There's a funny culture angle here to me, which is that I knew the song (it was the right time and genre for my brief era of listening to radio - RIP, 99.1 WHFS) but not the video, because videos only existed on cable TV, which we didn't have out in the boonies. So controversies or discussions about the video are just from an alien planet as far as I've been concerned.
Over the past couple of years my wife and I have been watching a livestreamed music/video show every few weeks ("Transmission" by DJ Jake Rudh out of Minneapolis), and even when I know the music, the videos are utterly baffling. It's just a genre I entirely missed.
We had cable TV in town, but I still remember the time in high school when one guy mocked a very rural friend with "What was on UHF last night?"
Mostly, I made jokes about the "Center for Missing and Exploited Children", because why did both have to be the case before it was a problem. Either seemed sufficient cause for worry to me.
It should probably be two different group, since exploited children who aren't missing probably need lawyers but missing children, exploited or not, need finding. Different skill sets.
Maybe that's why they didn't find any kids and why I'm such a good consultant?
By 1993 I considered myself too cool for WHFS, so I'm not familiar with the song.
One of the greatest pop songs from that era, and still one of the greatest pop songs.
Just listened to the whole Grave Dancer's Union album last month, it still holds up.
I have a hard time considering grunge music as pop, because I am so fond of bubblegum pop, and musically they are extremely different. As much as I looked the part, I didn't ever connect with most grunge music.
I was into ska, which, musically, is a lot closer to bubblegum pop than to grunge.
I have this song many times, but until now I didn't know it was by Soul Asylum. Also, I have heard of Soul Asylum, but I couldn't have named any of their songs.
Furthermore, I don't get what is grunge about the song. I get that the band is grunge, because it looks like they haven't washed their hair in a while.
12: please add "heard" to the first sentence.
one-earworm brain, never going back
won't change, it's the only track
sure'd like to be forgetting somewhere
somehow it's staying stuck in there
I wonder how the current administration at Slate justifies to Washington Post eyeshade-wearers its new editorial policy of "Advice columns and young people reminding Generation X that it's old."
When I read about the music video on Wikipedia (before it occurred to me to click the link), the "over 1 million youth lost on the streets of America" part stood out to me. As I thought, that's from a statistic of people reported missing over the course of a year, the vast majority of whom are soon found. Evergreen!
Soul Asylum isn't exactly grunge. They were a regional band in Minneapolis doing their thing for 10 years before this album came out. I think the timing isn't that they were influenced by grunge before making the record, but instead that they got successful because they already existed and were grunge enough?
Lol, here's a 1986 review of Soul Asylum with a bizarrely prescient use of "runaway train."
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-07-ca-21904-story.html
I don't think a band has to originate from scratch during an era in order to embody it.
Never liked the song, never liked the band. "Leave Without a Trace" is OK.
I think 17 is roughly correct in terms of arrow of causation, but in terms of style or genre or whatever, I'm pretty sure it's just one of those things where something's in the air, and once you know what to look for, you can find plenty of close-enough instances. I mean, it's basically convergent evolution: rock musicians of a certain age, circa 1991, all had similar baskets of primary influences*, they converged in the cheap housing of post-white flight cities during the recession and developed similar, cynical attitudes. Different local scenes had different particular influences, and individuals might pull from very different ones, so it's not as if every city had the same array, but they ended up in cognate places: crunchy guitars, quiet/loud, ironic lyrics. That's not definitionally grunge but, like I said, close enough when you're looking to sign acts.
*speaking to ones who weren't intentionally or self-consciously playing in genres; like, hair metal bands had smaller overlap with the bunch of bands that ended up on alternative radio playlists in 1994 (although of course some hair bands jumped on the bandwagon to get that airplay, but they didn't start in the same place)
Anyway, I don't think I ever knew there was a mythology around the video in the OP.
Funny convergence: I've got YouTube on in the background 'cos I wanted to hear "Leave Without a Trace" to refresh my memory, then it played "Sister Havana", then it played a West Elm ad about how "home is where you define yourself" or some similar tagline, as they're showing the kind of generically tasteful greige decor we discussed last week (although, in their defense, there's some color in there; it's not quite as generic as Air BnB decor).
I think they were considered "post-punk" before the grunge label was a thing.
20.2 just like a fair number of mid-70s punk bands were really just pub bands typical of that era (e.g. the Vibrators).
They had an acoustic album where they were the Dildos.
Not exactly relevant to the conversation, but legend has it that Soul Asylum lead singer Dave Pirner is the person who first responds to the Minneapolis police in the intro to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGxINyXiVgQ
Yeah, I mean they're grunge-ish, but I think the history also explains why some people wouldn't hear it as grunge, like in 12.
Grunge is overrated, but flannel was nice.
I moved to New England so I could be in a place where I would still be accepted for wearing flannel.
8: I still remember a moment when I heard a DJ on HFS -- my brain says it was Dave Marsh, but I think it would have been after he left -- get super excited because they thought a listener had requested a song by the Shaggs, only to grind to a disappointed halt when they realized the caller actually wanted "Mr. Boombastic" by Shaggy.