“Totally changed”: Dave Grohl on the band that invented emo music
Rock and roll has always been about evolution. If everyone had decided to ape Led Zeppelin tropes for the rest of their lives and not bother to make anything new, there’s a good chance that the genre would have officially died out before the MTV generation even kicked in. While Dave Grohl was never a snob when it came to listening to all the different facets of rock and roll, he had the foresight to know when new genres were emerging right underneath his feet.
Then again, this is coming from someone instrumental in changing the entire musical landscape overnight. Although Nirvana may not have been looking to become one of the musical acts in the world within the span of one album, hearing Kurt Cobain’s wail on their first hits off of Nevermind was enough for most kids to burn all of their hair metal albums out of spite and adopt flannel shirts within the span of days.
But for all of the “grunge” taglines that surrounded them, it’s safe to say that the Seattle-based musical genre was never really a fleshed-out style to begin with. Pearl Jam had traces of classic rock, and Alice in Chains were a glorified metal band with alternative tendencies, but listening to every song that Nirvana ever put out, it was clear that they were a punk band that happened to have massive hooks.
At least, that’s how Grohl thought about it. His heroes had all come from the hardcore scene ever since his days playing in Scream, and growing up in the DC punk area, he was more interested in seeing what was going on with Fugazi or Bad Brains than giving a shit about what Madonna was up to. But even in the world of hardcore music, Mission of Burma was providing something different.
Outside of the artists who were screaming their brains out about their problems with society, this was the first time that people could hear raw pain on a record. Even though there might not have been complicated arrangements around them, no one could deny the pure emotion that Mission of Burma brought across with albums like Vs., and when Grohl heard it later, he realised he witnessed the emo genre being born firsthand.
Since music fans were years away from artists like The GetUp Kids and American Football, Grohl claimed emo for Mission of Burma, saying, “Mission Of Burma were from Boston, totally amazing, powerful, loud, one of the later hardcore bands who just totally changed the template, like Rites Of Spring. I guess nowadays, this’d be called emo-core; back then, it was just an incredible thing to hear a hardcore band playing this kind of music. Really inspirational.”
And it’s not like Grohl didn’t have an appreciation for it in his own music as well. While he wasn’t going to go down that road of singing about his personal problems, the fact that he pulled the rhythm section from Sunny Day Real Estate when putting together the first incarnation of Foo Fighters showed he knew what made the genre so special.
But you weren’t going to find those kind of moody choruses until much later in his career. While some of Grohl’s later material, like But Here We Are, showed him in recovery, some of his best moments have come from writing songs about working through his pain rather than cutting himself open for the world to see.
