The other night I stumbled across episodes six and seven of The 7 Ages Of Rock on VH1 Classic. Every time I come across programming like this I’m a sucker for it. Episode six was titled “American Alternative” and had somewhat of a storyline: Kurt Cobain grows up in a backwater logging town and revolutionizes American music. This is more or less true and the episode (narrated, oddly, by Dennis Hopper) sort of cited influences and contemporaries (Mudhoney, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, pretty much any band whose members grew up in a broken home in or around Seattle in the 1970s) and made the obligatory references to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, etc. It was all information I had heard or read elsewhere, which was fine but the way VH1 presents this stuff makes people (well, me) salivate and I cannot figure out why. Episode seven, “British Indie” revolved around Oasis mostly, a band I mostly dislike save for a few songs but they used their “Supersonic” in a couple of different places, a song that is among my all-time favorite songs (yes, I’m aware of what I just said about them), a song so good it makes me want to smoke crack and buy a Rolls-Royce–for the sole purpose of smoking more crack.
The latter episode was the one that stuck with me more. Most of the bands that were discussed in the first episode I worshipped when I was in high school and it was fun to revisit that time in my life, when I first started to care about what I was listening to and took great care to surround myself with it whenever I could. The latter episode however, doesn’t have an ending yet (”American Alternative” was clearly going to end in April of 1994), and (according to the producers of The 7 Ages Of Rock anyhow) it started in 1983 when Morrissey chose to sing into a bouquet of flowers instead of a microphone on “Top Of The Pops” since they would be lip syncing it anyway. I was surprised to hear Johnny Marr speak so glowingly about the Mozzer, but I suppose he realizes they’re responsible for each other’s careers and aging rockers holding grudges is infinitely more disgusting than the young bucks doing it. Throughout all of this, they kept going back to Oasis and I was mesmerized. Somehow, the show made me feel like they might be the greatest band since The Beatles and I’m still not convinced the show’s wrong, even though their last two albums were unspeakably awful and I think The Stone Roses were given short shrift by the show’s producers. VH1 makes my life better somehow, even though I don’t know how exactly that can be and even though I kind of despise it for having the audacity to try and then do it so well. I’m fascinated at it’s ability to make me go beyond want and actually need albums (I would have bought Oasis’ Definitely Maybe new or used had they had it when I went record shopping last night), and once I was almost convinced by another VH1 program that I was an idiot for not owning Def Leppard’s Pyromania, I caught myself that time, but that was a lot earlier in our relationship, when I still had control of it. Now the relationship is clearly out of my control and there is nothing I can do about it.
