If you read the standard histories of 1990s alternative rock, written from an American perspective, you’ll learn that the spirit of alternative rock movement was dead as early as 1995, when the likes of Live and Alanis Morrisette took watered down grunge to the top of the charts. Steven Hyden, for example, pronounces the spiritless corpse of alternative rock to be unambiguously dead in 1998, once rap-metal types like Korn and Limp Bizkit started ascending the charts.
But in Australia, the late nineties saw alternative rock go from strength to strength. Between the national radio station Triple J and the morning television show Recovery, the Australian alternative scene thrived, full of sounds which now sounds much more vital than most of the American music of the time. In Australia, Triple J and Recovery would play the less-blatantly-commercial versions of corporate alternative alongside actually credible indie rock, alongside slacker alternapop, alongside music from the punk revival, alongside Britpop.
And in the middle of this mix were a large community of Australian rock bands who broadly shared distortion pedals and a peculiarly sardonic Australian outlook, and who all stirred various elements of Triple J’s brew into their own coherent sounds. The outlook shared by a lot of this music was a certain wariness of the tall poppy syndrome, a certain self-awareness – a humbleness that you see more rarely in American bands, and more of a commitment to pop hooks, an attempt to reflect the lives of Australian teenagers/young adults (e.g., a band who named themselves The Fauves after French painters had a song called ‘Self-Abuser’ about the joys of masturbation).
Jebediah were half-slacker indie rock a la Superchunk and half-Green Day-style punk. Regurgitator started off with a mix of hardcore punk and hard rock rifferama but very quickly made a radical turn into 1980s pop; regardless of genre, the philosophy behind the music stayed the same, with sardonic tunes with titles like ‘I Sucked A Lot Of Cock To Get Where I Am’ or ‘I Like Your Old Remix Better Than Your New Remix’. You Am I put together 1960s Britpop, power pop, and grunge riffs and made it all seem like lead singer Tim Rogers was the saviour of rock and roll. In this context, when we heard music from Blur’s 1997 self-titled album, which famously ditched tightly wound Britpop (‘Country House‘) for the slacker sounds of American indie (‘Song 2’), it really seemed to me like it wasn’t a big deal. Triple J was cool with Britpop, it was cool with slacker indie, and Blur still had catchy songs that more or less sounded like Blur. I could go on; there’s a 4CD Rhino-style boxset of 1990s Australian rock called The Australian Alternative: 1990-1999 which is a figment of my mind, but which is all-killer and no-filler.
Custard’s ‘Music Is, Crap’, from 1997, is as good an illustration of what Australian alternative music in the 1990s was all about as anything else. Custard’s sound was half-Weezer (from whom they inherited nerdiness and pop smarts) and half-Pavement (thus the slacker vocals and the alt-country vibe) – two bands which came from very different scenes in the USA. And ‘Music Is, Crap’ is called ‘Music Is, Crap’ (yes, the comma is part of the title of the song), which seems to me to be typical Australian humour. After all, Australians have a habit of calling redheads “bluey”. Written and sung by Custard’s drummer Glenn Thompson (who later played in the Go-Betweens, and, erm, my band Lazy Susan), the song’s chorus points out that music is crap as far as aliens are concerned. Elsewhere in the song, Thompson points out that music genre doesn’t matter: whether you like rock, pop, or metal, aliens don’t give a shit. It all sounds like crap to them. And considering that our ears developed for a specific environmental niche that aliens are unlikely to share, it is scientifically likely that aliens will think that music in general is crap. The logical corollary of Thompson’s argument is that, considering the cosmos, music is a silly thing to be interested in, and that we should do something more useful with our lives rather than play and listen to music. Yet, you know that Thompson doesn’t actually believe music is crap. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be singing the song, would he?
P.S. One of the joys of the era was the wilful absurdity Australian alternative rock types often went for, and one of the best examples of this was seeing Custard play ‘Music Is, Crap’ on the venerable and embarrassingly-bad variety show Hey Hey, It’s Saturday! They even managed to convince Hey Hey host Daryl Somers to play drums while Thompson sang his song. This kind of actively seeking out gleeful absurdity largely seems missing from the po-facedness of Australian music in 2012, and I wish there were more bands willing to look like dorks on national TV like Custard were.
Custard – ‘Music Is, Crap’
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