Dave Grohl is the Phil Collins of alt-rock. I don’t know how else to put it. Just as Collins took over the post-Peter Gabriel Genesis and continued to play a watered down version of their best music, Grohl inherited the Nirvana formula from the late Kurt Cobain and has been playing diluted variations on it since.
Grohl and the Foo Fighters can rock out like nobody’s business, but his sound has always struck me as generic, bland even. His songs strike me as genre exercises, and his reuse of Nirvana’s patented quiet-loud-quiet-loud shtick wears thin. Worst of all, Grohl’s screamed choruses and expressions of rage sound false—imitations of Cobain’s very real expressions of angst—rather than earned. Grohl isn’t tortured and he’s not enraged—he’s just a nice, normal American guy. He’s certainly not angry or self-hating enough to blow his brains out, and by pretending he is he has never done himself any favors.
In short, Dave Grohl lacks the capacity to move me. At all. Perhaps it lies in the fact that—as not one but several people put it to me—he lacks soul. Kurt Cobain had soul to spare, so much soul in fact it killed him, but Dave Grohl is just a well-adjusted boy from Washington, D.C. When I listen to him rage away I feel like Bob Dylan, who after being branded a traitor in England responded, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” Not that I think Grohl is prevaricating. Rather, I think his skill set and time with Cobain have doomed him to forever play a kind of Nirvana Mark II, which unlike the Mark I version lacks the explosive emotional power supplied by Cobain’s nausea, disgust, and self-hatred. Grohl is the Man Who Would Be Cobain, but in reality is but a shadow successor, someone who can produce the requisite noises but can’t infuse them with the pain that Cobain—who wore his nerves outside his skin and truly had a hellhound on his trail—could evoke at will.
Grohl’s musical journey took him from Washington, D.C.’s Scream to Seattle’s Nirvana just in time to record Nevermind. Following Cobain’s suicide Grohl weighed his options, and actually spent a very brief stint as drummer for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers before finally deciding to record an album all by his lonesome. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, he invented a band and called it the Foo Fighters. The record, which was released in 1995, was a hit. Thereafter he collected some musicians and put together a real band, and the rest is history.
The Foo Fighters are a real conundrum. I find it hard to criticize their albums, but I don’t like them. This is especially true of the band’s 1995 self-titled debut. Opener “This Is a Call” has everything you could want in a song—catchy verses and choruses, a big sound, those great drums—and yet it leaves me cold. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that it sounds like it’s already been done. This is the second song to scale Mt. Everest, and the first one was by a band called Nirvana. That said I do like the guitar play that ends the song. The same goes for follow-up “I’ll Stick Around,” which features laid-back verses punctuated by loud guitars, and then explodes on the choruses. Sound familiar? “I don’t owe you anything,” he screams over and over, and one can’t help but wonder if this is a message from Grohl—and declaration of independence as it were—to the shade of Kurt Cobain. If so, it’s a failure, because “I’ll Stick Around” owes its existence to Kurt Cobain’s songwriting. It makes one think that Grohl should have called his band Nirvana Jr.
I like “Big Me” because it varies enough from the Nirvana template to sound original, even if one can still hear the echoes of Grohl’s previous band in its grooves. It’s a melodic pop song and never goes off like a hand grenade, and I’m grateful for that. If I had to listen to a Foo Fighters song, say once a day, this is the one I’d choose. “Alone + Easy Target” opens with some cool guitars and barbaric drums, and then turns into a Nirvana song before your very ears. It’s a good song—the melody is worth writing home about—but it sounds derivative, and the choruses aren’t half as fetchingly melodic as the verses. Me, if I want to hear a Nirvana song, I’ll turn on Nirvana, because everything about this tune sounds second hand.
“Good Grief” does nothing for me, melodically, musically, or otherwise. It moves briskly along, Grohl singing in that non-emotive voice of his, and even when things get really furious I’m left indifferent. It strikes me as a cipher of a song, despite the screamed choruses with their big guitars. “Floaty” opens on a nice note with strummed acoustic guitars, and is pretty good, original sounding even. The melody is nice, and I can listen to it without thinking, “Did Nirvana put out an album of sub-par music I’ve somehow never heard?” Still, I would never turn it on of my own volition, so how good can it be? “Weenie Beenie” boasts some heavily distorted vocals, a big chugging guitar, and stop-and-start drums, and actually approaches the threshold of noise rock. I say almost because it’s too polite and controlled to pass for real noise rock, which I suppose makes it noise rock lite, a genre that I had never heard of before the Grohl invented it.
“Oh, George” is bombastic and loud and features big power chords and might work if everything about the melody and Grohl’s vocals didn’t remind me of Cobain. The chorus is all Nirvana too, and as for the album’s sole guitar solo, it doesn’t quite pass muster. “For All the Cows” opens on a shambolic note, with quiet vocals, a laid-back guitar, and some casual stick work, and then goes ballistic on you before reverting to laid-back mode. Only to go ballistic again. And where have I heard this before? “X-Static” opens with some cool guitar wank, and then the drums come in. Grohl’s vocals are hushed, and joined on the choruses by other vocals, and to the extent that this one doesn’t follow the Nirvana template I like it more than most of the other songs on the album. In fact, like “Big Me,” I wouldn’t even mind hearing it again, although I never will if I have anything to do with it.
“Wattershed” is a salute to hardcore (that “Watt” in the title refers to the ex-Minutemen bassist) but doesn’t do much for me, because it’s, well—generic is the only word that comes to mind. It’s not a good hardcore song, much less a great one, although it has all the hardcore trappings. Finally there’s “Exhausted,” which goes the soft-loud route and features more hushed vocals, and which reminds me of guess who? I do like how the song seems to go out on an appropriately exhausted note, with a weary guitar drone and some bedraggled drumming, before briefly kicking back into motion.
Foo Fighters are a giant band, an arena band, and I suppose that should mean something until you remember Grand Funk were a big band, an arena band too. I could go on, as I want to, about what it says about the American listening public that they can’t get enough second-hand music, while ignoring bands that are truly mining new ground. The critic Robert Christgau wrote of the Foo Fighters debut, “The spirit is strong but the identity is weak,” and I think that about sums it up. Grohl gave it his utmost, but he was simply too much in thrall to Nirvana and Cobain to make his own mark. I think he’s made strides in escaping Cobain’s shade over the years, but I still find his music to be both colorless and generic. In one of the songs on the debut Grohl sings, “How could it be I’m the only one who sees your rehearsed insanity?” He might as well have been singing about himself. It’s hard to crawl out from beneath a shadow as imposing as the one cast by the late Kurt Cobain, and the task, on this LP, was too much for Grohl. Which isn’t to say he hasn’t recorded some excellent songs or that he’s not a nice guy. He has and he is. But as Leo Durocher once said, “Nice guys finish last.”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C-
