The band Joe Strummer said reinvented rock: “People have to make it their own”
Joe Strummer knew a thing or two about rock’s need for reinvention.
He’d been there during its first big resuscitation. By the mid-1970s, the world of rock felt like it was on life support, either lost in the bloated prog excesses of the day, earnestly strumming acoustic guitar on The Old Grey Whistle Test, or even pulling the former countercultural heroes like The Rolling Stones perilously close to the crevices of self-parody. Something had to change.
The punks didn’t declare a musical ‘Year Zero’ as the insurrectionary rhetoric often declared, but looked over rock’s prematurely aged death spiral back to the time of rock and roll’s first plugged-in guitar attack of the 1950s, through to the British invasion’s first Billboard conquer, before the era’s chin-stroking rockism had entered the musical discourse by the 1960s’ close.
Following the Sex Pistols’ pointer, The Clash would emerge from the UK punk scene as the era’s most successful act, imbuing their white-hot garage attack with an expanded palette of reggae and rocksteady for 1979’s London Calling, before sailing to the fore as one of the leading names of the 1980s’ Second British Invasion, dominating the decade’s MTV explosion.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” so Mark Twain supposedly said, a statement that couldn’t stand truer for the following ten years or so in punk’s smouldering crater. By the 1980s’ end, rock had flumped into another creative crisis, the radio airwaves and MTV rotations gunked with hair metal horror and the glossy power ballads eagerly in need of another great rock upheaval to sweep away the spandex dregs.
“It has to be invented again,” Strummer mused to Uncut in 1999. “You remember how it was before Nirvana came out, and then suddenly there was grunge. You can’t put a particular number of years on the [rock music] cycle, but it has to be reinvented. People have to make it their own.”
The grunge explosion that surged across the early 1990s charts is not without some clichés and mythmaking. Just as eyerolls can be triggered by well-trodden ‘punk killed prog’ narratives, so too can the notion that Nirvana single-handedly staked Mötley Crüe in the heart with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’s opening riff.
The fact is, a potent alternative underground was simmering away nicely in Seattle, courting major label attention and seeing key releases by Alice in Chains and Soundgarden before Nevermind topped the Billboard 200, including Pearl Jam’s mammoth Ten debut, released a month before. Elsewhere, the likes of Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Jane’s Addiction were showing the music bigwigs that capital was to be won outside Whitesnake.
Yet, Strummer wasn’t wrong in highlighting rock’s need for urgent reinvention. The 1980s’ unabashed material excesses and the gloop of cartoon bands it created indeed aged like milk with acceleration the moment the musical winds were blowing in a new direction, all it taking was ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’s pin burst on the swelling rock dam behind them to thrust Nirvana as the unwitting soundtrack to a new generation eager to call rock their own for the 1990s, just as punk had years earlier.
