Alternative Wednesday!

[pyynk]

So earlier this week, there was a brief generational flareup between the Boomers and Generation X on one of the message boards I'm on. And because there's a chunk of my brain that's always thinking about music, I remembered of a compilation disc I picked up years ago creatively titled, Generation XBack in 94 when this came out it was a lot harder

Comments

[aquaknot]

A-men it was hard to find "alternative" music way back when. You had to notice it at 3am on a commercial station (if you were lucky enough to find one that didn't just loop the late night), hear it in a movie then look closely at the credits, or find an older friend or sibling. I virtually lived at THE record store in my tiny town. Pouring over most every slab of vinyl looking for something interesting. Compilations were much harder to find in '80s, except for the cassettes we passed back and forth!

A friend from San Diego turned me on to Dramarama in about 1989. Not a perfect band but worth a listen, and I heard they did pretty well regionally. I think they did some reunion shows not too long ago.

[pyynk]

I know a lot of people who look down their nose at Nirvana, the primary complaint being that Nirvana didn't do anything that the Pixies, Replacements, and Melvins hadn't hadn't already done. One thing they forget is that Nirvana hit it big -- something that the Pixies, Replacements, and Melvins never did. Because of that, I got exposed to a TON of bands via those comps that I wouldn't have before living in a similarly small town because suddently those bands were commercially viable.

Yeah, Dramarama was never one of those bands that would have set the world on fire, but cheesy as it sounds, they did their jobs. They came in, played some fine, slack generation rock, and left the building. There are lots of bands who could do with taking a page from that playbook.