In Fear Of A Punk Decade, the punk
and hardcore explosion of the ’90s is revisited, remembered, and reassessed,
year by year.
I
stood on the stage of The Lion’s Lair, one of the seediest bars in Denver,
getting heckled by the singer of Agression.
Agression (the misspelling is intentional, or at least that’s what the band would have
you believe) began in the ’80s as one of California’s first skate-punk outfits.
By 1994, the group had relocated to Colorado. It seems like an odd move for a
band with more than one song about the beach, but many notable punk bands—from pop-punk
champ All to post-hardcore powerhouse Planes Mistaken For Stars—have picked up
roots and headquartered in Colorado over the years. It’s a relatively easy state
for a musician to live in, and when it comes to touring, you’re centrally
located. Agression’s frontman, Mark Hickey, was being less than neighborly that
night at the Lion’s Lair. I forget his exact words, but as my admittedly wobbly
young punk band played, he drunkenly yelled something about how our
Offspring-sounding shit sucked, and that it might be best for all involved if
we simply got off the stage. He generously volunteered to help with that.
Standing
there with a bass strapped to my scrawny frame, I wasn’t intimidated by this
grizzled old punk from a legendary band heckling me. I was offended. The Offspring? We didn’t sound anything like the goddamn Offspring.
In
1994, The Offspring’s breakthrough hit “Come Out And Play”—with its annoyingly
infectious refrain, “You gotta keep ’em separated”—hit radio and MTV like a
bomb. It rocketed the previously unknown band to instant fame, and eventually
it would turn the album it appears on, Smash,
into the biggest-selling independent album of all time, a distinction it still
holds. I never cared for The Offspring; their 1992 album Ignition hadn’t done anything for me when it came out, and “Come
Out And Play” sounded just as tuneless and empty. But that wasn’t why I was so
offended when my band was compared to them. It upset me for a far more petty
reason: I didn’t want to be labeled as some kind of wannabe sellout.
Short
of dressing like Urkel, selling out was the uncoolest thing you could do in
1994. Actually, dressing like Urkel was okay, assuming you were in
Weezer—another band that would go supersonic before the end of that year. But
Weezer wasn’t punk, even though the group would eventually influence an untold
number of punk bands by the time the ’90s were out. The Offspring was punk—only
The Offspring wasn’t that huge of a band in the underground scene before making
the jump to stardom. It was easy to view things on such black-and-white terms
back then, totally ignoring the fact that musicians might want to make a
living—hell, a great living—at
playing music. Punk was supposed to be a higher calling. If Fugazi could make a
living by releasing its own records, selling no T-shirts, and charging only
five bucks for its shows, why couldn’t any band? So went the common argument
against selling out circa 1994. Logically, that was full of holes; Fugazi could
do that because it sold hundreds of thousands of records and had a guaranteed
draw of a thousand kids in almost any town in America. What seemed like a
cut-and-dried, us-vs.-them issue was actually extremely complicated. But if there’s
anything punk loves to view itself as, it’s the sword that hacks away at the
Gordian Knot.
Green
Day didn’t make things any simpler. As angry as frontman Dexter Holland tried
to seem, The Offspring wasn’t taken seriously by that many punks. But the punk
scene had truly taken Green Day into its heart in the early ’90s—because, not
in spite, of Billie Joe Armstrong’s nerdy romanticism. When Dookie came out in February of 1994,
Green Day seemed instantly huge. Those of us who knew every word of the band’s
first two albums, 1990’s 39/Smooth
and 1992’s Kerplunk, were well aware
that the major-label debut was coming. But we had no idea Dookie would turn into what it did: the next Nevermind
Kurt
Cobain died on April 5, 1994, three days before The Offspring’s Smash was released. There is no
correlation between these two events except for the fact that Cobain helped
pave the way for the mainstream acceptance of punk, and that his suicide letter
bemoaned the loss of his artistic independence—an ethic learned in his “punk rock
101 courses.” The Offspring and Green Day were just the vanguard of the battalion
of punk bands that made the leap to the big time in 1994, thus leaving a
perverse wreath on Cobain’s grave. Strangely, most of the others had very
little chance of ever succeeding on that scale. Samiam had spent years making
gruff, brooding, darkly melodic albums, and its major-label debut, Clumsy, was just as good as its
predecessors—but if Atlantic Records executives thought Samiam was going to be
the next Pearl Jam, they were sadly mistaken.
Two
of the most curious major-label debuts by bands from the post-hardcore scene,
however, were Shudder To Think’s Pony Express Record and Jawbox’s For Your Own Special
Sweetheart. Both had previously
released albums on Dischord Records, the label run by Ian MacKaye of Fugazi; as
such, Dischord was the last label anyone thought would produce a major-label
band. It only made things sting more when Pony Express Record and For
Your Own Special Sweetheart wound up being not only good, but amazing—huge
leaps forward in artistry and ambition for each group. Naturally, the
stage-diving public had no idea what the hell to make of such weirdly, subtly
confrontational music. A year earlier, In Utero had tested the limits of
how far a mainstream rock album could push the envelope of middle-American
tolerance. With Cobain gone, people were ready for the far more digestible punk
roughage of The Offspring and Green Day.
That
said, The Offspring still made it big on an indie label—although the irony was
that label was owned by Bad Religion, which had recently made its own jump to
the majors. Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz had run Epitaph Records for
years, but Bad Religion’s 1994 album, Stranger
Than Fiction, was released on Atlantic, and it remains the group’s
best-selling album. Epitaph had a full slate of up-and-coming bands of its own,
including the ex-Operation Ivy outfit Rancid, whose rousing, retro-’70s-sounding Let’s Go helped set the stage for a
much bigger showing with 1995’s …And Out
Come The Wolves. Lesser Epitaph signees like the impassioned Down By
Law—led by Dave Smalley, former singer of All and Dag Nasty—helped flesh out
the roster, providing punk with a bit less polish and overt careerism. On Down
By Law’s 1994 album Punkrockacademyfightsong, Smalley sings a fist-pumping song called “Punk Won”—but rather than
trumpeting punk’s victory over the Billboard charts, it extols the
integrity and idealism of the punk he grew up on. Curiously, Smalley would soon
become a rare voice for conservativism in the punk scene. But in 1994, politics
seemed to be the least of most punks’ worries—even those on a label run by the
notoriously outspoken Bad Religion.
Bad
Religion had Epitaph, and NOFX had Fat Wreck Chords. Owned and operated by NOFX
bassist and lead singer Fat Mike, the label similarly exploded in the early
’90s—although NOFX itself was on Epitaph, including 1994’s Punk In Drublic, an album whose goofy irreverence and hardcore
speed belied a deep knack for pop songcraft and wordplay that was both silly
and genuinely witty—not to mention satirical of the punk scene itself. Plenty
of other popular bands put out albums on Fat Wreck in 1994, including Lagwagon’s
NOFX-like Trashed and Strung Out’s
earnest, Bad Religion-esque Another Day
In Paradise. Those albums contributed to a meme that was beginning to take
hold in the punk scene: that the bands on Fat Wreck are all derivative and
same-sounding, subject to the Fat Mike meat-grinder that made generic punk
sausage out of its signees. It’s an unfair, inaccurate claim, as would soon be
proven when the label began to branch out—albeit never very far—as the ’90s
progressed.
It
didn’t help that the first of Fat Wreck’s many inexpensive sampler CDs, Fat Music For Fat People, came out in
1994. Along with the first volume of Punk-O-Rama,
Epitaph’s series of cheap compilations, Fat
Music For Fat People turned thousands of kids on to bands they might not
have normally heard. In the days before the Internet became a primary means of
music promotion, that was central to the wild success Fat Wreck and Epitaph
would see in the ’90s—but it also reinforced the notion that each label had an
inbred house style, and that they existed just to manufacture punk-rock product
even more homogenous than what the majors pumped out. Not that it stopped
Lagwagon from smartly exploring the complexity surrounding that bogeyman of the
’90s, “corporate rock,” on “Know It All,” a standout track from Trashed that also appears on Fat Music For Fat People.
Part
of the mythology of punk rock is that the music is supposed to sound crude and
raw. But there’s always been room for slick sounds in punk, at least relatively
speaking; even the Sex Pistols’ Never
Mind The Bollocks is slathered in studio polish. But with all the Epitaph
and Fat Wreck bands beginning to sound cleaner and cleaner—not to mention Green
Day’s Dookie being a huge step above
its previous releases, fidelity-wise—it’s not surprising that a crop of
decidedly scrappy punk bands sprang up. Lo-fi, after all, was a buzzword in
indie-rock at the time, and while it may be hard to imagine Sebadoh and, say,
F.Y.P, being part of the same continuum in 1994, they kind of were.
Led
by Todd Congelliere, one of punk’s most unfairly overlooked pop songsmiths, F.Y.P
produced static-addled classics like 1994’s Dance My Dunce, a disc full of adenoidal weirdness and surreal
juvenilia that flew in the face of every prevailing punk trend at the time,
although it’s not hard to trace a line from F.Y.P to later kindred spirits like
Jay Reatard and King Khan. Accordingly, Dance My Dunce still holds up—as
does Got A Record, the 1994 debut by The Rip Offs, a band formed by
ex-Supercharger frontman Greg Lowery and former Mr. T Experience member Jon
Von. That mash-up of gritty garage gunk and pop-punk snarl resulted in one of
the best punk albums of the ’90s, even if it irked (or just plain confused)
many punks at the time.
Hardcore’s
roundabout route of mutation throughout the ’90s is as frustrating as it is
exhilarating. For every holdover from the ’80s like 7 Seconds or Agnostic Front,
there were new bands springing up trying to fill the void—even as they
genetically modified hardcore by adding elements of dissonance and complexity.
San Diego’s Drive Like Jehu can barely be called punk, but like Weezer, the
group didn’t need to be embraced by the punk scene to wind up influencing so
many bands within it. Yank Crime,
Drive Like Jehu’s 1994 swansong, inspired legions of post-hardcore bands to get
weird, scratchy, and angular—and Jehu’s San Diego neighbor, Heroin, took that
formula to a higher level with its self-titled album from ’94, an epochal disc
that helped kick off what would become known as screamo. But hardcore proper
received a shot of adrenaline to the heart with yet another San Diego act,
Unbroken. The straight-edge, Slayer-loving outfit didn’t make sense on paper,
but on record, it was unstoppable. Unbroken’s 1994 full-length, Life.Love.Regret., is a brooding, metallic spasm of
righteous rage that pointed the way toward a brighter, bleaker hardcore future.
Screamo
was the tag bands like Heroin got saddled with, but that unfortunate
portmanteau couldn’t have happened without emo. The first, brief wave of
emo—initially called “emocore”—fizzled in the ’80s after Rites Of Spring, Guy
Picciotto’s and Brendan Canty’s legendary pre-Fugazi outfit, broke up. But by
1994, it was a vital and surprisingly diverse subgenre. That year, veteran
group Moss Icon released Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly, a poetic, sporadically delicate meditation
of moody post-hardcore that set the template for the artier side of the emo
underground. The same can be said of younger groups like Indian Summer.
Although it never released a proper full-length, Indian Summer put out enough
singles and compilation tracks to warrant an anthology, Science 1994,
that showcased the group’s affinity for both post-hardcore intensity and post-rock
dynamics. Few bands of emo’s second wave, however, held as much sway as Cap’n
Jazz. The suburban Chicago band’s lone full-length—whose ridiculously long
title is more popularly known as Shmap’n Shmazz—was released in 1994.
It’s emo’s The Velvet Underground; not many kids bought it at the time,
as it was barely available before going out of print for years. But it inspired
legions of budding, sensitive young men and woman to flex their wordplay, fly
their nerd flags, and scream about the emotional landscape of youth over cathartic,
harshly jangling art-punk.
Not
all emo was challenging. Some of it was downright pretty. Denver’s Christie
Front Drive released a self-titled EP and a self-titled seven-inch in 1994, and
like Shmap’n Shmazz, they left
a mark on the fledgling emo scene that’s still felt. It could rock out and even
get a little screamy, but for the most part it’s an epic, achingly tuneful slab
of post-adolescent soul-purging. The members of California’s Sense Field were a
little longer in the tooth, having spent time in the hardcore band Reason To
Believe before going sweetly, dreamily melodic on albums like 1994’s Killed
For Less. Released on the hardcore label Revelation, it also set the stage
for a similar-sounding band of former hardcore dudes, Texas Is The Reason, who
were a couple years away from unleashing Do You Know Who You Are?, their
heralded album on Revelation.
Likewise, Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate featured
former members of hardcore bands, including Christ On A Crutch. Sunny Day Real Estate’s 1994
debut, Diary, couldn’t be further from that kind of corrosive punk.
Layered, lush, and otherworldly, Diary hit the emo scene hard. The album
has been heaped with hyperbole since its release, but it’s best to remember
that it was already spoken about practically in whispers when it came out. Diary was a sea change in emo—not just because it was so intricate and singular,
but because it came out on Sub Pop, the label that meant both artist
credibility and commercial viability. First grunge had gone mainstream, and
then pop-punk. Was emo next? Diary was the first album that raised that
question, even though it was still many years before that question would be
definitively answered.
One
of the bands that would eventually haul emo into the mainstream is Jimmy Eat
World—not that you’d know it from the group’s 1994 self-titled debut. Recorded
when the members were still teenagers, it’s a promising yet rough document of
feisty, messy pop-punk—a style that would soon change when Jimmy Eat World
began playing shows with Christie Front Drive, resulting in a split single in
1995 and JEW’s gradual ascent to emo superstardom. It didn’t hurt that, in a
few years, the up-and-coming JEW would tour with a band that was just beginning
to find its feet in 1994: Blink-182. That band’s first album, Cheshire Cat, came out in ’94, and its off-kilter
bounciness immediately caught the ear of kids who were already starting to
wander from the Epitaph/Fat Wreck flock. Cheshire Cat isn’t radically
different from your typical Fat release from 1994, but there was a refreshing
sloppiness and wide-eyed exuberance to it that augured lucrative things to come.
Green
Day had sold out. The Offspring had sold out. Many more would follow,
regardless of whether selling out was really as evil or clearly defined as many
’90s punks thought it was. Besides Fugazi, one of the biggest bands that seemed
to be holding the independent line was Jawbreaker. 1994 marked the release of
the group’s third album, 24 Hour Revenge
Therapy, which remains many fans’ favorite—and by then, Jawbreaker had
become a bona fide phenomenon. After 1992’s sprawling, ambitious Bivouac, 24 Hour was punchier and punker; at the same time, it packed odd
pockets of strangled noise and tangled verse into its short, sharp doses of
raspy pop-punk.
But
Jawbreaker was already straining at the indie leash. In 1993, the band had been
hand-picked to open for six dates on Nirvana’s In Utero tour—and before long, Jawbreaker would sign to Nirvana’s
label, Geffen. Before that polarizing (and ultimately disastrous) leap to the
majors happened, Jawbreaker delivered a masterpiece of ’90s punk. On one of the
disc’s high points, the anthemic “Boxcar,”
leader Blake Schwarzenbach spits in the face of punk orthodoxy with the opening
lines, “You’re not punk, and I’m telling everyone / Save your breath, I never
was one.” And on “Indictment,” he throws around phrases like “Selling kids to
other kids” and “What’s so wrong with a stupid, happy song?”—clues that he was
already wrestling with the decision to follow another catchy Bay Area trio,
Green Day, into the great, mainstream unknown.
Fear Of 1995: In 1995, it became
official: After 20 years of making only marginal inroads in America, punk was
the next big thing. Not only that, but The Offspring showed that it was
possible to have it both ways—be a platinum-selling band while remaining
technically independent. While bands like Rancid went for the gold, others like
J Church remained proudly underground, even as the first Warped Tour began to
solidify the money-generation infrastructure of mainstream punk. The sleeping
dragon of the ’90s, hardcore, finally awakes in 1995, and so do ska-core and
street-punk. In the midst of it all, gloriously unique groups like Smoking
Popes and Scared Of Chaka forged their own sounds in the cracks between
subgenres. It’s the hump year of ’90s punk—and it shows.