Shaping the 1990s: Why Dave Grohl called Dinosaur Jr “the Prince of our generation”
Measuring new music against the previous generation’s efforts is natural but futile. Every artist will want to stand out compared to everyone else they work with, and that normally involves going against the grain and making the kind of music that no one has ever heard before. But even if someone doesn’t measure up to what their musical heroes have done, Dave Grohl knew there were still geniuses out there in the wild waiting to be discovered.
But looking at how many people he has worked with, Grohl is practically a walking encyclopedia of all things music these days. He has had many moments where he reps for mainstream rock with Foo Fighters, but he never had a second thought about going out onstage with boygenius or working with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band when putting together material for Sonic Highways.
That kind of diversity always came from Grohl’s more eclectic music tastes than others. If you think about it, any type of genre elitism never made sense to him, so it made a lot more sense for him to blast Slayer when he felt like it, learn drum fills from listening to Rush records, or take out his acoustic guitar and jam on everything from Neil Young to The Beatles.
It’s that same mentality that birthed the alternative generation as well. Kurt Cobain was never afraid to make something that sounded poppy, but the 1980s alternative movement was already light years ahead of them, whether that was REM turning in some jangle pop or Pixies messing around with the quiet-loud dynamic that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was built on. Then again, no one ever occupies the same space J Mascis did.
While Dinosaur Jr already earned the distinction of being one of the best fuzzy-rock bands of the underground, they were one of the few who had genuine pop hooks behind them. There were always going to be parameters around how big a band like Flipper could have become, but ‘Feel The Pain’ is still one of the best songs of the 1990s, if only for how simple it is and how Mascis flies off the handle in the final few minutes with his guitar solo.
Although Grohl would eventually find his way out front in Foo Fighters, he felt the need to give due credit to Mascis for shaping what it means to be an all-around musician, saying, “With Dinosaur Jr, he shaped the way music sounded in the early ’90s. And a lot of people don’t know that he’s an amazing drummer. He’s the Prince of our generation.”
And listening back to Grohl’s best hooks, a lot of them are taken directly from what Mascis was doing. Given how much feedback and distorted noise is prevalent on Foo Fighters’ debut, the whole thing may as well be one giant tribute to Mascis, especially since Grohl plays every single note and finds time to make his own hooks in between the raw noise on tracks like ‘Exhausted’ and ‘Alone + Easy Target.’
Then again, there’s a good chance Mascis wouldn’t put himself in the same conversation as ‘The Purple One,’ but his approach was always similar to what Prince had in mind. For both of them, music was a calling more than it was a job, and that meant learning everything you possibly could to bring the songs in your head to life.
