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grunge golden age on YouTube
Friday, April 27 2018
[REDACTED]
At around 7:00pm Gretchen drove to Manhattan, where she would be spending the next couple days. I ended up getting stuck wallowing in the nostalgia of videos from the golden age of grunge on YouTube. That stuff was great and refreshing when it first started appearing on college radio in 1991 (I was listening to WXJM out of James Madison University at the time). But it's also great to now be able to watch the videos, which used to be a rare treat, on demand. The Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Hole, it's all great stuff and, though I've already heard it all hundreds of times, sonically it's like beer in the refrigerator. I'm especially impressed by Courtney Love's talents. While it would be easy to dismiss her as having ridden to fame on the coattails of her famous husband (and she definitely did), her songs are great and remain so, and the woman (despite all the things you've heard, many of which are certainly true) is a charismatic genius. It makes you wonder what other geniuses we've been missing out on, people without access to publicity and high-end music production.
I was disappointed to find few early (that is, bizarre) Liz Phair songs on Youtube. Instead it seems to be buried under the spam of her more recent work, all of which tries to recast her as more of an middlebrow popstar than the blond weirdo who famously failed to have sex with one of my friends at Oberlin College. She's someone who actually did something creative with the wealth into which she was born.
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