5/20/2023 0 Comments Tad 8 way santaBut SST began a devolution into its third wave by signing seemingly hundreds of lame, jazzy/jammy bands like The Alter Natives, Slovenly, Always August and Painted Willie. And then there was SST Records, the ultra-hip California label whose second wave signees (Firehose, Screaming Trees, Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth et al) occupied the DMZ between the aforementioned camps.įrom ’85 to ’87 or thereabouts, SST was, hands down, the label. So, by ’84 the cooler skinhead and mohawked dudes had grown their hair out and realigned themselves with one of two camps: The more inward-looking and purportedly sensitive types enrolled in college radio’s Alternative Nation, while the hard-partying, rougher ’n’ rowdier dudes gravitated toward speed metal. The hardcore punk that had been a revelation in 1982 had crystallized into cliché by ’83. And they were a little bit lucky, too.Īmerica’s subaltern musical landscape of the mid to late ’80s was a weird, liminal space. And you’ve gotta admit, these guys had balls of steel and a wee bit of business acumen, to boot. Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt were the wannabe Svengalis who had the guts, audacity and derring do to build an empire of sorts with their label, Sub Pop Records. The American grunge phenomenon of the early ’90s was not nearly so much an eruption from the underground as it was the result of a deftly choreographed branding campaign mounted by a couple of carpet-bagging dilettantes who just so happened to be in the right place (Seattle) at the right time (the mid ’80s) to reshape a loosely aggregated, regional music scene as a prefab musical subculture for fun and profit.
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