Let’s (Not) Get It On

Despite my decades-long love of Mickey Rourke, I had a few problems
with the movie The Wrestler. Not least of these was the fact
that if you were to mute the sound track, you’d be watching a movie
about a man who’d had so much plastic surgery on his face that he was
forced to be a minor-league wrestler living in a trailer park. But the
film had one scene that really stayed with me. It takes place in a bar,
where Rourke’s and Marisa Tomei’s characters are talking about the
music they love most, which, not uncharacteristically, consists of
bands like Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, and, cue “Round and
Round” on the jukebox (it’s a rerecord), Ratt. Rourke talks up the
good-time rock ‘n’ roll merits of these bands and decries the malign
influence of “that Cobain fuck” who came along and spoiled everything
before both characters agree that “the ’90s sucked.”

Whether or not the ’90s did in fact suck is for history to decide
(though as I recall, people began making a pretty convincing case that
they did as early as 1989). What landed hardest about this scene,
however, was the subtextual relationship between the wrestler, a
battered narcissist with no capacity for navigating emotional
complexity, and the music that stirs his soul, simple songs by
hedonistic bands that defiantly offer no emotional complexity to
navigate. As the film unspools, the dying hero (not unmovingly)
strives, and fails, to establish meaningful human interactions with his
resentful daughter and Tomei’s indifferent dancer character. The
sacrifices required by the relationships he hungers after are simply
more than he’s capable of making. In the end, the only interaction he
can both nourish and be nourished by is the one between him and a
roomful of strangers eager to see him execute one last Ram Jam or
mutilate himself with a staple gun.

It certainly feels right for Randy “The
Ram” Robinson to relate more to “Girls Girls Girls” than to “Smells
Like Teen Spirit,” but the question persists: Does the emotionally
vacuous music he loves appeal to him because he’s incapable of dealing
with emotions, or did the music instruct him in the ways of emotional
vacuousness—such that he can’t understand a woman unless she’s a
stripper, such that he can summon genuine tears in asking for his
daughter’s forgiveness but can’t be bothered to remember their dinner
date less than a week later because he’s having sex with a random
groupie, such that he is desperate for sympathy but incapable of
empathy? I’m not saying these are mortal sins (we’ve all done worse
things to better people), nor am I trying to assert a moral argument
about the film or the character, or even about Mötley Crüe.
I’m merely suggesting that the music we love offers us certain lessons
about life and how to live it (to cite another band The Ram probably
isn’t massively enamored of) and that it might be worth considering
what happens when those lessons rub up against (which is not to say
“pamper”) life’s complexities.

Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that just because a real
person likes these bands (or any bands, or any thing) that he’s
incapable of experiencing meaningful emotions, or that all the people
who like this or that strain of music represent some kind of hive mind.
Still, for those who are attuned to it, pop music is more than just the
background noise of our development. In an indirect but essential way,
it teaches us how to live, by offering codes that we’re free to
decipher as we choose. Sometimes we agree. “The Times They Are a
Changin’.” Sometimes we differ. “Gotta Serve Somebody.” But the “we” in
question tend to gather around fixed points, and those points have a
way of marking the attitudes and behavior of the gatherers. And by
“attitudes and behavior,” I obviously mean sex. Specifically as it
relates to rock music, even more specifically to the strain of rock
music known variously as punk, alternative, and indie rock.

(I’m just going to go ahead and say “indie rock,” with a
free-floating asterisk to indicate that I recognize and value the
several important microfibers of distinction that will be lost in the
assumption that, say, Hüsker Dü and Sugar might be part of
the same stratosphere… I hereby stipulate that I understand, if
anyone still cares, that punk is not the same as alternative is not the
same as indie—to say nothing of good-old college rock. But they
are all more like one another than they are like Poison. Plus “punk” is
too specific and “indie” sounds better than “alternative,”
which, because of the age I was at the time of its ascendance, I always
refused to say aloud anyway, like “Generation X” or
“Friends.”)

Indie rock never achieved the widespread
cultural dominance that was reported or predicted at the time. For
every Exile in Guyville there were far more Tuesday Night
Music Clubs or Butterflys or whatever. And, asterisks aside,
it’s far more prominent in today’s pop culture than it was in 1994,
though the indie rock of today—found at the top of the Billboard
charts, in movie trailers, TV shows, and beer ads—bears little
relation to ’90s indie, in sound, spirit, or psychological profile. In
1994, rock itself still had the distinction of at least seeming like the dominant voice of youth culture, and indie was at least a
strong influence on its idea of cool. This was a time when the concept
of “selling out” still existed, which it really doesn’t today except as
a voice from the fringe, a vote for Ralph Nader, a vegan Thanksgiving.
Indie then was rock that was un- or possibly just pre-sold-out, and as
it advanced toward and retreated from the musical mainstream throughout
the ’90s, rock music itself was busy lapsing out of relevance. It
didn’t die. It just mattered to fewer people. Possibly because fewer
people were being addressed by the best of it.

The important indie bands of the day had about them an air of
conscience (though not one of them would have made such a claim for
themselves), offering proof that rock could thrive without the hoary
clichés of Wrestler rock, which was still regnant at the
turn of the decade that sucked. As a result of that air of conscience,
the indie music of that period, while rich in variety and blah blah
blah, had a collective tendency to abandon, in sound, lyric, and image,
the traditional rock ‘n’ roll mandate of sexual primacy, and that
abandonment became more pronounced (or perhaps just seemed more
significant) as the strain’s cultural influence grew. And because the
music we cherish teaches us how to live, it’s reasonable to assume that
the decreased sexual energy of this music may even have affected the
sexual attitudes and behavior, even the desires, of its audience during
that period.

And by “its audience,” I obviously mean me.

Generalizations about rock moments become easier to make, and of
course more general, the further back you go, but no matter how you
look at it, there’s no mistaking the fact that sex and rock ‘n’ roll
are linked so inextricably that the very term “rock and roll” actually
means “sex.” I also realize that this line of inquiry is both well- and
oft-traveled and fraught with peril to every imaginable kind of
cultural sensitivity. So at the risk of even further disclaiming, when
I say “sexual primacy,” I’m not talking about the racialist argument
about the music’s “primitivism,” or the musicological Bermuda Triangle
of linking the beat with irresistible urges in the body, or any of the
other problematic tropes of gender, race, and class that have
traditionally suffused this subject. I’m instead interested in the way
that the Doors’ status as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex,” who seemed
to be saying that “love was sex and sex was death and therein lay
salvation,” was what made them interesting to Joan Didion. Or how Harry
Nilsson’s recording of Badfinger’s “Without You” could be transformed
in Lavinia Greenlaw’s young consciousness as “not so much a song as a
continuum, a booming tunnel of desire through which we flew like
static.”

Because by the time these sources made it to my eyes and ears, they
read respectively as an embarrassingly brazen sexual
self-­advertisement enacted by one handsome man and the three jazz
dorks who played music so he could dance around and sing bad poetry,
and as a saccharine dose of quasi-sexual mawkishness—so far from
what I recognized as acceptable or pleasing evocations of desire as to
constitute actual parody. The distinction here isn’t about vicissitudes
of musical taste or vagaries of gender. Like everyone with a radio, I
have also felt myself flying through that same tunnel of
desire—no matter that I was propelled by different songs. This
sensation transcends generation and genre, and is one of the great
thrills of being alive.

But time changes some things irrevocably. The gulf between my
perception of the Doors now and the one that pulled Didion into the
torpor of their recording studio in 1968 has everything to do with
time—not because the Doors were valid 40 years ago and are not
valid now. It’s because my understanding of Jim Morrison is necessarily
filtered through the gestures of the pop stars who followed. Plenty of
whom have embraced the naked torso of his legacy. But some, whether by
way of aesthetic preference or simple discomfort, left the erotic
politicking to the erotic politicians, and kept their shirts on. So to
speak. Time, as Vladimir Nabokov reminds us (in Ada), “is a
fluid medium for the culture of metaphors.”

And speaking of metaphors, if popular music is a city, everyone who
lives in any of its many neighborhoods has an equal right to claim it
belongs to them (and they to it). Though I had visited this city all my
life, I never felt like I truly belonged there until the brief
commercial heyday of alternative rock in the early ’90s, hastened by
the success of Nirvana. (I realize that admitting this here is akin to
outing yourself at the RNC, so I’ll keep it brief, but you know how
people in the music business and certain quadrants of the press used to
talk about how the mainstream success of underground-oriented bands
formed a bridge between the subculture and the mass culture? Well, that
bridge was built for me, and I crossed it, and I apologize, though I am
not sorry.)

Newly immersed in this city of indie rock—I am kind of sorry
for that phrase—I took immense pleasure in seeking out the
experiences that would allow me to claim it as my own. Like many people
who discover something anew, I assumed not only that it had been placed
there for me, but that now was the most important time a person could
be discovering it. I don’t know why it was that these sounds were the
ones that drew me in. It’s not as though I had never liked the Doors. I
had. I had liked a lot of music. But I had never felt like it was made
for me specifically, that it belonged to me and I to it, that we were
contemporaneous, consanguineous, until the early ’90s, with its
explicit and implicit backward reach to the late-’70s and mid-’80s. Can
it have been a coincidence that this was the moment I first noticed
that the bands making the music I loved tended to be fully dressed?

Of course, there have always been shirted
artists. And not just the Association or whatever. The “unlikely” rock
star has been with us as long as the “born” kind. For every Elvis
Presley a Buddy Holly. For every Bob Dylan a Leonard Cohen. For every
Jim Morrison a Van Morrison. Okay, maybe not every one. Still, it’s not
like it was ever a question of Mick Jagger or nothing. But rock’s
defining gesture—in primary and secondary source material
alike—was always a sexual leer, a sexual urge, a sexual
seduction, a sexual plaint, a sexual attack. Sexual primacy. The
hormonal explosiveness that attended the birth of rock ‘n’ roll plainly
went through many changes and refinements as the decades wore on and
the form became institutionalized and classed up. By the time it
trickled down to me, the idea that there might be something other than
sex for rock stars to be peddling—other than, not
necessarily more than, and frequently in addition to—felt
completely new and alien to my conception of rock music expressly as an
outlet for raging hedonism. This was no school, or movement, really.
More like a group of musical artists who happened to have had in common
the impulse to subvert, to question, to confront, and/or to
ignore—rather than simply to embody—the relationship of
rock and sex.

The mask worn by the iconic and subiconic makers of this music, from
Johnny Rotten to Ari Up to Michael Stipe to Bob Mould to Morrissey to
Kurt Cobain to Calvin Johnson to Liz Phair to Kathleen Hanna to Polly
Jean Harvey to Stephen Malkmus, advertised disdain for the
clichés of rock virility, offering in their place a short but
potent list of abstractions and deconstructions—antisexuality,
homosexuality, pansexuality, nonsexuality, in-quotes sexuality,
etcexuality. But these alternate models also became masks: for
embarrassment about, veiled and unveiled hostility toward, meretricious
reliance on, and general discomfort with sex of any kind.

Nirvana’s quest to derail the hair-spray element of heavy music
(“Hard rock as the term was understood before metal moved in,” from
Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide review of Nevermind) remains
well-documented but worth remembering, because they were a total
inversion of what a band was supposed to do with its fame, and set the
stage for the idea that indie music was in the on-deck circle, which
wasn’t really true. It was in the hole. They wore dresses. They kissed
each other on TV. They made sex sound like putrescence. They gave
interviews in which they used the word “feminist” in a positive way and
sang about rape as if it were bad. They were, in short, unheard of. The
first time I heard Nevermind, I was stoned on the floor of an
NYU dorm room on Halloween with a girl and—I’m not bragging
here—it just seemed so appropriate not to make out. That
was just the beginning of my ’90s. Of course, you could do it to
Nirvana (well, Nevermind anyway—hard to imagine getting
sexually aroused by In Utero), and I’m sure many, many people
did. But it also seemed like a violation of something. Nirvana
reignited a culture of refusal that extended to everything you might
choose to extend it to.

Sonic Youth had totally gone pop, kind of, and without getting into
that whole discussion, there was no shortage of sex confusion and
confrontation for the casual listener on an album like Dirty:
Kim Gordon’s growl voice on “Swimsuit Issue” and “Drunken Butterfly”
extends the creepy sexual-harassment/seduction-burlesque of
“Kissability” from Daydream Nation, while lines like “I believe
Anita Hill” and “I’ve been around the world a million times and all you
men are slime” make no secret of where Thurston Moore’s sympathies lie.
Most disturbingly, Lee Ranaldo’s “Wish Fulfillment” gets inside the
mind and mouth of a stalker in an eerily convincing impersonation.
Desire is a subject here, but also a scold.

There was Pavement, the definitive ’90s band, a notoriously arch and
intellectual group whose classic rock gestures were always at least 80
percent critique. When they talked about girls, they were figurative,
always an abstraction of an idea of Girl distilled from other songs
they were thinking of—Summer Babe, Loretta’s Scars, the queen of
the castle/Pasadena/California thrill. They elevated diffidence to the
vaunted place normally reserved for longing in pop songs, not knowing
what to feel instead of Sweet Emotion. Confessional moments, such as
they were, consisted of lines like “there is no castration fear” and
the far more revealing “I trust you will tell me if I am making a fool
of myself.” One of their most conventionally “soulful” vocals concerned
the absence of room to grow in a leather terrarium. Sex was utterly
beside the point.

Neutral Milk Hotel: Album one, side one, song one: “Song Against
Sex”:

So why should I lay here naked
When it’s just too far away
From anything we could call loving
Any love worth living for
So I’ll sleep out in the gutter
You can sleep here on the floor.

Even when Bikini Kill released a song with the unambiguous title “I
Like Fucking” (flip side: “I Hate Danger”), on which they declare a
belief “in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe” and that there
is “anything beyond troll guy reality,” the lines sound like
encouragement from the singer to a female friend, as if to say, “It’s
possible to feel this way, despite everything.” It’s desire as a
statement of purpose, not as seduction. (Another key line: “Just ’cause
my world, sweet sister, is so fucking goddamn full of rape, does that
mean my body must always be a source of pain?”) Not exactly “Touch Me.”
Not hardly “Rape Me,” either.

Again, other than Nirvana, this was not
the music on the radio. So we abandoned the radio. It wasn’t playing
our music. When we did turn on the radio, the rock stations were
obviously unlistenable (stuff like Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam
sounded unbearably macho in this context, which says a lot), so we’d
flip around to hear what the rest of the world was hearing, the
squares. A song like “Doin’ It” by LL Cool J (and LeShaun) was
genuinely shocking. How could something like this be on the radio? Was
this pornography? Was it sexist? Was it real? Did we like it? Were we
allowed to like it? What had happened?! I wish I were exaggerating.

The gap between the music I had chosen to teach me how to
live—which I of course thought of as the vanguard, music that was
too good, too important to be too popular—and the music that was
teaching everyone else had stretched further than I knew how to reckon.
I remained staunch, however, as indie rock abandoned its biological
impulses, to say nothing of the bass register, and I wrestled with
mine. I just thought it was the way things were supposed to be now.

The idea, I thought, was not to deny your sexual urges—that
would be folly—but to keep them to yourself, to mute them, to
deplore the fact that any expression of them was bound to be either
vulgar or predictable or, worst of all, male. Male (the adjective, not
the noun, although maybe the noun also) was definitely something you
didn’t want to be in the early ’90s, if you could help it. But let’s
say hypothetically these deplorable urges every so often managed
to link up to someone else’s; when it came time to enact the
traditional hormonal imperatives of youth, making out on the sofa for
example, finding the appropriate contemporary soundtrack was often high
comedy. In 1989, my high-school friend Jonathan Scott, a black teenager
from Baltimore, preparing for a weekend at home, let me hear his “fuck
tape,” a 90-minute mix of songs recorded on the fly from late-’80s D.C.
radio (beginnings and ends cut off) including Keith Sweat, Guy, LeVert,
Bobby Brown, and Troop, with half a Prince song at the end of one side.
He had made this tape just in case he managed to score with a girl and
they needed something to listen to. Something current. I may have
blushed when he said “fuck tape.” I’m sure I was embarrassed. I could
never have made such a tape. Every tape I ever made went out of its way
to scream, “This is not a fuck tape.” The music I liked the most in my
most-hormonal years would not have qualified.

Songs About Fucking is an amazing album that I heard in an
extraordinarily high percentage of the houses and apartments I visited
between 1990 and 1996. But who could concentrate on losing themselves
in a passionate embrace while Big Black was shearing skulls? Do you
really want “Bad Penny” to come on during an intimate moment? Or how
about Sebadoh, a band I worshipped, whose unstintingly detailed
relationship dissections (the same relationship, dissected from every
conceivable angle) and masturbation confessions trade off with
spastic-screaming noise songs? It would be like using tears for
lubricant. Who then? Slint? Smog? Tortoise? Palace? Silver Jews? Beat
Happening? Daniel Johnston? I would be lying if I said I didn’t take
them on test drives. Of course there were important exceptions. But
even with a conspicuously virile, happily sex-drenched band, like
Afghan Whigs, there was a wall of explicitly misogynist persona to
scale—as if, in the throes of sexual congress you might stop and
say, “It’s important to keep in mind that what Greg Dulli is doing here
is a kind of impersonation of the male aggressor in an attempt to
reveal the dark corners of male-female…” Sadly, I wouldn’t have put
it past myself.

The self-conscious nature of the music, its very refusal to be
mindless even when it had no particular ax to grind vis-à-vis
sexuality, rendered it inadequate to the task of providing a sound you
could lose yourself in. Loosely framed by the end of the cold war and
President Clinton’s impeachment for lying about sex, the times were
self-conscious, too. The obvious was always suspect. The natural
answer—getting it on to “Let’s Get It On,” for
example—would have been suspect for being too obvious. Not to say
you couldn’t love Marvin Gaye, of course. You could even love sex. But
obviousness, that was not going to fly. Even when the obvious answer
was obviously the right one.

The hater line against indie, which was amply aired long before
The Wrestler, is that it took all the fun out of rock. It’s not
like there’s a counter to it; that was pretty much the defiant
pro-indie argument then, too—it took their kind of fun out
of it. Alternative rock, wrote Eric Weisbard in 1995, “is
antigenerationally dystopian, subculturally presuming fragmentation:
It’s built on a neurotic discomfort over massified and commodified
culture, takes as its archetype bohemia far more than youth, and never
expects that its popular appeal, such as it is, will have much social
impact.” And, indeed, in the end, it didn’t have much.

It’s curious to reflect, 15 to 20 years hence, how little influence
that period has on contemporary sounds or attitudes, even as the
current wave of indie rock has begun reaching a broader audience. You
look at that broader audience, at mega indie-rock-oriented events like
Sasquatch! or the Capitol Hill Block Party, and you see demonstrable
sexual confidence, even peacockishness, both in terms of the
dress-extra-in-a-DeBarge-video fashion reality—all those louche
sideways baseball caps!—and general presence. Not much neurotic
discomfort on view, unless you count the nerve damage caused by skinny
jeans. Compared to the way similar gatherings would have looked 15 to
20 years ago (not that they could have even existed; an indie-rock
festival filling the Gorge for three days in 1994 would have been a
laughable prospect)—all uncomfortable-verging-on-apologetic
slouches, body-deemphasizing garments, chewed cuticles, and autistic
gazes—the current cultural idea of indie seems not to have even
descended from the old one. And who can blame it?

When I originally started thinking about
this topic, I was trying to get around to discussing the idea that
through some alchemical reaction with its culture, pop music somehow
has a way of magically finding you when you need it. It wasn’t long
before I realized that it actually works the other way around. It would
be ludicrous to suggest that these few bands I mentioned were the only
bands around, or that there was no music in the ’90s indie scene that
wasn’t defined—not to say thwarted—by muted or awkward
sexuality. I mean, obviously. But if that’s what you were
looking for, if, say, you were prone to being unbelievably uptight, to
being scared of wanting what you wanted, to missing the point about
absolutely everything, the ’90s were a smorgasbord. In that respect,
they didn’t suck at all.