Reaching Nirvana

b y . a d a m . l e v i n e

Somewhere in the 1980s, amidst the bold eyeliners, electric drum kits and spandex, rock critics found hope. But it wasn't easy to find outside of New York and London. Simmering underneath the sop pop and technowimp tunes of the '80s was an explosive wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am kind of music that wailed and screamed "Fuck you!" with the best of them. The technology in this music has also followed a similar path.

Enter Toronto rock critic Alan Cross, on-air personality of Toronto alternative rock radio station, CFNY-FM (102.1 The Edge). As well as holding the regular gig as a co-host of the weekday afternoon-drive slot from Monday to Friday from 2:00-6:00PM, Cross hosts his own show, The Ongoing History of New Music, an extensive look at alternative rock's expansive history. Cross has single-handedly researched and written over 140 hour-long shows. These scripts form the basis of The Alternative Music Almanac VI.0 (C.G. Publishing, 1995), his recently released book, which he describes as, "Written by one alternative music fan for another."

According to Cross, rock technology has forged a distinct path through the last four decades which alternative rock has trod upon with generous shoe. Les Paul's invention in the '40s, the electric guitar, was integral to the creation of rock music at a point when all rock was "alternative" to the mainstream tastes of the time. The invention of the transistor followed, making broadcasting easier, and the '60s, '70s and '80s were dominated by the keyboard synthesizer. The digital synthesizer in the 1980s, another revolutionary technology, helped make the creation new sounds cheaper and easier. MIDI technology in the late '80s early '90s gave a single musician every conceivable musical instrument at his or her fingertips with the ability to bend, warp, stretch and mutate these sounds beyond belief. Digital sampling became possible, and rap's prominence in the music industry rose.

With the development of this musician-oriented technology came the rise of technopop from the UK. Groups like Human League, Thompson Twins, Depeche Mode and Frankie Goes To Hollywood soared in popularity as the bands learned to harness the technology with catchy melodies and nifty tunes. As one technology magazine editor notes, "The whole '80s period was an attempt by musicians to reproduce the same huge orchestral arrangements of groups like YES on a much smaller basis."

Today, the term "alternative music" has come to have two distinctly separate but paradoxically intertwined concepts with respect to technology. Its musicians embrace technology for its creative edge, yet simultaneously rejects it for the base harshness it projects. In this way alternative rock can be seen as a reaction against '80s technopop, as bands began to put more acoustic instruments back into their sounds, swinging the pendulum away from musician-oriented technology and further towards consumer-oriented technology.

Yet alternative music, in spite of the implications of its own name, has also become a class of music that has come to define mainstream rock and pop of the '90s. Once relegated to the pubs and clubs of Manchester, Berkeley and Seattle, alternative has now been categorized as a full-fledged rock era. Grunge, the current cash cow of the music industry, has opened the door for other progressive figures like Laurie Anderson, Sarah McLaughlin and Jane Siberry to follow in the popularity of Nine Inch Nails and Porno for Pyros, into not only the poster-decorated living rooms of the university dorm, but also to the nether world of the record-hungry, fad-positive halls of high schools. Alternative rock isn't just the music of the five morose Goths who hang out in the smoking area of the school yard, it is the music of the homeroom clan and the athletic clique.

Alan Cross insists that the music has embraced and benefited from the capitalist notion of progress of both musician and consumer-oriented technologies. "It's how you get from the guitar to the consumer that is currently changing the face of rock and roll and will have a foreseeable impact in the future." Says Cross, videos and satellites allow groups like Green Day to catapult to star status with three songs at Woodstock because not only are there 350,000 people at the concert, but there are thousands of writers and television cameras beaming the event millions of homes around the world. There are Internet groups that, unlike underground mags of yesteryear, are available to anyone to peruse and millions do. Accessibility is grunge music's technological feat, it is what allowed it to be a marketed success. (Interestingly, Cross' book points out that Courtney Love, lead singer of HOLE, is the first person ever to have her email privileges revoked by America Online for running amuck on the information superhighway -- definitely the '90s version of trashing a hotel.)

Many bands can credit much of the their success on their ability to use videos to reach their fans. Indeed, REM did not even tour for two of their top selling albums, Green and Automatic for the People, yet they are one of the top grossing bands of the '90s. As lead singer Michael Stipe recently deadpanned at the 1995 MTV Music Video Awards in explaining why they are so popular, "We've made a whole lotta of videos that don't, you know, suck."

Grunge has suburbia in its veins. Hit groups like Nirvana come not from the blue collar Seattle but the commuterville of Aberdeen, Washington; the Lemonheads come from the gritty streets of Cambridge, Massachussets; and Blues Traveller comes from the tough streets of Princeton, Ohio. It is only fitting that alternative rock's breakout song, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", takes place in a gothic high school gymnasium.

Some people, like York University musicologist Professor Rob Bowman do not feel that the correlation of music success and rock technology is valid. "Things change, [but the word] 'progress' implies a better. It is a real loaded word in the western world," explains Bowman. "In fact, it is a word that really is tied to the whole notion of capitalism. Each year there must be growth. I believe there is change that often build on earlier things and in some people's mind that means growth."

Cross agrees with Bowman, for the most part, saying that alternative rock has risen to the level it has because of its integrity and its approachability, and its use, not reliance, on technology. "One of the things that mark the alternative bands of the '90s is that the integrity that bands like Sonic Youth, The Lemonheads and Pearl Jam have brought to the major recording label force [the recording companies] to play by those rules. If Smashing Pumpkins don't want to tour stadiums of 60,000 people -- they only want to play club stage, club shows -- labels have no choice." Cross has an easy explanation for the alternative appeal. "By the mid '70s rock had become fat and bloated. You have these bands like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer with these incredibly intricate and difficult songs -- grand symphonies of rock music. You had Jimmy Page, the world's greatest guitar player and John Bonham, who could play drums like no one else's business. If you were a kid, you'd never aspire to that level of musicianship when you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old. You knew there would be years and years of practice ahead of you. And sometimes I just want to rock, I don't want to be able to play, you know, 64th notes on the fret on my guitar. I just want to play."

The '90s forefathers of grunge, The Ramones, The Clash, The Sex Pistols, all had simple song structures and chord progressions, so grunge's success cannot be placed solely on a theory of torpor and indolence amongst teens today. Consumer-end technology like walkmans, videos and satellites, have been equally as progressive and beneficial to alternative music as performance technologies like MIDI and the ability to sample. It is here that Alan Cross sees music progressing into the future.

Listening to Cross, it becomes apparent that alternative music has managed to collapses two waves of technology -- musician-oriented technology and consumer-end technology -- into one gigantic tidal wave of big bucks, hyperpopularity and, incredibly, a connectedness to their fans.