Grunge ‘R Us : Exploitating, Co-opting and Neutralizing the Counter Culture.

SHE HAD HACKED-OFF CRIMSON HAIR AND DORKY cat-eye glasses; she wore a prissy dress with bold, black letters running down her arms. Her look screamed “misfit.”

I was in search of a Riot Grrrl. This was before the whole world knew what these young punk feminists looked like, but I had been briefed that they dressed like grotesque caricatures of girlhood, so this misfit must be one.

My Riot Grrrl squatted on the floor of an Olympia, Wash., auditorium where a rock concert was about to begin. A knot of similarly attired outcasts formed around her: red lipstick, junk jewelry and feminine frills combined with combat boots and other jarring punk touches. While everyone waited for the band to finish setting up, my Riot Grrrl opened her plastic lunch box and took out a stack of “ ‘zines,” the intensely personal homemade newsletters-cum-magazines that serve as the mass media of the underground. Someone handed her a quarter and received a tract in exchange. Seeing my chance, I broke into the huddle, a towering intruder, a good 17 years older than any of the acolytes. The circle froze, the defensive reaction of a teen when a parent bursts into her bedroom unannounced.

I quickly explained my presence--I was writing an article on the Riot Grrrls. To my amazement, the redhead started to cry. Bitter, convincing tears. She told me how she’d seen her friends’ private revelations exploited in articles. (Riot Grrrls talk freely with each other about painful personal travails such as incest and teen-age rejection.) The media is going to ruin everything, she said.

Chalking up her resistance to adolescent foot-stomping, I continued to cajole. After all, I was a feminist, too. I was on her side. The others in the circle drew back and stared accusingly, as if they were in physical fear of me. Finally I gave up and wandered away, feeling that I had been mistreated and misunderstood.

Later, I began to understand that I wasn’t the victim after all. A Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter and Riot Grrrl sympathizer, Lois Maffeo, tried to explain it to me: “These girls want to preserve their scene. Some of them are fighting for survival. They’re afraid of what will happen if the spotlight shines on them.”

A year has passed since the day I made a Riot Grrrl cry. In the interim, the media has catapulted the Grrrls into the public domain. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and the other bands that gave the scene its leadership and inspiration got their moment of fame. But the movement’s credo--that young women should support each other rather than competing as society urges them to do--was lost in the transition, and the movement was reduced to a kicky little clique defined almost exclusively by fashion. You can catch the Princess Dork look on MTV these days, and imitation Riot Grrrl pre-tattooed wear is for sale on Melrose.

The Grrrls still aren’t talking to reporters, but observers say the scene has fizzled under the premature media bombardment. “That kind of mainstream attention changes things irrevocably, and the Riot Grrrls are no exception,” says Slim Moon, co-owner of Kill Rock Stars, an Olympia record label that records Riot Grrrl bands. “It’s really hard to return to an underground thing after that kind of attention.”

For alternative movements like the Riot Grrrls, the trip from underground obscurity to celebrity to obsolescence has never been quicker. We’ve seen grunge go from a fringe movement of grubby, alienated youth to a fashion phenomenon to a joke--wWitness the Muzak-type release from Seattle’s C/ Z Records: “Grunge Lite.” Lollapalooza, a super-alternative, post-punk Woodstock when it debuted three years ago, now resembles a shrewdly packaged frat party. Around 1990, quiet little pockets of folks began experimenting with the transcendent possibilities of tattooing, piercing, scarification and other ancient body rituals. These so-called modern primitives were making a profound, groping attempt at spiritual enlightenment. Then Newsweek, among others, reported on Borneo-scorpion tattoos and branding in a chirpy little trend item. Before long, tattoos and piercing were co-opted by professors and carpet salesmen and became so passe that the looks appeared on year-end “out” lists.

The rave scene emerged about three years ago as an anarchic tribal dance marathon reminiscent of ‘60s psychedelic blowouts. At the beginning, raves were so underground that the only way to find one was by word of mouth. Then, last New Year’s, 17,254 people attended a rave at Knott’s Berry Farm, and the scene became just another mainstream diversion. Rap and hip-hop welled up from the African-American urban underground, but today even Barbie raps, and hip-hop is the beat of choice in white yuppie aerobics classes.

Observing the rise and fall of these movements has been like watching the weird kid down the block--the one with a streak of brilliance--drive into a wall at 70 miles an hour. We’ll never know what the kid might have become. If the Riot Grrrls had been left alone a little longer, what might have happened? A true reflorescence and refashioning of feminism? Instead we have some righteously pissed-off kids who are now reluctant to pour their feelings into their ‘zines for fear that their private passions will wind up trivialized in the mass media.

And what about grunge, that rough, emotional return to primal rock? It’s easy to dismiss it now, but punk and the hippie movement sprang from equally tenuous and noisy roots and ultimately changed the way society looks at big issues such as war, commercialism and hypocrisy.

In fact, most of the ideas that transform the world start out with a bunch of scruffy young people dreaming up wild ideas that at first seem preposterous. In some cases, the passage of time proves them to be in fact preposterous, but sometimes the scruffy youths are Henry David Thoreau or Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the founders of Apple Computer Inc. The thing is, you can’t tell from the jump. All fevered, motley young people look pretty much alike. Safer, perhaps, not to step on them indiscriminately.

I don’t know what happened to that flame-headed Riot Grrrl. Her phone in Olympia is disconnected. I’d like to give back her ‘zine--the one I managed to cop off a bystander--and tuck her secrets back in her lunch box. They shouldn’t have been ripped away so soon.

*

AN AUTHENTIC COUNTERCULTURE IS AS NECESSARY TO THE LARGER SOCIETY as the rain forest is to the planet. It’s a protected laboratory where evolution can take place. J. Milton Yinger, an anthropologist and sociologist who claims to have invented the term counterculture , says countercultures are like genetic mutations. Some mutations are fruitless or even harmful. But sometimes, he writes in his book “Countercultures,” a mutation supplies the recessive traits necessary for adaptation and survival in a changing environment. Rigid cultures die. We depend upon the occasional wild-card mutant counterculture to infect society with something truly new. For society to absorb such new strains, some degree of co-opting must occur--and it always has. By the late 1950s, entrepreneurs were peddling tours of Greenwich Village beatnik haunts. By 1967, ad magazines were publishing articles on selling “The Now Generation.” Later, punk was packaged for the masses as an amalgam of black leather, spikes and watered-down rage.

What’s different today is that alternative scenes are being gobbled up almost as fast as they’re created. The beats, the hippies and the punks all enjoyed a longer period of blessed outsider status when no one wanted a piece of them. They had the time and space to create, safe from the crushing judgments of Authority. Then, by the time the record companies and advertisers swooped in, there was some essence that couldn’t be stolen.

These days, thousands of feature spots in magazines, newspapers, radio and television need to be filled every day--with something new. What better source for new than young people? The appropriation of youth culture is now instantaneous. The kids don’t have time to distill an indestructible core; all it takes is one reporter somewhere sniffing out a Riot Grrrl or a grunge rocker, and within weeks, the cool little scene is on Arsenio. For the first time ever, the underground itself is in danger of being absorbed completely into the mainstream.

Baby boomers and the marketers who catered to them are also to blame. While my friends and I were tromping the aisles of the AmVets thrift store in Azusa at the dawn of the ‘70s, hunting for the perfectly faded farmers’ overalls and tacky Hawaiian shirts that would complement our post-hippie image, our parents looked on in bemused tolerance. My mother never once asked to borrow my overalls. Our parents were raised on tradition, not revolt. Bohemia was not something they related to.

But the folks currently in the nation’s driver’s seat think of Woodstock as their lodestar. As singer-songwriter Maffeo notes: “When a kid says, ‘Dad, can I have $15 to go see the Butthole Surfers?’ that Dad remembers when he asked for money to go see the Jefferson Airplane.” Dad is hit with a patchouli wave of nostalgia; he may even check out the Surfers on CD, so inclined is he toward expressions of dissent.

As if the millions of boomers weren’t market enough, Madison Avenue has discovered another huge bloc of counterculture consumers: people in their 20s. Endless articles have analyzed this group’s wealth, stressing that the bounty will go to those who can tap young people’s psyches. Consequently, the youth scene is riddled with more spies than an Earth First! picnic. Companies like Mattel and Pepsi buy videotapes of audiences at alternative rock concerts. Picture a bunch of ex-Deadheads in a boardroom, squinting at a screen, their fingers on the pause button: “Wait! Back up! Look at those felt-pen tattoos. Can we sell those?”

Last July, guitarist and alternative rock journalist Ira Robbins wrote in an article on the Lollapalooza generation for Pulse! magazine: “Nowadays, when I hear the word rebellion, I reach for my credit card.”

*

COUNTERCULTURE, BEFORE IT shows up in department stores and on sitcoms, grows from tiny, localized cells, or scenes. In trying to define what makes for a vital scene, I talked to Candice Pedersen, manager of K Records, a respected independent based in Olympia, home of the Riot Grrrls. A small college town fringed by dripping, dark forests, Olympia has always had a healthy alternative scene, Pedersen says, “because it’s a place where you can make mistakes.”

On a similar note, Nils Bernstein, publicist for Sub Pop records in Seattle, says Chapel Hill, N.C., has a robust scene because “you can still hide there, to some degree. The rest of the world doesn’t know.” (Weeks after he said this, however, the world knew: Chapel Hill was touted as the next Seattle in Entertainment Weekly and Details.)

A good scene, then, is really a hide-out--a place to pen purple lyrics, concoct giddy revolutions, flub up and regroup, all in the company of friends. Naivete also may be an essential ingredient. The Riot Grrrls were publicly trounced for their flimsy political theories and half-baked notions: “How can just talking to each other be a revolutionary act?” skeptics asked. “Don’t these girls know you have to get out there and march and lobby if you want to change the world?”

But the critics forgot that until the media burst in, these were just kids trying on new thoughts in supposed privacy. Mature grown-ups don’t invent something as heady as the Riot Grrrls. True revolutionaries are always a bit starry-eyed.

“A successful ‘underground’ scene is all about belonging,” writes Larry Rosen in Pandemonium!, a Northwest alternative paper. “To many, a scene takes the place of a family.” When the outside world crashes in, as was the case in Seattle, the family breaks apart. You can’t belong to something precious and private along with 5 million other people. Once it’s transplanted to A & M or Geffen headquarters, the scene simply dies. “After the corporations suck it dry and spit it back out, there’s usually not much left,” says Tim Yohannan, a founder of the punk ‘zine Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll.

And the kids get displaced. If grunge was their home and grunge goes big-time, then they are left, in effect, homeless. A young woman I know got the tattoos and joined a band so that she could find community in the Seattle scene. When I saw her recently, she looked like a housewife, with nondescript hair and clothes. She referred to a shadowy, sinister “they,” which I took to mean people like me, the media. “They take everything that’s unique and make it normal. I sit and think, what could you do to your hair or body to make yourself stand out? Nothing. Nothing seems to have as much meaning as it did before.”

Another group of kids runs harder to stay a step ahead of MTV. The guy who cuts my hair--I’ll call him Zeke--is like a hummingbird, lighting here and there on a look or a thought, then bolting when the culture catches up.

“The media lets you know when to stop saying something or wearing something,” he says. “When Nordstrom started carrying Doc Martens, that was it for me.”

Of course, some people say the mainstreaming of alternative scenes is good for the larger culture. Kim Neely, writing in Rolling Stone, said the co-optation of grunge is “part of the way rock ‘n’ roll revitalizes and reinvents itself.” And MTV executive John Cannelli says he likes to think his station is nurturing youth culture by appropriating its most viable elements. The process is “very healthy,” says Cannelli, senior vice president of music and talent. “It has the effect of encouraging people to go on and explore new things.”

But the kids who jump on board after the scene is co-opted get the sound and the look but not the meaning. The Riot Grrrls are no longer angry feminists but sassy babes with funny outfits. Tattoos are trifles you wear on your skin, not symbols that feed your soul. Little white girls strike gangsta poses, oblivious to rap and its genesis in ghetto life. Nirvana-lovers buy their “Kill Corporate Rock” T-shirts at Tower Records, without a thought as to the politics of the purchase.

Whatever threat or sting might have existed in the raw version of the scene is erased, and the status quo is protected for the moment, but in the long run we’ve all lost. For without an occasional infusion of viable Bohemia, we get something akin to what we have now: a hobbled, exhausted culture based on reruns.

*

THE TEMPLE OF THE BEAN IS a tiny coffeehouse and youth hangout in my Tacoma, Wash., neighborhood. On the side of the building, someone has painted a mural of Raphael’s famous cherubs idly sipping espresso. The angels’ ennui reflects the mood in the Temple--as it is called--these days in the wake of the Seattle scene’s triumph and defeat. This is the summer that saw Mia Zapata, singer for the band the Gits, murdered on a Seattle sidewalk; the summer the sun never shone. The kids who hang at the Temple all remember paying a few bucks to see Nirvana, and the musicians who later came together to become Pearl Jam. That was back when the band was broke and accessible. This summer, it has finally sunk in: Those dudes are rich and you can’t talk to them anymore. The parade has most definitely passed by, taking the scene with it.

On this particular afternoon, there is one guy sitting alone on the deck in a steady drizzle. In his blue watch cap, flannel shirt and boxers worn over long johns, he is a museum piece, a grunge relic.

Inside, the silent barista is mixing his dark potions. He’s an ascetic-looking young man with a thin face, close-cropped hair and beard. He could be a Zen monk, or one of Kerouac’s bunch. He is slow to put down whatever he’s reading--his Krishnamurti or Sartre--to wait on a customer. He’s slow to smile, gossip or gab.

It’s only when I talk to him on this visit that I understand that his aloofness is his survival. In the wake of everything he’s seen happen in the Northwest in the last year or so, Kevin Dolliff, 21, says, he is guarding his thoughts so someone can’t take away what matters to him.

He says there is one place “they” can’t invade, and that’s his heart and mind. While co-optation attempts to rip substance from image, people like Dolliff resist, hanging onto meaning with all their strength. “Now, more than ever, we have to find out what we really believe in,” he says gravely. “What kind of person do I want to be? You need to remain vigilant and not let down. It’s hard, it’s really hard. I think people give up.”

One way Dolliff fends off homogenization is by adhering to an ethic invented by the punks: Do it yourself, or D.I.Y. Make a ‘zine, form a band, record a cassette, write a letter, produce a radio show--just don’t let the big boys do it for you. And don’t do it for the big boys; do it for yourself and your friends. Cherish your scene. Smaller is better. Personal connection is everything. “D.I.Y. is of ultimate importance,” Dolliff says.

The survival of the alternative mutant gene depends on D.I.Y. “Thinking for yourself, that is the moral of the story,” says Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of Sub Pop, the record label that launched Nirvana and the so-called Seattle sound. “The images can be discarded. They are ultimately meaningless. What’s not meaningless are the personal connections you make. Part of becoming an adult is learning how to think and, more important, learning how to feel and not just react to stimuli.

“Put on your own Lollapalooza,” Poneman says. “Get your band. Rent a VFW hall. Put on your own rock show.”

Now is the time to think for yourself, say the guardians of counterculture, people like Poneman and Dolliff. Now is the time to feel for yourself. Do It Yourself. It’s still the one thing, they say, that can’t be co-opted.