From grunge to riot grrrl to girl power

book-cover-1989Read back-to-back, Joshua Clover’s 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About and Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music stand to offer a view as to how music had a chance to radically shift as the eighties ended, but essentially lost their impact after corporate co-option.

Clover’s book offers up a dense polemic that proffers hip-hop, acid house and grunge as the genres which were to cause a sea change as the decade changed. While a little over-reaching, and owing much of its narrative thrust to Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?,” Clover still makes the point that “there are no novelty songs, only failed genres.”

From that phrase, one can extrapolate grunge as a genre that — and I paraphrase Clover here — takes the sword that punk had beaten from a plowshare and turns it upon itself. Grunge was so nihilistic that it was incapable of sustaining itself for an extended period of time. Grunge represented the general tectonic shift that Clover posits took place in the time around 1989: “a way of preserving antagonism in the very moment of its cancellation.” Essentially, grunge — while a movement that took the rage of punk — took none of punk’s politics, choosing instead to focus on that feeling.
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