Renaissance Grunge

I’m reliving my youth through music right now. It seems that, having been hi-jacked by the latest generation of 15-year-old long-haired kids, Grunge is fighting back. When I teach in secondary schools it’s like I’ve stepped back 10 years in time. There are kids with army-surplus bags covered in badges and marker-pen-scrallings for Nirvana, Pear Jam, Green Day etc. Yes I know I’m in danger of sounding like every generation of the past as it comes to realise it’s not the new kid on the block anymore, but here’s the thing – they’re the same bands, not new ones playing the old tunes, except most of them haven’t been around for a while due to hitches like splits, musician exchanges, retirement and suicides. I was losing my identity.

It’s coming back anew though. Sent on a trip down memory lane by the SeatleMetroBlog’s post of Eddie Vedder’s Jam session in a Seattle Bar after a PJ gig, I bought the New Pearl Jam album ‘Life Wasted’. It’s good. It’s not the same as the PJ of my youth, with pure gold hits like ‘Jeremy’ and ‘Alive’ appealing to angst ridden teens. It’s grown up. It’s got a social conscience. It’s anti-Bush:

“She can feel this war on her face, sars on her pillow, folding in the darkness, begging for slumber… She tells herself, and everyone else, Father is risking his life for our Freedom…” – ‘Army Reserve’

It’s not just Eddie Vedder either. Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last 18 months, you can’t have failed to notice GreenDay’s ‘American Idiot’. I doubt if Cobain was still around he’d be attending anti-war rallies, but I’m sure he’d have written a thrashy little number about bombers or something.

So you see, the teenies haven’t got our music, they have is a snapshot of 1994. They have the teen-angst and trailer pop because that’s what was written for them. We’ll have the Renaissance Grunge, thank you, the ‘stick-it-to-the-man’, anti-war, anti-Bush Art. Yes it’s art, and it’s ours.