Americans born between V-J day and J.F.K. have always considered themselves the 20th century’s chosen people. Their wonder years were blithe and prosperous; they invented sex, discovered candor and stopped an immoral war; they were rewarded with Haagen-Dazs and Saturday Night Live. Three decades ago, the Beatles’ crude, cheerfully anarchic exuberance came as a revelation to the adolescents of the day, who proceeded to make an ideology and then a mass-market sensibility out of a certain high brattishness. Adolescent baby boomers were by turns passionate and sullen, angry at the world in general and grownups in particular, certain, above all, that they were uncompromised, pure. In the mid-’70s, as prosperity finally ebbed and a generalized post-Vietnam enervation set in, much of rock turned merely slick. But along came a fresh cohort of bratty youngsters convinced of their own exceptional purity, and so a dozen years after the rock-‘n’-roll youthquake, punk music appeared — crude, youthful, exuberant, sullenly anarchic, objectionable to grownups. In the late ’80s, as go-go prosperity ebbed and post-Reagan enervation set in, yet another raw, out-with-the-old rock paradigm arrived on schedule: the astringent musical and emotional impulse driving alternative bands strikingly resembles that of the Clash in 1977 or, even more, the Who in 1964. As before, the music tends to be willfully coarse and loud, tough for anyone over 30 to like. As before, the musicians are passionately, defiantly alienated lumpen prole white boys flirting with nihilism. ”I’m a negative creep,” Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain sang. Keith Richards remained cooler than Mick Jagger because he was a junkie; Sid Vicious became the permanently coolest member of the Sex Pistols when he died of a heroin overdose; Cobain has already spent some of his fresh superstardom as a heroin user. The Who and Jimi Hendrix ritually smashed and burned guitars onstage in the ’60s; today Nirvana does its own instrument-destroying thing. There is a familiar solipsism. Alternative rock, says Atlantic Records’ Danny Goldberg, who managed both Nirvana and Sonic Youth, ”takes itself very seriously. It’s very similar to the ’60s.” Plus the jeans, the extremely long hair . . . ”I look at Nirvana and Soul Asylum,” says Jann Wenner, the 47-year-old founder of Rolling Stone, ”and I practically get acid flashbacks.” In other words: been there, done that. For any smug baby boomer, it is pleasant to see the young so precisely following in one’s footsteps. A century ago, there was Dostoyevsky on the one hand and Dickens on the other. You could be a doomed bohemian man of principle, or you could be popular, but it was pretty hard to be both. Beginning around 1965, however, rock’s big stars became a new breed of living oxymoron: it was possible to become rich and even powerful by striking extravagant poses of contempt for the rich and powerful. In theory, ”selling out” was a major cultural felony, but in fact it was almost impossible to be convicted. For the mass audience, icons like Mick Jagger and John Lennon retained their outlaw tang even after they acquired palatial residences and took up with socialites.
By and large, the paradox at the heart of bohemian superstardom has been tolerated or ignored by successive waves of teenage fans, although it makes for pretty luscious ironies. ”We’ve got to the stage where we end the night by destroying everything,” Pete Townshend said in 1967, ”which is expensive.” At their zenith in 1977, the Sex Pistols peevishly canceled a Saturday Night Live appearance. SNL creator Lorne Michaels, who has himself made a lucrative career out of counterculturalism, complained, ”It’s very strange that a group that prides itself on representing the underground turns us down because we can’t pay them enough.” Punk, essentially a working-class British genre, never went fully mainstream in happy-face America. But since then the U.S. has become a significant bit more like Britain: the sense of tapped-out, no-hope job anxiety that has settled over this country helps postpunk bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam sell millions of records. And with megapopularity comes the rub for another cycle of suddenly-rich-and-famous rock performers: What is a boy to do when his splenetic-loser shtik wins him magazine covers and huge record contracts? How to deal with the heartbreak of success? By growing up. It happens. According to John Lennon’s friend and producer Phil Spector, the edgy Beatle regularly joked about losing his edge. ”John would say, ‘Jesus, Phil — we’re startin’ to sound like our f— parents.’ ”
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