LOLLAPALOOZA, report
The Guardian, August 29th 1991

by Simon Reynolds


Lollapalooza means a bizarre happening. Lollapalooza is a mobile rock festival currently traversing the US, a package of seven alternative bands (including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Living Colour, and Butthole Surfers) headlined by Jane’s Addiction, the Los Angeles-based art metal group who dreamed the whole thing up. Recession has led to the collapse of many of this summer’s US tours; Lollapalooza is one of the few that’s selling out, even adding shows in some of the 21 cities on its itinerary.

The more sanguine US commentators have dubbed it as “Woodstock for the Lost Generation”. That sounds fanciful, but although none of the shows pull more than twenty thousand kids, if you factor in the 26 performances being played you get a combined audience of nearly a half a million -- close to the number who attended Woodstock. The difference is that for Woodstock, Sixties youth traveled huge distances for the sake of an ideal; with Lollapalooza, the festival comes to the kids.

The festival was the brainchild of Jane’s Addiction’s charismatic singer Perry Farrell and drummer Stephen Perkins. The idea was conceived when the band attended the UK’s Reading Festival, a three day “alternative” rock jamboree, and, impressed, began to wonder why there was nothing like it in America. Farrell immediately saw an opportunity to create an event that was more than just a budget-price opportunity for kids to check out a load of bands. So each Lollapalooza performance comes with a sideshow of booths and displays operated by political, ecological and human rights organizations: Handgun Control Inc, Refuse and Resist, national Abortion Rights Action League, Rock the Vote (an MTV sponsored group that encourage young people to register to vote) and more. There’s also an “art tent” featuring work by local artists selected by Farrell (himself a Renaissance man, who sculpts, paints and has a full-length movie under his belt).

Lollapalooza is a riposte to the “twentysomething” debate that raged through the US media earlier this year. A number of critics and commentators characterized Eighties post-punk youth as a lost and defeated generation, impotent, directionless, and scared of political and emotional commitment. Overall, it was argued that the “twentysomethings” have failed to come up with a distinctive culture of their own to rival the baby boomer generation’s contributions (the counter culture and punk rock).

Lollapalooza is an attempt to rally the twentysomethings, to restore a sense of rock as a counter-culture rather than an over-the-counter leisure industry. “I predict a very strong youth movement will grown out of Lollapalooza,” Farrell told me in May. “I want there to be a sense of confrontation. But I’m not declaring myself left or right wing. I want to bring both sides into it.”

So how did it pan out in reality? I went to the New York area’s date (a couple of hours drive out to Waterloo Village in the wilds of New Jersey) with high hopes. But problems, or at least realities, intruded. One of the reasons the twentysomething generation seems to lack an identity is that it has too many cultural options, so that you either become a partisan of one subculture or you succumb to a schizoid eclecticism.

Lollapalooza’s bill reflects the fragmented nature of modern left-field music, ranging from Nine Inch Nails’ overblown electro-theatre to Butthole Surfers’ acid rock buffoonery to Sioxuse’s Goth and Ice T’s gangsta rap. Most of these groups attempt to reconcile or transcend genres, in order to achieve “crossover”. Living Colour blend metal, funk, jazz, soul et al into a polite, ungainly fusion with impecceable left-liberal credentials but little sense of danger. Ice T (now a superstar thanks to his role in the movie New Jack City) tried a more interesting gambit--not fusion, but fission, a split persona. For the first half of his set, he was “black”, a baleful rap hoodlum; for the second half, he tore off his cap, let loose flowing locks and rocked out as a “white” headbanger in his very own metal combo Body Count.

The counter cultural element of the festival was a shambles. The art was tediously “taboo-breaking” stuff (computer warped images, art made of detritus and found material), while the political aspect was more piously right-on than Perry Farrell had hoped. Overall, the event was marred by disorganization. Bringing your own food or water was forbidden, but they didn’t provided enough food concessions to cope with the demand.

What actually unites the youth of today was never really articulated. Most performers swore a lot, which went down well with the crowd, and there were various platitudinous expressions of opposition to censorship. But the most pronounced unifying aspect of the twentysomethings is a kind of voyeurism. This is typified by one of the groups participating in the cultural sideshow element of Lollapalooza--Amok, a publisher and distributor of “extremist information”; magazines and books by or about serial killers, conspiracy theorists, crackpots, and weird cults, plus video compliations of atrocities and autopsies.

Jane’s Addiction themselves are a great band languishing for the lack of a cultural context that would make them a world-historical force. (Hence Lollapalooza). After two brilliant major label albums--Nothing’s Shocking and 1990’s Ritual De Lo Habitual--they’ve built up a huge cult following, through reinvoking a sense of rock as an underground--a dark haven of deviant and transgressive behaviour. Jane’s Addiction are like an intellectual cousin to Guns “n’Roses.

Even performing below their transcendent best, Jane’s Addictoin fuse idioms (heavy rock, funk, ethnic music, psychedelia, Goth) in a far more volatile and incendiary fashion than Living Colour or anybody else in the “funk’n’roll” genre. Clearly, Farrell desperately wants his audience to live out their fantasies, rather than live through Jane’s Addiction vicariously. For Farrell, the only sins are self-denial, boredom and nostalgia. As the encore “Classic Girl” goes: “they may say, ‘those were the days’, but you know, for us, these are the days.” I was left feeling that the twentysomething generation, listless and impassive, doesn’t deserve Jane’s Addiction.

METAL BREAKDOWN: The Funk-Metal phenomenon
20/20, 1990.

by Simon Reynolds

When it comes to the USA’s current birth explosion of funk-metal groups, all paternity suits should be filed with the Red Hot Chili Peppers: a “seminal” band in all senses of the word. Five years ago this Los Angeles group’s Freaky Styley LP coined a sound, an attitude and an onstage dementia that has since inspired an entire genre.

First there was Faith No More from Northern California, with their torrid, overwrought fusion of metal, rap and funk, and their morbid fixation on the darker side of life. Faith No More rapidly overtook the Chili Peppers, and last year cracked the MTV mainstream with their Top Ten hit “Epic”, an anthem-like encapsulation of their cartoon Nietzche world-view.

In 1990, the funk-metal floodgates opened. Most of the time, the names tell you everything you need to know: Psychofunkapus, Scatterbrain, Limbomaniacs, Mindfunk, Sprawl, Sweet Lizard Illtet, Moneyspank, Electric Boys, Spin Doctors. All these bands are loosely aligned to the P-funk creed originally formulated by George Clinton and Bootsy Collins (“a creative nuisance… the recognition of stupidity as a positive force”) as reactivated and reinterpreted by the Chili Peppers with their combination of zany antics, horny-like-a-mutha lyrics and elasticated funk-rock.

How is it that a generation of metalheads reared on Black Sabbath, Led Zep and Aerosmith have suddenly become turned on to Funkadelic, James Brown and Sly Stone? One reason for the shift towards funk was a reaction against the sterile impasse that metal had reached by the late Eighties. Heavy metal had undergone a striking regeneration during the Eighties, reforming its worst abuses and trimming off its flabby excesses. It even achieved a degree of raised consciousness with the apocalyptic protest of groups like Metallica and Anthrax.

But the thrash/speedmetal boom rapidly hit a dead end. With its high-velocity blur and self-flagellating S/M aesthetic, thrash was about as sexless and ungroovy as rock music can get. Light years from rock’s R&B roots, thrash was the ultimate Aryan sublimation of metal. It was almost inevitable there would be a call for a reinfusion of ‘blackness’, a return to syncopation. Even mainstream metal groups have been lubricating their sound with a bit of funk fluency (Poison’s “Unskinny Bop”, Extreme’s “Get the Funk out”).

Another factor was the influence of rap: hip hop has set the agenda for US pop in much the same way that house has completely overhauled British chart pop. In particular, it was Def Jam’s rap/metal phase (Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J) that opened a lot of headbangers’ ears. Also part of the ‘crosstown traffic’ of the late Eighties was the rise of black rock. Groups like Living Colour, 24-7 Spyz and Fishbone, coming from the opposite direction, have run head-first into the funk-metallers.

This connects with another reason for the rise of funk-metal: musicians’ tendency to get bored easily. Mixing genres allows the muso to show off. Once upon a time, it was the blues solo that provided the pretext for exhibitionist feats of dexterity: with the funk-metallers, it’s slap bass. In both cases, white musicians colonized a style that its black originators had almost unanimously left for dead. Contemporary black dance (house, swingbeat, rap) is technophile, happy to engage with state-of-the-art equipment. Funk-metal generally displays a Luddite techno-fear, following the Chili Peppers’ “organic anti-beatbox” creed, which declares that audience pleasure is in direct ratio to the amount of flailing energy expended by the band.

Body-awareness is at the core of funk-metal. In part this is a reaction against the chaste, fleshless aura of most metal. Death metal, for instance, is carnographic rather than pornographic. Its histrionic crescendos are more nuclear detonations than orgasms. And partly it’s that George Clinton’s lewd and lubricious bad-ass persona somehow seems a more acceptable role model for the male libido than trad metal’s penile dementia.

But funk-metal comprehends a range of contradictory attitudes to the body. On one hand, there’s the West Coast’s health-and-efficiency ethos--muscle-bound athleticism and the hardcore punk philosophy of straight-edge (no drink or drugs). Sweet Lizard Illtet sing of positive energy, rail against “merry-go round thrills” and aspire to the “honest bodily togetherness” of Afro-American culture. Other groups aspire to the debauchery and excess of a different West Coast culture. There’s the apocalyptic aura of decadence entwined around Jane’s Addiction, whose art-rock inflected brand of heavy metal brilliantly melds influences from funk, dub reggae and Eastern music. Or there’s Moneyspank’s pagan/voodoo vibes and sex-and-death lyrics. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ career has included body worshipping (they invariably perform with their shirts off to showcase their muscled physiques) and desecrating their body-temples: guitarist Hillel Slovak died of a drug overdose, while singer Antwan aka Anthony Kiedis cleaned up his act and exchanged over-indulgence for New Age eco-platitudes.

All funk-metal groups agree that one form of self-abuse is still legitimate: moshing, stage-diving and other forms of lemming-like behaviour are de rigeur. Funk-metal gigs seethe with sweaty male bonding. This is the genre’s biggest defect--it’s a boy’s own affair. Not one of the score or more funk-metal bands includes a female musician. Admittedly, examples of outright sexism are surprisingly rare (one exception being Limbomaniacs whose Stinky Grooves LP includes songs like “Butt Funkin’” and “Porno”). But it’s also true that the represensation of sex in funk-metal is totally masculine--thrust-orientated, with no place for languor or tenderness. In many ways, it’s an aggregation of the most phallocratic tendencies in the white rock and black funk traditions: Rick James meets Robert Plant.

Still, funk-metal earns a Brownie point for its anti-racist tendencies. Implicit in the musical miscegenation, these are often explicitly articulated in lyrics and interviews. The Chili Peppers even started a fashion for songs about the plight of the Native American with their “American Ghost Dance”. That said, the pro-integration sentiments don’t seem to have had much effect on the racial composition of the audiences or indeed of the bands themselves, who remain almost exclusively “white dopes on funk”.