Category: 1991

It’s our 50th episode and to celebrate that we’re having a special treat: One of the most important, influential and decade-defining videos of the 1990’s.

One night in the winter of 1990 Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill, and Kurt Cobain were out spraying graffiti in the streets of Seattle and got hideously plastered before hanging out at his room, where the intoxicated Hanna took out a sharpie and began to write on the walls. As Cobain had been recently dumped by her bandmate Tobi Vail she thought it important to let her readers now that he reeked of Vail’s deodorant, “Teen Spirit”. Alas, the meaning was lost on Cobain, who read “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a compliment of his rebellious essence and asked Hanna for permission to use the phrase for the title of a song he had been working on. He intended it to be “the ultimate pop song – ripping off The Pixies”. The manufacturer of the deodorant certainly welcomed the free publicity…

The song became a huge hit and as a result Cobain was often considered a spokesman for Generation X – for whom “Here we are now, entertain us” became somewhat of a credo – , which he despised just as much as the term “Grunge” that was assigned to their music.

The audience in the video was recruited at a Nirvana concert a few days earlier, where director Samuel Bayer handed out flyers looking for kids between 18 and 25, attending as a typical high-school persona: punk, nerd, jock (Well, most of them were. The cheerleaders came from a local strip club). They had expected to be there for an hour or so, but were ordered to sit in the stands and look bored for more than 11 hours, while the band was acting out a prep rally. As a result there was quite some pent up aggression when they finally requested to destroy the set – and when permitted so they did. The mosh pit and destruction is quite real.

Up to this point it was the norm for people on MTV to be pretty and trendy and initially the network refused to play the video. However, they finally gave in and due to the video the practice actually changed, paving the way for artists with “radio faces” – and by the year 2000 it had become the most played video on MTV Europe.

Note from the editor: So we made it to 50 videos. Yay! Unfortunately the two visitors we get on a good day don’t really justify the time required to keep up the pace, which is why starting next week we’re cutting down to two episodes per week. Thank you for your understanding!

Michael “Flea” Balzary and Anthony Kiedis formed their band “Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem” in 1983 when they were classmates at Fairfax High School. It would undergo a fair number of changes before becoming the group that is known these days as the “Red Hot Chilli Peppers”: to the name and personnel, but also to their musical style (with Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley playing on their second album) and quite noteably their lifestyles.

After their early modest success they had all been using heroin, but while most of the members somehow held together, the addiction took quite a toll on Kiedis. The band was already auditioning for a new singer when he managed to overcome the problem in rehab and rejoined them with new enthusiasm. As is often the case, he came down with bouts of depression, and when he drove home from a rehearsal session a few years later a poem came unto him, reminiscing about how he had been under the bridge he was just driving over a few years back, looking for drugs, and how he never wanted to get back to that low point in his life.

When producer Rick Rubin found the poem in Kiedis’ notebook he immediately saw potential, but the singer was reluctant. However, once he was persuaded to at least show it to his bandmates they immediately went to their respective instruments and started working on the song.

It kicked their career into high gear, out of the somewhat obscure Alternative Rock scene into mainstream. And when the video, directed by none other than Gus Van Sant entered heavy rotation on MTV they definitely had arrived in the olymp of pop music.

November 11th, 1991 marked the 15th birthday of a close friend of mine. But that’s not what I remember the day for. What stood out that day was the news on the telly, specifically 10vor10, which back then was a fairly new addition to the Swiss news scene, outfitted with an extraordinary permission to experiment a bit. And so they did:

As one of a select few television channels in the world DRS (as the channel was called back then) was allowed to broadcast Michael Jackson’s newest video: “Black or White”. It would be featuring mind-numbing “morphing” technology on faces – something a room full of computers had been working on for months, as the presenter, Walter “index finger of the nation” Eggenberger, was proud to inform us. Sure, it wasn’t the moon-landing, but it was presented in a similar way and including the introduction it took up more than half of the 30 minutes the programme was allotted.

So we sat. And we watched. And we saw Macaulay – you might never have heard that name, but he is the sole reason for any of your friends – well, these days probably: your uncles – being called Kevin. Branding a pristine Gibson’s guitar. And then there were Tess Harper, John Goodman, Tyra Banks!

We were properly impressed at the time.

Yes, you do have to watch it to the end. And no, we did not understand those last four minutes either.