And now on to entry #3 in my attempt to go through and review every song on every Trip J Hottest 100 Countdown, from 1993 to the present. The intent has been to find the exact point, if possible, where alternative music in Australia started fall into vague, atonal, apolitical, syrupy irrelevance - or when JJJ started to push it in that direction (you can read more about the rationale here). So far, it's been an interesting step back into nostalgia, while also casting a sharp light on my preconceptions of what alternative music was like during this time. I'm hoping the general eclecticism continues - there's been an decent sampling of non-mainstream genres of music so far - and I'm hoping the run of generic, middle-of-the-road alternative rock (with strong Australian representation) gets a bit more interesting and more vital than it has been so far. I'm also curious to see if there are any more entries that are just outright bad in the same vein as "Three Little Pigs" by Green Jelly. You can read my previous entry in this series, which covers #90 - 81 in the 1993 Hottest 100, here.
80: "Rooster" - Alice in Chains
This is solid grunge from the period, with a strong, meaningful subtext. The music video has plenty of graphic violence, and perhaps the lyrics are also slightly on the nose, but the passion and general directness give these other qualities a justification. This got plenty of radio play back in the day and, until I started looking at the song in preparation for this post, I didn't have any conception that it was a social issues song. Maybe at some level it seeped in. Jerry Cantrell based "Rooster" on his father, who was a Vietnam War veteran and whose trauma had contributed to a rift in the family that led Cantrell to be temporarily homeless. As Yates notes in the Louder Sound article, when you realise this, it makes the ambiguity of Cantrell's perspective in the song interesting. He approaches the subject matter sympathetically, but with a certain amount of critical distance. I wonder if it was weird for him to play this in front of large audiences while touring, or if it was therapeutic. He does trot out the popularly believed (and promoted) narrative that Vietnam veterans were spat on and insulted by anti-war protestors upon their return, which apparently has little basis in reality. You could read into that more ambiguity, or maybe it has something to do with culturally-mediated perceptions past events. Lots of material here for the sort of essay a high school English teacher might dole out to get the student body interested in textual interpretation. I see enough Gen Zs in town wearing Nirvana t-shirts for it to be conceivable that some teenagers today might have heard of Alice in Chains as well.
Musically, "Rooster" is strong and appealing, though a little too crisp. When Layne Staley (who performs the song - Cantrell wrote the lyrics) yells during the chorus he sounds like he's going for something like what Kurt Cobain does, but he ends up sounding more like Axl Rose doing an impression of Eddie Vedder. I never really thought much about how much the trashier arena rock of the eighties bled into or influence the alternative rock of the early 90s. Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins both developed their own sound, and drew from a lot of other sources to do that, so listening to them makes it sound like there was a clean break. But Alice in Chains sounds more of its time. The feedback, the lyrical content, the quiet-to-loud Nivana/Pixies thing, the more drawn out and thoughtful pacing place it comfortably within the alternative rock of the period, but they don't totally escape the kind of music that was charting a few years earlier. Cantrell himself started in a local Seattle glam rock band, then moved into the kind of music being played by his contemporaries in the city. None of this is meant critically. It's a good, powerful, personal song (and it's nice to have something with enough depth to write paragraphs about with ease). The backing vocals are nice as well.
