A post in which I take a journey from grunge music to the Vietnam War.
I'd like to invite you in to a chapter about life in the late 1990s. Come, take a seat on my inflatable furniture:
Comfortable?
As a teenager in the late 90s, my musical taste was all over the place. Weezer, The Backstreet Boys, Shania Twain, classical music, traditional Irish music, Beastie Boys, Tupac, TLC, etc. You name it, and (shamefully) I probably liked it. Over time I gravitated to an alt rock radio station from the Boston area, which I think was 92.9 FM. They played a lot of Alice In Chains, a fairly well-known grunge band from Washington state that didn't get a lot of air time outside of alternative spaces. AIC's popularity was likely overshadowed by the traumatic fame of Nirvana, a contemporary Washington state band, whose lead singer Kurt Cobain died by his own hands in 1994. Nirvana's music was so overplayed on radio stations by 1998, that you could be shopping in a Bath & Body Works subconsciously humming along to "R*pe Me" playing on the store's speakers. Nirvana also kinda sucks.
Now, stay with me. Nirvana can be two things at once:
- Influential, talented, and popular.
- The Worst Lyricists Ever.
For example, these lyrics from "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Are they avant garde? Deep? Or was Cobain a musician for whom the tune arrives first and the lyrics never?
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto, an albino!
A mosquito, my libido!
Nirvana didn't do it for me, but Alice In Chains apparently had what it took to stir the emotions of this 14-year-old white girl from the suburbs. Play this video 30 seconds or so. I've timestamped it for your convenience:
Bury me softly in this womb! Holding rare flowers in a tomb in bloom! Emo lyrics wrapped in a dank, garage band aesthetic.
AIC's vocalists at the time, Layne Stayley and Jerry Cantrell, had this incredible ability to sustain a glottal scrape, or a very controlled vocal fry. Their harmonies sound like buzzing bees. "Again" kicks off with a good sample of their signature sound:
Ultimately, my favorite song by AIC is "The Rooster." It's absolutely a grunge ballad. The first time I paid attention to the lyrics as a kid, I knew it was about the Vietnam War. Back then, the Internet was an unreliable place to search for lyrics and song meanings, so you relied on CD liner notes, rock magazines, or MTV for that information. Eventually I saw an interview on TV about "The Rooster" with Jerry Cantrell talking about writing this song for his Vietnam veteran dad. He was tripping on acid when he wrote it, contemplating his dad and the war experiences he never talked about.
Walking tall, machine gun man
They spit on me in my homeland
Gloria sent me pictures of my boy, mm-mm
Got my pills 'gainst mosquito death
My buddy's breathing his dying breath
Oh, God, please won't you help me make it through?
My dad is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, and I didn't have any friends growing up with fathers who served there so it wasn't something I talked about often with them. My experience of having a veteran dad was sometimes informed by the reactions of others to that information. Sometimes they gasped or asked if he ever used a gun. A history buff friend (and by that I mean that he fancied himself a history buff, but really just liked war movies) once asked me if my dad ever told stories of "being in the shit." I'm still not sure if calling Vietnam war zones "the shit" was actual marine slang or if it's a line from the movie "Rushmore."
So you were in Vietnam? Yeah. Were you in the shit? Yeah, I was in the shit.
The kind of wartime information my dad shared with me as a teenager were benign things, like which C-rations were the worst: hands down, ham and lima beans. I intentionally avoided consuming media about the Vietnam War, except for one time in high school AP English when we watched "Apocalypse Now" after reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "Apocalypse Now" is a great movie, but even as a teen I understood that the film is an extreme dramatization. On acid.
All of this is a long winded way to say, as a minimally informed teen, I really dug this ode. It's heavy and haunting. It doesn't abuse artistic license. Thanks for reading.