I've been a fan of the Foo Fighters for a long time. Considering my other listening habits, this may strike some as being really strange. Indeed, I'm a big fan of the Nirvana shoot-off bands: Foo Fighters, Courtney Love, and Garbage. I guess Garbage is less a Nirvana spin-off band than the other two but it does sport Butch Vig who produced the seminal 'Nevermind'. In fact I'd venture to say I like the spin-offs much more than the Nirvana incarnation. I'll get into that in more detail, but suffice to say, part of the Foo Fighters' appeal is the legacy David Grohl carries over from Nirvana - like it or not for Mr. Grohl himself, he's never going to live down being formerly of Nirvana. He's a good sport about it; he even played one song on drums as drummer Taylor Hawkins led the band through a fuzzy little song of his own. Grohl was still aggressive as all-fuck but he's lost some shine off his chops. Probably lack of practice there.What are the Foo Fighters like live? Incredibly tight, and with a turn-on-a-dime mood changes that appeal to crusty Art Rock fan like me. There's a lot of 'solid mounds of rock' that kicks from start to finish but they do leave the arena with the feeling of total combustion. It's a good band still playing at the peak of their powers.
What's Good About Them?
Songs, songs, songs. They write fantastic songs and play them well. They really kick butt in the energy department and as rock shows go, they have a practiced nonchalance that's seemingly devoid of stylistic pretensions. They just play and they are flat-out energetic.
What's Bad About Them
We saw the second show at the Sydney Superdome and it seemed like David Grohl had lost some punch in his vocals. That's it. The crowd was funny. There were so many shirtless rugby forward-types having a ball moshing in front of me, and the intensity of their participation in this largely homoerotic activity was sort of interesting. What is it about great music that draws out all the ugly people? I mean the opposite is nightclubs where beautiful people dance and jiggle to awful mass-produced computer music. What is that? So here I am complaining about their 'clientele'. Well, you do get judged on the dogs with which you run.
Or maybe I just got old and have seen too much. I thought, "Christ almighty, I'm too old for this shite now".
Other than that, it was a great concert.
Other Thoughts
David Grohl is about my age. That is to say, when I look at many of my fave rock acts, I'm used to being much younger than the old farts to whom I listen. This changed with the arrival of the Nirvana generation of acts. They were my age doing what I wanted to do. So in some ways I'm a lot more critical with them than I would otherwise be. Now, I normally don't just praise and nit-pick in short order like the above two sections; I go into a lot more detail, but I want to discuss a few things (with caveats) here instead.
When Nirvana came out it was at the height of revisioning guitar-rock. I have to say I didn't like it anywhere near as much as I liked acts like say, Living Colour or Baby Animals. The thing that bothered me about Nirvana was Kurt Cobain's musical sensibility - a kind of primitivism and willful ignorance that bordered on the cretinous. He may have come out of punk, but even allowing for it, 'Grunge' and the so-called Seattle Sound seemed an attempt to be slick and artless as a pose in of itself. Since his suicide, I've come to ponder the meaning of 'Nirvana-the-band' and its mercurial success a lot more and I've come to the conclusion that he was talking to people younger than me, and so I am never to understand the meaning fully. I just didn't share enough of the same world with old Kurt, which is sort of a shame, but clearly enough people do.
Still, in the aftermath of Nirvana you had David Grohl forming the Foo Fighters and what emerged was a re-branded 90s guitar-rock that was in some ways the opposite of Nirvana. Where Cobain couldn't resist veering off into decidedly unmusical moments, Grohl would rein in the weirdness and pack it tight into a good song. Where Cobain was kinky, Grohl is strictly musical. Even in their stage personae, where Cobain's sexuality and emotional life seemed like a tattered mess for public consumption, Grohl comes across as uncomplicated, heterosexual and ordinary. This contrast in of itself isn't good or bad, but it goes a long way to show why the success of the Foo Fighters dwarfs that of Nirvana. Nirvana won a place in history while Foo Fighters continue to win a place in the market. - Having written this far, it seems there is almost a retread of the Lennon-McCartney thing. Lennon keeps inspiring people - McCartney keeps making tonnes of money and wonders why he is loved less.
I wonder if such a comparison would bother David Grohl. Perhaps what helps the Foo Fighters be so much more successful than Nirvana is that it's just not all that threatening; it's a really ordinary kind of exploration of rock, not an extraordinary exploration of a suburban psychosis. It's music you can mindlessly mosh to; not music to contemplate suicide by.
What comes off the stage from Grohl's band is a down-to-earth sensibility that is so stable in its blokiness, it makes you wonder how he ever sat and drummed for Nirvana. Had Nirvana survived Cobain's death, they wouldn't have survived the inevitable departure of Grohl because this man's abundant talents as a musician run in the opposite direction. I guess that's where the morbid fascination I have with Foo Fighters comes from - You can't help but think about the absent man Cobain when you see the survivor Grohl on stage. Perhaps that's part and parcel with me sharing Grohl's age, having survived Cobain and the '90s - as if the '90s was something that needed 'surviving'.
Kurt, if you thought the '90s were bad, you should see what we're living through right now.
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