A little take on Rolling Stone's parlour game, for the Globe and Mail
in Toronto.
* * *
THE ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS OF THE '90s
by Greil Marcus et al
Rolling Stone, May 13
Reviewed by Carl Wilson
... In which Rolling Stone rushes to judgment in order to beat every
other magazine to the end of the year. Hey, if you were about to
release a brilliant disc in the later months of 1999, don't bother.
The section is launched by Greil Marcus's brief essay on the
magazine's Artist of the Decade, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. This one's no
scratch on his definitive RS piece after Cobain's suicide in 1994,
merely re-running Marcus's patented line on negation in American music
via the epochal Smells Like Teen Spirit. It covers the "artist" part
well: "The song is . . . definitively unsettling and a definitive
release." But what Marcus misses is the "decade" part: Yes, Cobain
dominated a two-year time span, but how did he affect the next five
years?
In fact, especially in death, Cobain rendered the decades-long
underground-vs.-mainstream debate obsolete, forcing us to hear
everything from Garth Brooks to Pavement as doubled - inherently
self-subverting. Rock's resulting aporia cleared the way for hip hop,
as well as for teenyboppers untainted by that original sin. And that,
in brief, plus Soundscan, gives us the chart Babel of 1999.
Not to mention the Babel of RS's nineties-recordings list, a
scattershot rundown on dozens and dozens of albums and afterthoughts
on singles (including "Top 10 Songs About Your Butt"). The selections
divide evenly between the obvious (PJ Harvey, Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre,
Beck), nice surprises (Iris DeMent, Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian),
and absurdities like Hootie and the Blowfish, Peter Wolf, Billy Joel
and anything Touched by a Jagger - the latter few pulled straight from
editor Jann Wenner's personal rolodex.
Without the guts to confirm or deny any aesthetic agenda, lest someone
feel left out, Rolling Stone's list suggests that Wenner's real artist
of the decade is none other than Bill Clinton. And when Marcus quotes
Cobain saying that he used to expect to be voted "Most Likely to Kill
Everyone at a High School Dance," there's a haunting sense that the
decade has come full circle - and that Cobain is the least of the
betrayed.
