Gott im Himmel: The Ghosts of Grunge

At first I thought I was just having a strange feeling of déjà vu, but last weekend confirmed my suspicions: The early '90s are back. Let me tell you how it began. A very quiet guy who rarely speaks (but when he does, it's genius) remarked that the current obsession with garage rock was going to lead to GAR-unge rock, just like it did before--but now we have an actual name for it. Of course, that led to all kinds of really bad puns, such as "Let's keep the GAR-unge door closed," and others way too retarded to print even here. But then, a couple of days later, I was standing in line at QFC and a guy who wanted to buy a single two-liter bottle of Cherry Coke threw an absolute hissy fit when he realized that all the lines were super long (5:00 p.m. at the Harvard Market Q is a madhouse). He tossed his basket on the floor, then went on a tirade about how Seattle needed to get over itself--that it was dead, and so not cool, and on and on. Of course, I was standing agog, because not only was his hair long and parted down the middle, but he was dressed in a thermal with a flannel flappin' over it. So he's just going off on his way outside, and the automatic door keeps opening and closing on his verbal eruption until he notices he has a rapt audience of one--me--and on my face is, I'm pretty sure, the look I often have when I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the object of a prank. This gave him permission to direct the rest of the scolding at me. All the way home, I was questioning whether I'd been hallucinating or not, because all the hipsters and grown-ups at the Q had just looked the other way while all this was going on, and no one had even chortled at the fact that the ghost of grunge was throwing a hissy fit at the goddamn Harvard Market QFC.

So last weekend, I saw long hair everywhere I went, and no matter how hard I tried to get away from it, grunge sat next to me. I saw authentic "back-in-the-day" types and scary pretend types wearing too much cologne who flip backwards off their barstool when they have too much to drink (Hee!), or fall down the stairs and spill their freaking pint of Oly because their hair-curtain proved hazardous (Hee!). Then Courtney Love was on MTV2 for 24 hours straight, kicking off with her special guest Ursula from Portland--who, what seems like a lifetime ago, not only served up lunch for all us folks working at the Hanna Andersson headquarters (where I distinctly remember wearing Doc Martens and long striped jumper dresses as I sat at my desk drawing up fabric samples), but terrorized me playfully at clubs because I was, in her opinion, way too shy. Drawn to the television as if to a car wreck, I was double-tasking by flipping through the newest Vogue, and there was Marc Jacobs' designer-grunge garb, circa '93, "recycled" with more modern clothes for a cross-decade look. Jesus Christ. Oh shit, I didn't mean to be so verbose. An hour ago, when I began writing this column, all I meant to say, or what I meant to say before getting into new record labels Cold Crush and Continental was... Gott im Himmel!--How fucking bad did Courtney Love look after staying up for a measly 24 hours?!