This is a riff on a quote from former editor of the Melbourne Left literary journal Overland, Ian Syson. Syson both articulates a sociological explanation for these dirty realist novels of inner-urban angst, and also takes a swipe at the name 'grunge' which he dismisses as marketing hype. While I agree that the labelling was indeed 'marketing spirit' I also think that as the label still adheres to some of these novels, it might be worthwhile to refigure the meaning of grunge itself away from the fairly obvious and, let's face it, fairly shallow critical formula: pop/rock music = expression of authentic teenage emotion. Syson forecloses on any homology of cultural form, and thereby sociology of cultural form, shared by grunge music and grunge literature, when he poses what his argument takes to be the absurd attempt to equate rock with fiction: a modernist or realist guitar solo doesn't make any sense!
Underscoring the fragmentary points made below is the notion that fordism in the USA is sensually experienced due to the sheer weight and size of industrialization in the American North. Conversely, in Australia Fordism is less urbanly concentrated and it is industrial citizenship as a form of script-text culture which dominates: hence the importance of The Bulletin in forming keystones in Australian Labourism and the radical nationalist movement in the post-war period. By thinking grunge music as Fordist, Grunge lit becomes more comprehensible as a response to the decline of industrial citizenship in Australia.
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What our band did was basically make a big noise and create some movement with that noise. Slowly I came up with a kind of concept. A lot of it was based on the attitude of juvenile delinquency and general mental grievance that I'd gotten from these dropouts I was hanging out with, mixed in with the sorts of music I like: hard r&b, hard rock and roll, and the exciting elements of jazz, 'cause I was starting to listen to John Coltrane, and the unpredictability of that. And then an added element was to find something simple, monolithic, metallic, like a big machine - like the drill presses at the Ford plant, stamping out fenders. I'd listen to that and think. 'God those are impressive sounds, big sounds.' And they're so regular and simple, I thought, 'Those are sounds that even we could master.’ Iggy Pop
The early electric guitar emerged out of the role the acoustic guitar played in Hawaiin music forged from the desire for volume in the swing and big bands of the 1930s and 40s. The innovators of the electric guitar solo, at this early stage, were Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker. Can these early solos be interpreted as realist or modernist? To take the simplist understanding of the musical context here, the answer would have to be modernist, due to the jazz and blues context in which Christian played. While the electric guitar is and has played a role in jazz, it is the blues line in which its power and dominance over much post-war music has occurred. And in travelling up this line, effectively up the Mississipi to the heavy industry manufacturing towns of the American North, we can perhaps begin to hear that the electric guitar, even rock’n’roll, is fundamentally best understood as Fordist – a intimate part of a whole way of life, that sexualises, twists and rolls the rhythms and timbres of what Zygmunt Bauman calls heavy modernity with a loud, distorting electricity – the Chicago Blues.~
A modernist guitar solo can be theorised – it is the guitar solo as most western ears know it: Charlie Christian, Chuck Berry, Robert Fripp. But this is the wrong question [Ian Syson’s question about modernist and realist electric guitar solos], put in the wrong terms, and it's here that the sense of incommensurable paradigms lead less to a knowing mocking, and more to a different way to conceptualise that might permit a smoother jump between what I’d like to argue are the shared structural tropes of Praise and Nirvana’s Lithium. For rather than attempting to set up a realism to modernism shift, it makes sense to begin with the notion that the electric guitar, and its solos, are only understandable within modernism. Indeed, what I want to suggest is that the forms and sonics of the electric guitar solo are intimately wound into that aspect of modernism, and modernity, Gramsci named Fordism.
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Rock’n’roll takes the repetition of the train, the cars on the motorway whizzing past, the monolithic machinery thumping out car fenders in time, in tempo, and re-stages these textures, rhythms and timbres in a Chicago or Detroit bar. Rock says –‘yes, this is the rhythm and timbre of our modernity, but we can still be free, we can still feel the blues, take this car, this train, and fly – we can make love like a fleshy-machine.’ The guitar solo is the romanticism that gets released by the rhythms of the factory – we can live with and subvert the rhythms of the factory – this machinic repetition: we can keep our human feeling, move faster and with more freedom than the factory. Modelled on the Fordist factory, Berry Gordy’s Motown, marks the Fordist dream as a black dream of creative capitalism: a production line of stars and hits. The avant-garde, the inversion and ‘reframing’ of Fordism in culture, enters popular music slowly, but its hard to shy away from the profound influence that Andy Warhol’s factory plays in this stream of post-Fordism.
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If the new pop of the 1980s (ABC, Scritti Politti, Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood even Prince and Madonna) celebrated, if not attempted to subvert, commodity culture, then the return to authenticity (over this ‘artifice’) is most measured in Grunge – real, true, authentic. Ironically, Grunge draws genealogical lines into post-punk, punk itself and the rock and pop bohemians – Iggy Pop/ Stooges and the Velvet Underground: artifice pop art, art rock. Cobain’s aspiration to meld aspects of the Beatles with Black Sabbath, heavy metal with modernist rock/pop, confirms that his musical head was in sync with that of the US’s (and by extension UK, Australia’s) white, male, suburban teenage heartlands. But what Nirvana also brought into the mix was this post-punk legacy – the pop art subversion and artifice that had been enacted as an accumulating endless loop through bands like the Pixies; the stockpiling of records and CDs; and MTV. What Grunge promised to deliver was the underbelly, the dirt and heaviness of authenticity – the antithesis to the gloss and surface sheen of pop.
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Was America, then, like Australia, working with a sense of industrial citizenship as its basic subjectivity? Clearly not in the same way. The historic compromises in Australia, its lack of overt civil war and sense of manifest destiny, its lack of clearly sanctioned citizenship (compared with the U.S. Bill of Rights and constitution) produce a much thinner version of liberalism in Australia than in the U.S, and yet a version of liberalism that is more textual, more read than the American version which is more felt.
JF Archibald founder of the now defunct Bulletin & Henry Lawson.
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