Music History (As According To Stuff I Remember) Part I: The Band That Singlehandedly Destroyed Rock Music

Disclaimer: This article is based on stuff I remember and is not checked for factual accuracy. That said, everything is probably true anyway.

I believe the year was either 1995 or 96, putting me either in 8th or 9th grade. Back then, MTV still had programming that included these little four to five minute curiosities known as "music videos". The tide was beginning to turn away from these, but at the time I could still come home from school and bask in what was truly a unique and innovative era of rock music. I remember a regular rotation of Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Rage, and all the seminal bands of the day alongside the industry giants like Aerosmith and the Stones, coexisting peacefully in spite of reality shows that nobody I knew cared about, like "The Real World". Bands were cool, music was exciting, and all was well for my 14 year old self.

Then, one song, one song came along and irreversibly changed the face of rock music forever, bathing the channel that had made me and so many others love music in a sea of limp-dicked weenie ballads for the rest of the short-lived life of the music video. People always talk about how "Smells Like Teen Spirit" popped the Glam-Metal bubble, a concept that has been endlessly rehashed and remembered on VH1 for three times as long as Nirvana was actually recording music. But nobody talks about how a mere 4 years later, this band came along and destroyed everything novel and meaningful that was going on in music thanks to the Seattle and alternative bands. Who was this band, you ask?

What? Who the Hell are these guys? I'll tell you, God damnit! They're called The Verve Pipe, and I clearly remember the specific moment they destroyed rock. I was watching the Jenny McCarthy show for some reason. She always had a musical guest on at the end of the show while she rolled around in her pajamas on some corny retro 60's studio set. After twenty minutes of trying to be funny (immunizations make your kids autistic, Hut Hut!), she introduced the debut performance of the hot new band, The Verve Pipe, with their breakout hit "The Freshmen". I can clearly remember wondering for the next three minutes when the song was actually going to start. This boring, washy, clean guitar wusfest had to just be the intro, right? The weepy, uninspired lyrics just had to be a buildup to an actual song. I mean, these guys were on TV, where the hell was the rock?  As it turns out, nowhere. When the band stopped playing and the audience cheered (more out of excitement at being part of an audience rather than at anything they'd heard, I'm sure), I realized that that had been the whole song. Ha! Nice try at being relevant, Jenny. The Verve Pipe were a bunch of boring losers, their hit song was about as exciting as an afternoon nap, and that's the last I would have to hear about that.

Wrong again, Lou.

So the next day, while returning to my usual routine of watching music videos all day because I was in 8th grade, imagine my surprise when I saw the video for "The Freshmen" sandwiched in between two definitely superior songs. It had the same grainy, low lit texture as the alternative videos of the day, but, as with the live performance, it was ultimately boring and meaningless. "How the hell did this song get into the rotation?" I paraphrased to myself, "I thought I'd never have to hear this crap again! What gives?" Well, imagine my further surprise when this song absolutely exploded. MTV was playing the video all day long. I'm convinced that Y100 had the song on repeat at the station. I was sure it was a fluke. "The Freshmen" was garbage. I mean, I practically was a freshman and this song had absolutely no appeal to me. These guys were going to burn out, and rock could continue as normal.

Well, I was right on one count at least. The Verve Pipe did turn out to be a one hit wonder, but the absurd over saturation of that song opened the door for a seemingly unending stream of wiener bands who couldn't have found the overdrive channel on their amps if it was directly under a picture of the girlfriend they were always pining over. In the next couple of years I was bombarded with one bittersweet, toddler-friendly pop ballad after another. Next out of the gate were the bands that would become the leaders of the wus-rock movement: Matchbox 20, Fuel, and Third Eye Blind, with safe, radio-friendly bubblegum pop tunes like "3 AM", "Semi-Charmed Life", and whatever fuckin Fuel song everyone liked at the time. After all of these singles broke, the floodgates were open for forgettable bands with hummable choruses to absolutely dominate life on earth: Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars", Fastball's "The Way", Eagle Eye Cherry's "Stay Tonight", whoever sings "Closing Time", Smashmouth's "Walking on the Sun", Savage Garden, The New Radicals, and a host of other copycat bands who plugged in the guitar just long enough to have their albums filed in the "Rock" section in the record stores. In my mind, nothing could be farther from the spirit of rock and roll. There was no local scene that spawned this explosion. Nobody talks about the "Wisconsin Wus-Rock Movement" or anything like that. I believe that these bands were handpicked by labels to be a safe and consumer-friendly alternative to, well, Alternative.

To make matters worse, all the good bands were breaking up and dying. Kurt Cobain died, along with Layne Stanley. Soundgarden split up (conveniently the day before I wore my brand new Down On The Upside shirt to school, unknowingly), and the Smashing Pumpkins soon followed. No comparable bands were coming up, at least in the popular music sphere, to replace them. A few funny things happened too. For example, the proto-hipster Beck, who had been a small fry in the alternative market suddenly seemed like a genius in comparison the rest of the wus-rockers. His quirky, retro, boring songs became huge hits with their forced, too cool for school nonsense lyrics and funny noises going on in the background. Some bands that had potential to be cool, like Filter, suddenly jumped ship and pandered to the wussery of the new market, revealing themselves as the copycats they were. It seemed as if there was no end in sight. Day after day I would continue to come home and watch MTV only to find an ever increasing slew of reality shows encroaching on an ever worsening variety of music videos. The only respite from this and spark of originality came in the form of Marylin Manson, and let's face it, I really, really didn't want to become a Manson fan.

Popular music has never really recovered from this era of weepy not-rock. Once the labels realized that the public still loved music even though it was completely stripped of any originality, personality, or creativity, they knew they could pretty much sell us anything. For evidence of this, look no further than at the biggest rock band names of the past decade: Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Staind, and Nickleback. What they all have in common, besides not being able to spell the words in their own names, is that they've all sold a million billion records despite the fact that pretty much nobody I've ever met in my entire life would listen to any of them with a ten foot listening cone if you pointed a gun at their mothers. So how can this be??

Popular rock music has been on a steady decline for the past 15 or so years, and it was The Verve Pipe who pushed it down the hill. From the first time that they lazily feathered their guitar strings on The Jenny McCarthy show, their "we're just not trying that hard" attitude crept its way into the airwaves, letting every band thereafter know that it was ok to not push any boundaries, ok to not play any hard parts, and ok to have your press photo look like an IT staff meeting outside of a Starbucks. Perhaps that's not completely fair. Perhaps any one of those predictable singles I mentioned above could have lit the spark that fueled the entire inferno of boredom if "The Freshmen" had never been written. However, that's not how it went down, at least according to my memory. And if there's one thing I can trust myself to remember with nearly superhuman clarity, its being disappointed.