This documentary on the Pacific Northwest rock scene of the early 90s is far from an angst ridden affair as its music is so often characterized), but instead an oral history of one of the last great local scenes retold with sentimentality and snark. Dreary highways, logging trucks, heavy rain, and seedy venues are the backdrop for a bunch of charmingly disheveled musicians put everything they have not into performing but playing around with their music for the hell of it.
“The most absurd, the most noisy the heaviest thing that was going on…We know that this is the cheesiest thing we could possibly do so we got to do it”
Of course, with a certain amount of creativity and ingenuity comes the leering eyes of industries looking to exploit it. Here capitalism ruins things as it always, gentrifying the scene, commercializing a few acts from it, and becoming another prototypical example of the copycat commercialization of culture, the only difference is for once it was happening to white people.
This is a great ride through the history of grunge and the larger Pacific Northwest indie scene of the early 90s. I dunno, grunge was one of the first musical genres I really latched on to as a youth, so this really worked for me regardless of its blinding whiteness (which as someone who lived in the PNW for a year, I can say is just true to the demographic of that subculture). I loved seeing the members of 7 Year Bitch rag on shallow music journalism more concerned with fads than the sonic quality of the work. I found it very telling how everyone talked about Sub Pop bottling a taste of the culture and selling it at a marked up price to the world (I mean, they even have a shop in the SeaTac airport). And it was honestly really interesting to hear Eddie Vedder talk about how the mainstream culture didn’t dig deep enough into all the amazing bands out there.
It outright asks the question of whether success is a good thing to aspire towards and has made me question whether doing any creative pursuit professionally is a good idea.
“Push the pimple up and it comes up somewhere else”
