Idolator

The Nevermind nostalgia in the air this week is making us pine for the grunge era—not the silly fashion or the yarling, but the endless willingness of certain people to screw with the journalistic-promotional superstructure. When we were clonking around in Doc Martens and our fathers' flannel shirts, one of our heroes was Megan Jasper, a Sub Pop employee who was interviewed about grunge by the NYT's proto-Styles section. She came up with an entire lexicon of grungespeak (right), and the NYT printed it, with the warning that readers would be hearing terms like "bound-and-hagged" and "swingin' on the flippity-flop" at malls and high schools around America. Well, not quite—although "lamestain" did make its way onto a T-shirt.

Thinking about this whole episode has made us wonder about today, when every Garageband noodler out there has a PR agent and a CD to hawk. To any bands that feel like they could be "on the verge," we issue a challenge: Make shit up. Be bold, be outrageous, be inventive. And let us know what you did. Because, as Baffler editor—and fill-in NYT columnist—Tom Frank put it, "(W)hen The Newspaper of Record goes searching for the Next Big Thing and the Next Big Thing piddles on its leg, we think that's funny." And there are some types of humor that will never, ever die.

Soundgarden - Sub Pop Rock City [MP3, link expired]
Tom Frank, "The Great Grunge Hoax," and The Baffler