Sells Like Teen Spirit by Ryan Moore

Author:Ryan Moore [Moore, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press short
Published: 2009-11-21T08:00:00+00:00

Henry Rollins, former Black Flag singer, in a Gap billboard ad. From The Encyclopedia of Punk. Brian Cogan. New York: Sterling, 2008.

The culture industry was successful in making Seattle the new capital of the music world and putting flannel shirts in department stores across the United States. But the attempts to use the authenticity of alternative culture as an advertising ploy failed disastrously, largely for the same reasons that led advertisers to fear “media-savvy” youth in the first place. Young people still felt they were being manipulated, and a backlash against the very mention of “Generation X” or “grunge” was born the instant they became buzzwords.53 When the New York Times was working on its story about the “success” of grunge in the fashion world, a former Sub Pop employee named Megan Jasper pulled off the now-legendary prank of providing the reporter with a fake glossary of grunge slang, which the Times then dutifully reprinted as truth. Like many others inside the subculture, Jasper was angry and annoyed at the perceived commodification of the grunge scene, which the Times story on fashion exemplified. The “lexicon of grunge” she fabricated included ridiculously cumbersome terms like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” to describe hanging out and “bloated, big bag of blotation” as code for being drunk.

As music industry and mainstream media interest in the Seattle grunge scene peaked, there was also a growing fascination with the riot grrrl movement that had begun in Olympia. Some of the media coverage was curious and generally positive, like that of the teen magazine Sassy, which printed the addresses of several riot grrrl zines that were subsequently deluged with mail from young female readers. Many participants felt that articles in the likes of Newsweek, the Washington Post, and most of the music press, however, sensationalized the sexuality of riot grrrl style while trivializing their feminist politics, and moreover that they positioned the members of Bikini Kill as “leaders” of what was supposed to be a nonhierarchical social movement.54 This led a number of women who identified as riot grrrls to call for a “media blackout” whereby activists and musicians, including Bikini Kill, refused to be interviewed or photographed by mainstream media outlets. The media blackout garnered some controversy, however, among those who believed that riot grrrls needed to work with the mass media to have any hope of building a mass movement. For instance, the otherwise sympathetic journalist Lorraine Ali called it “deadend elitism”: it seemed that many within riot grrrl were more interested in preserving a sense of purity and authenticity than in spreading their message, much like their male counterparts in the hardcore scene.55

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