ROCK Is Rollin'
Three big cds crank up the
volume on the charts after years of bubblegum pop. is the
headbanger's ball re-starting?
By
JAMES PONIEWOZIK and BENJAMIN NUGENT
The world
has turned and left me here," sang Rivers Cuomo on Weezer's
self-titled debut album. In the years since that double-platinum
1994 CD, that's exactly what happened, not only to Weezer
but to an entire generation of rock bands that emerged in
the early to mid-'90s. In that era, grunge, punk and "alternative"
bands-Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots-ruled
the hearts and wallets of young listeners. Then, almost without
exception, they dropped from the top of the charts, replaced
by rap acts and, later, boy bands and girl divas. Some lingered
but grew less relevant (Nine Inch Nails' 1999 The Fragile
was a critical smash but a sales disappointment) or less edgy
(a Foo Fighters song became the theme music for the nbc romantic
comedy-drama Ed, for cripes' sake).
Weezer released
the ruinously unpopular Pinkerton in 1996, then vanished long
enough for lead singer Cuomo to enroll at Harvard and nearly
complete a bachelor's degree. So before the release of the
band's new (and also self-titled) record, Cuomo flatly predicted,
"I think it's going to fail in every sense of the word."
If rock
is good at one thing, it's dying, as it did, cyclically, with
the rise of disco and new wave. But if rock is good at two
things, it's dying and coming back to life. And so last month
Weezer found itself making its debut at No. 4 on the Billboard
charts, its video for Hash Pipe-an eccentric, grinding single
about a transvestite hooker-breaking onto mtv's Total Request
Live. Last week Break the Cycle (Flip Records/Elektra), an
angsty slab of dysfunction-metal from Staind, entered the
charts at No. 1, selling a surprising 716,000 copies in one
week. Right behind it was Lateralus (Tool Dissectional/Volcano),
from arty gloom rockers Tool, which came out at No. 1 a week
before, displacing red-hot girl group Destiny's Child. (Weezer
hangs in at No. 9.) Overnight-Hello, Cleveland!-kids were
ready to rock again.
Well, not
overnight. Rock never really died-after the alternative-rock
craze bottomed out in the late '90s,
rap-rock
hybrids like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock as well as more straightforward
rock bands like Creed have clicked with audiences and gone
multiplatinum. And record-company executives, like anxious
analysts anticipating a tech bubble burst, have been anticipating
a correction in teeny-pop's long boom. They have devoted more
resources in the past year to signing and developing rock
acts, believing the tweens who flocked to pop would soon be
ready for a different sound. "They want [their music] to evolve
into something else as they grow older and mature," says John
Davis, vice president of Loud Records, a division of Columbia.
Teen pop
isn't dead either, but even there, a shift is under way. The
Backstreet Boys' latest, Black and Blue, sold a healthy 5
million, according to SoundScan, but that didn't touch the
11.8 million for their 1999 Millennium or the 10.5 million
for 'N Sync's 2000 No Strings Attached. And few expect 'N
Sync's July follow-up, Celebrity, to approach those heights
either. More significant, long-reigning teen acts are, in
attitude if not music, waxing more grownup, more rock 'n'
roll. It may not be far-fetched to see the cultural roots
of a rock revival in the moment Britney Spears ripped off
her clothes at the mtv Video Music Awards last fall-Daddy,
I'm not a little girl anymore!-or in the snarly, goateed look
'N Sync has adopted in its latest video. Bubblegum's fans
are being led down a rockier road-and nothing rocks like rock.
But each
of the rock successes of the past weeks were the product of
years of touring and building grassroots followings. Tool
first broke out on the Lollapalooza tour in 1993, and Lateralus,
its first album in five years, was hotly awaited, though its
sales were still surprising. Staind was godfathered by Limp
Bizkit front man Fred Durst, who brought the band on the Family
Values Tour in 1999, helped get it signed to Elektra (its
first album, Dysfunction, sold slightly more than a million
copies) and sang on its ballad Outside from the Family Values
Tour 1999 CD. But even with a famous sugar daddy, success
came after 18 months building cred on tour.
It's tempting
to liken this budding revival to the coming-out of grunge
10 years ago, when the President was named Bush, the economy
was contracting and anxious Gen-Xers with guitars rode self-deprecation
and power chords to the top of the charts. But Nirvana, Soundgarden,
Pearl Jam et al. could be said at least loosely to have a
common sound, a common fan base and a common thrift-shop fashion
sense. This season's rock monarchs share good timing-"There's
a collective exhaustion now like there was [in 1991]," says
Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of Sub Pop Records, which served
as grunge's midwife. But the bands have little else in common.
Thus Staind's
Break the Cycle is the sensitive mosher's album, heavy on
commercial-metal power ballads à la Creed and emotive if inarticulate
lyrics laced with therapy-speak (hence the title) that play
like an R-rated episode of Oprah. ("Did Daddy not love you?
Or did he love you just too much? Š Well, f___ them, and f___
her and f___ him, And f___ you Š") Tool, for its part, specializes
in punishing, proficient metal with complicated progressive-rock
time signatures: Metallica by way of King Crimson. It's also
firmly in the progressive-rock tradition of noodly instrumentals,
bloated song lengths and bombast; the band's florid lyrics
("Saturn ascends, the one, the ten. Ignorant to the damage
done") and Latinate album titles like Ænima and Lateralus
seem more than a little æffected. Weezer's stripped-down,
raging and sardonic beach pop is Tool's pure antithesis (you
could fit their blissful but brief new CD 21Ž2 times over
onto Tool's nearly 80-minute monster).
If there's
any musical link among the three, it's an emphasis on melody-at
least compared with the testosterone-drenched, jock-rock chants
of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock. And that may help lure pop kids.
"There's a lot more stuff that everybody can sing along to,
that girls can take home and listen and sing to, as well as
those guys hitting their heads on the wall," says Elektra
A&R associate Jill Katona. But if the three don't make a movement,
they may represent the desire for one, and a first taste of
things to come. "There is a nation of great up-and-coming
rock bands right now, and in the next couple of years we're
going to see something really exciting," says Poneman of Sub
Pop. "Have we made that switch and turned on a dime in one
week?" asks Alan Light, editor-in-chief of Spin. "I don't
know, but I think it obviously shows there's a hunger for
something else."
That something
else could be less homogeneous than grunge was, considering
today's cafeteria-style music culture. "Kids aren't necessarily
identified as being a heavy-metal kid or a punk kid or something
else," says mtv2 general manager David Cohn. "There's no better
evidence of that than the rap-metal thing." Says Katona: "Kids
today with the Internet and all the access they have to tons
of music have a wider array of interests. But you know: once
into rock, always into rock."
Does this
mean a return to musical authenticity after years of prefab
pop acts? Perhaps-at least, there's hope for bands that actually
record their own music-but don't expect a return of the grunge
era's rejection of rock-star pomp and artifice (or its embrace
of flannel). From the spiked bracelets and studded belts of
runway fashion to the recent reappearance of Mötley Crüe's
Tommy Lee on the cover of Rolling Stone, there's a creeping
nostalgia in pop culture for the old-fashioned rock-star myth
in all its showboaty, leather-pantsed glory. "If you're going
to stare at your toes and play guitar and look depressed,
that's not going to cut it," says Avery Lipman, president
of Republic Records. "It's important for artists to be stars."
(Even the dirge-slinging Tool is known for performing, glitter
rockstyle, in masks and wigs.)
Ironically,
this is the same sort of glammed-up rock excess that alt-rock
reacted against. But despite Weezer's nerd-rock image, Cuomo
was originally inspired by such over-the-top metal acts as
the Scorpions. "I was a metal kid at heart," he says. "But
I couldn't do all the right poses and I couldn't wear leather
pants." Who knows? Rock stardom could even be more fun for
Weezer the second time around than in the alterna-purist mid-'90s.
"At the time, it was definitely not okay to be successful.
It wasn't cool," he says. "The whole rock-star thing was considered
to be lame. Nowadays, it's totally come back in style." The
world has indeed turned. Three hundred and sixty degrees.
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June 12, 2001 | No. 24
COVER
STORY
A
Hero's Ascent
For mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, just crossing the street can be a risky
venture. The first sightless person to reach Mount Everest's summit, he
gives millions-both blind and seeing-the courage to reach for new heights
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY...
PACIFIC
BEAT: Post-Olympics blues; fractured Fiji...
THE
ARTS
MUSIC: Rock rises from the dead, again...
CINEMA: Keeping faith with Ingmar Bergman
BOOKS: A fresh look at a founding father
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