Friday, May 23, 2025

The Alternative 90s, the AV Club's Retrospective: 1998

Today, we continue the journey through a remarkable period of music history. This series is meant as a companion/reaction piece to Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? Accurately subtitled as “One man’s year-by-year journey into 90s rock.” You can get this highly recommend work on Kindle for just $2.99. Do it!

Look back for previous editions where we covered part 1part 2part 3part 4part 5part 6, part 7, and part 8.


Where did we go? Alas, though I finished reading Hyden’s book, I clearly ran out of gas on posting as it's been nearly two months since part 8. Why? Well, that’s easy. The 1998 chapter, sadly, appropriately, focuses exclusively on the nü-metal genre, specifically the bands Korn and Limp Bizkit. So it’s no wonder I did not rush to the keyboard to write about it.


Yet this week, I randomly came across a social media posting of the Limp Bizkit video for “Nookie,” and decided to let it play. Maybe I had misjudged the band because they simply weren’t as good as what came before them. If you hate yourself, you can watch the video here.


My goodness. If there was any misjudgment on my part, it was that I couldn’t fathom a song that bad had ever become a major hit. (In retrospect, I was grossly unkind to Alanis Morissette. The bottom was fathoms below what she had created.) Everything about this is pathetic. It is weeks-old warmed-over store-brand mac and cheese. The lyrics, the music, the vocals, Fred Durst’s dopey facial expression… right down to the “arrest” at the end of the video. I don’t even know what to say.

 

Anyway… Hyden addresses this moment in time wistfully, noting that he had in effect aged out of the zeitgeist, and talks about how he already couldn’t relate to those kids born after Back to the Future was released. He personally had already moved on from Grunge before then, but the world followed suit. 

“For the next several years, a new wave of bands systematically wiped away the gains alternative rock had made in the early ‘90s. Grunge was consumed by a new beast, and vomited back up with the most rank, least edible chunks of metal and hip-hop… Nü-metal beat grunge at its own game; you could feel sorry for yourself without worrying about other people. In fact, other people were the problem.” 

The “feel your pain” portion of the 90s was officially over, and vengeance was upon us.

 

Which, OK, fine. There was a rebellion against caring about other people’s concerns (that quite obviously continues to this day). But did the music have to be so pathetic? Hyden: “You didn’t have to be ignorant of rock history in order to appreciate it, but it definitely helped to be free of preconceived notions of what ‘good’ music was supposed to sound like if you wanted to be a Korn fan.” Perhaps it needed to be terrible music. Because if your driving sense of self as a music fan is to connect with something selfish and unenlightened, the quality of what you listen to will inherently belong to the lowest common denominator. Actual ability is an afterthought or even a snooty way to look down on the individual.

 

Hyden notes that Soundgarden and Nirvana were done. Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam were in new, less important chapters. I’d add that Smashing Pumpkins lost the plot with "Adore." Yet, he takes a short detour to talk about all the good things bubbling up over these late 90s years. 1999 was a stronger year, and I’ll touch on more examples then, but we still got “Hello Nasty,” a shocking triumph from the Beastie Boys in their third complete reinvention, and “Psyence Fiction” from U.N.K.L.E., a worthwhile electronic/rock/rap collaboration led by James Lavelle and DJ Shadow with participation from a gaggle of credible alternative musicians.

 

Back to the task at hand, though. Hyden laments, “After a while, [grunge] was just this passé thing I made fun of in order to make people think I was never silly enough to treat it seriously. But deep down, I couldn’t forgive Korn, Limp Bizkit, Creed, Godsmack, and all the rest for what they did to the Alternative Nation.” I don’t align with the first part. I still see grunge as music that mattered and lives frequently on my stereo/car/headphones/RockBand game today. But it’s true that the steering wheel was handed over to the lowest common denominator bands who lacked everything that this music genre was supposed to deliver.


Hyden closes by telling the story of his blistering review of a 2002 Korn concert, and how the cornucopia of backlash from idiots became a badge of honor for him. It’s amusing, but sad on many levels, especially what it portended. Hyden summarizes his feelings: “I’ll never get Korn and Limp Bizkit. I’ll always consider nü-metal a symptom of the nihilism, self-absorption, and arrogance percolating in the American culture in the late ‘90s, before it flowered into something really ugly a few years later.”


The nice thing is that, looking at this book 15 years after its publication, we at least can say that these bands have faded into obscurity. The sad thing is, the movement they surfed in on has only proliferated into all aspects of life, most obviously in politics.

 

The original "red hat" of ignorance

Things will get even worse as we get into 1999, but I’m going to try to balance my time on that last edition on the sparks of hope, joy, and brilliance that were emerging all the same. We’re here for the great tunes, after all…


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