One of the dumbest, most lantern-jawed songs of all time was a major rock radio hit back in 2010. Through astoundingly dim-witted lyrics, Godsmack’s “Cryin Like a Bitch” rehashes the tired conceit that showing emotional vulnerability isn’t manly: “I’m tougher than nails. / I can promise you that. / Step out of line / And you get bitch-slapped back.” Too distracted by his own machismo, singer Sully Erna never specifies why he has such harsh words for whomever “you” is supposed to be, and he doesn’t have to. Erna isn’t posturing for just any listener but a select audience he knows will cheer on his every roided tantrum.
Godsmack is part of an aggressive, no-cowards-allowed milieu of hard rock known as “post-grunge” (or pejoratively “butt rock”), which was at its most lucrative during the late 1990s and throughout the aughts, when it dominated both the rock and pop charts. Obscuring the stylistic boundaries between neighboring genres—country, grunge, and the genre which grunge supposedly killed, hair metal—post-grunge is characterized by its dragging tempos, down-tuned chord progressions, sporadic twanginess, and overly passionate vocals. If you took an eighties power ballad’s major key and turned it minor, you’d have a post-grunge song more or less. Even today, as its pop appeal has vanished, it remains viable in the realm of mainstream rock, selling out amphitheaters and filling up the playlists on “Alt Nation”-type stations. It soundtracks WWE pay-per-views; it’s what plays over the loudspeakers in Six Flags food courts. (...)
If anything, what makes post-grunge contemptible is that its hypermasculinity is so hysterically intense and over-the-top. Instead of depth or nuance, post-grunge singers rely on cliches: sweeping imagery and violent sentiments that communicate the frustration they feel towards vague, looming enemies. Groups like Nickelback, Creed, and 3 Doors Down aren’t despised because their singers attempt to confess their feelings, supposedly a feminine gesture, but because their attempts are ultimately evasive in spite of the music’s overbearing fervor. These men keep reassuring themselves that they deserve to be mad and sad as all hell, but they don’t seem to be sure about what exactly.
Which is perhaps to state the obvious: while white male rage and despair went on to define American domestic terrorism in the 2010s, post-grunge—a predominantly white genre—was celebrating these same emotions on the foremost rock and pop stations throughout the country. The problem was not that bands were vocalizing these emotions in the first place, but that rather than looking deeper into rage and despair, they romanticized their surface-level irrationality in one radio hit after another. As a result of its prolonged presence on the airwaves and in other media, such bands helped normalize the extent to which listeners might be willing to articulate their own similar feelings. It’s why the ambiguous, deflective fury of post-grunge has always harbored a largely conservative audience. (...)
In varying forms, hard rock has been at the heart of World Wrestling Entertainment since it began releasing soundtrack albums in the mid-1980s, but at that time the organization was having trouble deciding on a specific direction of hard rock to pursue—evidenced by the track list of an early release, the 1987 Piledriver soundtrack, which includes contributions from various washed-up rockers. Glam guitarist Rick Derringer composed Hulk Hogan’s theme, and he re-recorded with “Mean Gene” Okerlund his only hit, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” from 1973. Singing “Girls in Cars,” the theme for wrestling duo Strike Force, was the very minor yacht-rocker Robbie Dupree, known for his one 1980 hit “Steal Away.” By 1996’s WWF Full Metal soundtrack, the organization had replaced these puzzling classic rock selections with the Slam Jam band, comprised of members of thrash metal groups like Anthrax and Overkill. Still, the WWE couldn’t afford to stick with thrash metal since the music wasn’t consistently comprehensible; the speedy tempo and screamed vocals on a Slam Jam track like “Thorn in Your Eye” are enlivening, though they obfuscate lyrics which explain how wrestling in a cage is a liberating activity. For the sake of pay-per-view viability, the organization needed a hard rock that could express themes of anguish and toughening up at as steady a tempo as possible.
It was with 2002’s Forceable Entry soundtrack that the WWE established its signature sound, hellbent on nu-metal and rap metal, but most of all, post-grunge. The material on this album encapsulates how the latter genre definitively morphed grunge’s mopey navel-gazing into macho self-aggrandizement that guaranteed violence on all fronts: Disturbed has a track about lining people up to murder all of them (they don’t specify how); Creed has one about how being a boy is not the same thing as being a man (in the context of the WWE, should we wonder if what makes this distinction is a tendency for violent behavior?). These bands, however, didn’t reflect the wrestlers’ personal tastes; in fact, it was the complete opposite for someone like Mick Foley, who has written extensively on his Tori Amos fandom.
Staged and comical as it is, the WWE was instrumental in post-grunge’s metamorphosis into aggressive gloominess, thus enabling other domination-oriented sentiments—objectifying women is a big one—to fester throughout discographies. Brace yourself. From Puddle of Mudd’s “Famous,” which has been used in numerous WWE events: “‘Cause I just wanna be famous / Be so fuckin jaded / ‘Cause all the Playboy bunnies take my money from me / Show up at the Oscars / Smoke out Dennis Hopper / The money is for nothing and the chicks are for free.” From Saving Abel’s “Addicted,” not a WWE song unfortunately: “I’m so addicted to / All the things you do / When you’re going down on me / In between the sheets / Oh, the sounds you make / With every breath you take / It’s unlike anything / When you’re loving me.” In these two examples at least, the choppy, gauche lyricism shows how awkward these bands were at performing their sexism, as if they just wanted to meet the bare minimum of commercial hard rock’s required objectification of women. They would have opted to sing about the absence of a lover—giving them the chance to glorify, say, brooding alone in their bedroom—rather than any active romance. “Addicted” comes close to this; besides getting a blow job, it’s about lying face-up in bed and doing nothing.
Godsmack is part of an aggressive, no-cowards-allowed milieu of hard rock known as “post-grunge” (or pejoratively “butt rock”), which was at its most lucrative during the late 1990s and throughout the aughts, when it dominated both the rock and pop charts. Obscuring the stylistic boundaries between neighboring genres—country, grunge, and the genre which grunge supposedly killed, hair metal—post-grunge is characterized by its dragging tempos, down-tuned chord progressions, sporadic twanginess, and overly passionate vocals. If you took an eighties power ballad’s major key and turned it minor, you’d have a post-grunge song more or less. Even today, as its pop appeal has vanished, it remains viable in the realm of mainstream rock, selling out amphitheaters and filling up the playlists on “Alt Nation”-type stations. It soundtracks WWE pay-per-views; it’s what plays over the loudspeakers in Six Flags food courts. (...)
If anything, what makes post-grunge contemptible is that its hypermasculinity is so hysterically intense and over-the-top. Instead of depth or nuance, post-grunge singers rely on cliches: sweeping imagery and violent sentiments that communicate the frustration they feel towards vague, looming enemies. Groups like Nickelback, Creed, and 3 Doors Down aren’t despised because their singers attempt to confess their feelings, supposedly a feminine gesture, but because their attempts are ultimately evasive in spite of the music’s overbearing fervor. These men keep reassuring themselves that they deserve to be mad and sad as all hell, but they don’t seem to be sure about what exactly.Which is perhaps to state the obvious: while white male rage and despair went on to define American domestic terrorism in the 2010s, post-grunge—a predominantly white genre—was celebrating these same emotions on the foremost rock and pop stations throughout the country. The problem was not that bands were vocalizing these emotions in the first place, but that rather than looking deeper into rage and despair, they romanticized their surface-level irrationality in one radio hit after another. As a result of its prolonged presence on the airwaves and in other media, such bands helped normalize the extent to which listeners might be willing to articulate their own similar feelings. It’s why the ambiguous, deflective fury of post-grunge has always harbored a largely conservative audience. (...)
In varying forms, hard rock has been at the heart of World Wrestling Entertainment since it began releasing soundtrack albums in the mid-1980s, but at that time the organization was having trouble deciding on a specific direction of hard rock to pursue—evidenced by the track list of an early release, the 1987 Piledriver soundtrack, which includes contributions from various washed-up rockers. Glam guitarist Rick Derringer composed Hulk Hogan’s theme, and he re-recorded with “Mean Gene” Okerlund his only hit, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” from 1973. Singing “Girls in Cars,” the theme for wrestling duo Strike Force, was the very minor yacht-rocker Robbie Dupree, known for his one 1980 hit “Steal Away.” By 1996’s WWF Full Metal soundtrack, the organization had replaced these puzzling classic rock selections with the Slam Jam band, comprised of members of thrash metal groups like Anthrax and Overkill. Still, the WWE couldn’t afford to stick with thrash metal since the music wasn’t consistently comprehensible; the speedy tempo and screamed vocals on a Slam Jam track like “Thorn in Your Eye” are enlivening, though they obfuscate lyrics which explain how wrestling in a cage is a liberating activity. For the sake of pay-per-view viability, the organization needed a hard rock that could express themes of anguish and toughening up at as steady a tempo as possible.
It was with 2002’s Forceable Entry soundtrack that the WWE established its signature sound, hellbent on nu-metal and rap metal, but most of all, post-grunge. The material on this album encapsulates how the latter genre definitively morphed grunge’s mopey navel-gazing into macho self-aggrandizement that guaranteed violence on all fronts: Disturbed has a track about lining people up to murder all of them (they don’t specify how); Creed has one about how being a boy is not the same thing as being a man (in the context of the WWE, should we wonder if what makes this distinction is a tendency for violent behavior?). These bands, however, didn’t reflect the wrestlers’ personal tastes; in fact, it was the complete opposite for someone like Mick Foley, who has written extensively on his Tori Amos fandom.
Staged and comical as it is, the WWE was instrumental in post-grunge’s metamorphosis into aggressive gloominess, thus enabling other domination-oriented sentiments—objectifying women is a big one—to fester throughout discographies. Brace yourself. From Puddle of Mudd’s “Famous,” which has been used in numerous WWE events: “‘Cause I just wanna be famous / Be so fuckin jaded / ‘Cause all the Playboy bunnies take my money from me / Show up at the Oscars / Smoke out Dennis Hopper / The money is for nothing and the chicks are for free.” From Saving Abel’s “Addicted,” not a WWE song unfortunately: “I’m so addicted to / All the things you do / When you’re going down on me / In between the sheets / Oh, the sounds you make / With every breath you take / It’s unlike anything / When you’re loving me.” In these two examples at least, the choppy, gauche lyricism shows how awkward these bands were at performing their sexism, as if they just wanted to meet the bare minimum of commercial hard rock’s required objectification of women. They would have opted to sing about the absence of a lover—giving them the chance to glorify, say, brooding alone in their bedroom—rather than any active romance. “Addicted” comes close to this; besides getting a blow job, it’s about lying face-up in bed and doing nothing.
by Eli Zeger, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Godsmack
