In the last post, I talked about the sound of grunge music. This post is about the lyrics.
No Love Songs
No love songs—it’s the King Dutch motto. Let’s just say, as Soundgarden put it, that our grunge music is “louder than love.”
What do I mean by love songs? It’s when you sing about how much you love someone, or how they broke your heart, or how you want to get them into bed. Turn on the radio, and almost everything you hear is in that category. It gets repetitive.
That isn’t true of all genres. Country music is occasionally about driving trucks on Friday nights. Rappers might talk about “life on the streets,” or about buying the next diamond watch. Hip hop can also be political, against the system—similar to folk, metal, and punk.
Grunge is a little different. According to Wikipedia, grunge lyrics are “angst-filled and introspective,” with songs “addressing themes such as social alienation, self-doubt, abuse, neglect, betrayal, social and emotional isolation, psychological trauma and a desire for freedom.” Grunge isn’t always so dark—there are songs about cows, about peaches, about masturbation—but the angsty themes in that list are an important part of the music.
The dictionary tells us that angst relates to feelings of anxiety, and in grunge that anxiety is directed inward, mixing with rage due to the individual’s struggle with the Self. That’s probably why the music still resonates 30 years later—people are always going to have to contend with the way their individuality fits into the world.
Grunge is self-conscious. I think that makes grunge lyrics not only more interesting than the typical pop song, but also more poetic than political songs raging against “the system.” The Irish poet William Butler Yeats agrees with me:
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric. Out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry.”
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
When I write lyrics that struggle with my own self-consciousness—about being misunderstood for feeling like a giant, or about wondering if cloudy days are better for writing songs—I feel like I’m in the grunge sweet spot.
But then again I never want to be too obvious in my lyrics. And sometimes I just like the the way the words sound. Which brings me to my third and final point: grunge is abstract.
I’ll talk about that next time. In the meantime, you can get your tickets to our next show, Aug. 14th at Bar Freda in Brooklyn. Hope to see you there.