so he could eat a lot of peaches.)

Looking back on the alt rock standards of twenty years ago, finding songs that are even remotely that narrative-driven is a pretty daunting task. I guess we never realized it at the time, but the songs of our youth may very well have been the most oblique recordings in the history of recorded music. In more blunt terms: good lord, was our music stupid as all hell.

It wasn’t so much that our alt rock favorites were irreverent and irrelevant as much as they were stubbornly non-concrete. Abstract is one thing, but it seemed like in the 1990s, alt rock radio was ruled by refrigerator magnet poetry. Not only did the lyrics make zero sense most of the time, the stringing together of words to make those lyrics seemed an affront to English itself. I don’t care how much smack you have flowing through your veins, word jamming of the like is something that’s inexcusable even for such all-time juiceheads as that dude from The Brian Jonestown Massacre and that guy from Blind Melon that kicked the bucket before he could even collect his first royalty check from “No Rain.”

As such, I’ve decided to turn the dial back to two decades ago, and yank out the five worst examples of dumb, idiotic and irritatingly pointless lyrics that the NAFTA years had to offer. Some people call these tunes classics, and others call them stupid, absurd and intelligence insulting pieces of shit. And today? Buddy, we ain’t celebrating nothing for being “classic.”

Number Five

“Creep” by Stone Temple Pilots

Stone Temple Pilots were/are arguably the worst band to come out of the 1990s with the initials STP. While originally decried as a poor man’s Pearl Jam, Scott Weiland and his unfortunately non life-destroying heroin habit managed to parlay their success into a now twenty year plus career of being a poor man’s Pearl Jam, proving those egghead critics wrong as wrong can be.

The inherent awfulness of “Creep” is pretty self-evident. Granted, it’s kind of unrealistic to expect a band to churn out some high quality, Chaucer-like prose every time they enter a recording booth, but with lyrics like “feeling uninspired / I guess I’ll start a fire” and “everybody run / Bobby’s got a gun,” it kind of makes you wonder if the band even comprehended how rhyming works. It seems like Weiland is trying to make some sort of altruistic point with the chorus of the song, but he follows up “take time with a wounded hand / ‘cause it likes to feel” with “’cause I like to steal” which is followed up by a secondary chorus in which he bemoans being “half the man” he “used to be.” Using daily conversation as a framework, that’s like saying “nice weather” and “I’m a neurotic scumbag” without even bothering to throw in a comma somewhere.

Radiohead covered the same subject better, IMHO. Hell, even TLC trudged the same ground with more sure handedness. And as an eff you to English teachers the nation over, STP was ultimately saddled with a platinum selling record and even more drug money, proving that you can’t spell “success” in modern music without a fair amount of “suck” first.

Number Four

“Loser” by Beck

In the 1990s, a lot of music critics considered Beck to be something of a post-modern, generation-defining lyrical artisan. Also, a lot of music critics were high on angel dust all the time, so I think those two aspects might just be correlated.

As far as ‘90s standards go, they really don’t get anymore standard than “Loser,” a song that has been played so many times on modern rock stations that by now, Beck could probably buy his own archipelago and spend the rest of his days trying to hop from island to island on stilts made out of woolly mammoth bones. Some people say that the beauty of “Loser,” and by extent, Beck’s entire oeuvre, is in its disjointedness and absurdity. The reality is, Beck’s word salad is nothing that you wouldn’t hear spouted out of the mouth of your typical homeless schizophrenic, and when the works of Wesley freaking Willis have more substance than what you’re singing about, you know you’re just going through the motions.

“The forces of evil / in a Bozo nightmare,” Beck proclaims at one point, before going into a whirlpool of “phony gas chambers,” “burning down trailer parks” and random things “hanging from a chicken wing.” It’s like giving the play-by-play for a Luis Bunuel film to a blind person - yeah, you can condense the gist of it, but it’s a gist that will never, ever make any damned sense to anyone or anything. Beck was undeservingly hailed as a post-structuralist champion following the release of 1994’s “Mellow Gold,” which spawned this, his most popular track: incidentally, that was the same year SAT scores began a downward trajectory, wasn’t it?

Number Three

ANYTHING written by Rob Zombie 

Solo, in  a band, on a boat, with a goat, beside a moat, it really doesn’t matter: if you give Rob Zombie a microphone and/or an ink pen and a blank sheet of paper, pure bullshit is certain to follow suit.

Zombie doesn’t even ATTEMPT to make his “music” remotely lyrical. For one, to create lyrics, there has to be a sense of flow, intention and meaning, which are all alien terms to Mr. Zombie. Rather, he substitutes those things most people call “words” with random references to B-movies compacted with phrases that rhyme with the last word in those B-movie references to create the illusion of structure.

“El Phantasmo and the Chicken Run Blast-a-Rama.” Honestly, how much lyrical depth can anybody expect out of something with a title of the like? Meanwhile, half of “Thunder Kiss ‘65” is just the names of movies that came out in the 1950s, and “More Human Than Human” is almost entirely comprised of disjointed, unconnected things that kind of have stuff to do with “Blade Runner.” Not only does Zombie eschew composition in his work, he even found a way to eschew imagery in his lyrics, instead turning incoherent allusions and references to pre-existing texts into a literal formula for success. Virtually everything Zombie recorded in the 1990s, from “La Sexorcista Vol. 1” to “Hellbilly Deluxe,” followed the exact same pattern; self introduction, yeah, oblique nod to B-movie, yeah, a direct reference to a B-movie, yeah, chorus, rinse, repeat.

Man, it’s a good thing a guy that prone to the repetitive and formulaic never got into the business of making movies, huh?

Number Two

“Everything Zen” by Bush

Bush is everything wrong about the 1990s in one band. Really nothing more than a dime a dozen Brit-rock group, they were scooped up by Interscope Records following the death of Kurt Cobain and puffed up into the latest, greatest alt-rock stewards, based primarily on lead singer Gavin Rossdale’s Tiger Beat-ready hairdo.

Say what you will about Nirvana being overrated and over-celebrated (please do, because they were), but their influence on the market of alternative rock music is absolutely monumental. How many bands with wooly haired lead singers on heroin with rhythm sections composed mostly of feedback and wobbly drum noises can you recall from the years of 1993 to 1997? As long as you had something static sounding in the background and some guy just rambling on and on about incoherent nouns, odds are, you were mass marketed to the jaded, apathetic fifth-graders of America, the kinds of culture-deprived youths that would gladly save up two months worth of lunch money just so they could purchase the latest Sponge album.

Really, you can pick ANY song by Bush and label it as one of the most idiotically constructed lyrical abortions of this, or for that matter, any other year, but “Everything Zen” stands out because a.) it was the single that introduced the band to the masses, and b.) holy hell, are these lyrics super-duper-confoundingly-stupid.

There isn’t a single line in “Everything Zen” that makes a lick of sense. The structure of the lyrics simply do not connect from verse to verse, or even word to word. “There must be somewhere we can eat,” the song begins, already establishing the fact that we’re not in store for some Bob Dylan shit for the next three and a half minutes, before colliding into the couplet “Maybe I should find another lover.” And that’s probably the closest the song gets to anything resembling lyrical cohesiveness.

“Should I fly to Los Angeles?” the lead singer immediately follows, with the even more confounding line “and find my asshole brother?” Four lines into the song, and we have four separate narratives going on…and of course, the singer never ever returns to any of them throughout the rest of the track. Instead, we’re treated to complete nonsense about “faking with saints,” “rain dogs howling for centuries,” and in a line that brings Rossdale’s status as a non-retard into serious question, “Minnie Mouse has grown up a cow.”

Admittedly, it’s pretty hard to think of anything stupider than that…that is, until you take into consideration the virtual Rosetta Stone that paved the way for all of this lyrical absurdity to begin with.

Number One

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana

Without question, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the single most important song of the 1990s as far as lyrical composition influence goes. While obviously less heralded for the fact, it’s also far and away the stupidest song of the decade, an observation addressed by the guy that wrote it in several interviews.

What a lot of people never understood about “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is that the entire thing was an elaborate joke. Kurt, presumably under the influence of some more potent smack than usual, wanted to produce a song that was nothing more than “Louie, Louie” and “More Than A Feeling” merged together, with bullshit, exaggerated lyrics about angsty, disaffected youth staging a revolution against…well, stuff they really had no clue about. With a little, ahem, inspiration form Sonic Youth and The Pixies and the off-handed suggestion that he name the ditty after a line of deodorant, Smells Like Teen Spirit was birthed, inadvertently kicking off the greatest mainstream musical renaissance since the heydays of AOR.

People often call “Teen Spirit” a revolutionary anthem, which is sort of odd, since the lyrics of the song are about absolutely nothing. “Load up on guns, and bring your friends,” the song begins, before crashing into some junior high-quality, proto-emo poetry, “I’m worst at what I do best.” The structure of the song is incredibly disjointed, but it’s not until we get to the chorus where things get really, really idiotic.

“A mosquito, an albino, my libido…yeah!” Cobain yells, clearly indicating a countercultural call to arms against…uh, malaria, maybe? The song ultimately concludes with Cobain forgoing words altogether, spitting out a long, drawn out line of grunts that sort of rhyme with “sayonara” for about a full minute.

And like that, the great alternative rock movement of the 1990s began. With that in mind, is anybody really surprised that it was a decade dominated by half-hearted, nonsensical and chopped-to-all-hell fifth-grader prose afterwards?

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