Alice in Chains ~ The Greatest Band of the 1990s
Thank you, Layne and Company for Writing the Songs That Needed to be Written <3
I’ve felt compelled to write this article for a VERY long time, and finally, I have found both a time and a way to commit this article to the art crit journal. Today's subject will excite schoolchildren all over the world (just kidding, but I sincerely hope perhaps someday)...and the takeaway is this:
Everything seems to be a "hot-take" in contemporaneity. So here's a take on the music scene from the 90s (specifically, rock and grunge) and the more obvious extrapolation to my overture in the byline regarding my vote for the GOAT band, or at least GOAT in recent memory;
While everyone (and I do mean like, EVERYONE) will argue the merits and case for Nirvana and Cobain as being the last statesmen and gems of rock and roll coinciding with the death of history (with all their points respected and duly noted), I indeed concede that Nirvana was a tremendously talented, eminently listenable group (a personal favorite of mine, for sure). Further, I willfully and wholeheartedly acknowledge that Rage Against the Machine was one of the most uniquely righteous and innovative, ahead-of-its-time quartets that represented all that was right with the counter-culture in the 90s to our present period. I also concede that Trent Reznor, Nas, DMX, Jay-Z, Eminem, and others place in some 90s-2000s' GOAT canon, among others. But what doesn't work for me is the thesis that Nirvana represented the best of the Seattle scene or the last great hurrah in rock and roll history. It's not about diminishing the work and legacy of Cobain and Nirvana but about recognizing the sheer depth of impact in the authenticity, artistry, and musicality of the immensely important Alice in Chains.
Therefore, as you may have inferred, my vote for the greatest band of the ‘90s then, is the forcefully powerful and majestic Alice in Chains. Not only are they an essential listen for any serious rock or grunge fan, journalist, music critic, musician, young kid, the uninitiated, or those diving headfirst into the music of other generations with the commendable objective of discovering new material, but they speak, to my taste, to a greater emotional depth (also breadth, but undoubtedly Alice in Chains carries a more profound depth that many of their contemporaries and subsequent bands did in varying degrees or may have lacked) and perhaps more so even than Cobain, and likely certainly more so than Vedder, Weiland, Hoon, and others did during their respective time at the top often asserting their musicality through little more than heavier variations of REM, or fuzz and wah-wah box soaked sloppy stoner pop rock, which I do genuinely love without question, but Alice also exerted and exhibited all of the above with the added merit of a courage of desperation and through a strainer of heavy metal-grunge fusion with primal intimacy, subtlety, and multi-genre nuance and conceptual value. I assert this can be demonstrated merely by reading the lyrics (apart from listening to the actual vocals paired with the accompanying music) to "Bleed the Freak," "I Stay Away," "Them Bones," "Again," "Down in a Hole," "Junkhead," "Rooster," "Would?", "Man in the Box," and the downright melodic trauma that is "Nutshell." After reading those lyrics:
Watch their live performances on YouTube (watch them play and perform, with particular attention to Staley).
Listen to their LPs and EPs and songs all the way through and then listen again and again and again (make sure you give a good listen to Alice's brooding (and underrated) "Unplugged" album - easily one of MTV's better Unplugged offerings from the era)
So, as you may have guessed, I've always disapproved of certain culturally popular notions that X, Y, or Z are "dead" or "not what they used to be." While this may sometimes legitimately be the case, I refuse to admit defeat. I can be stubborn, and you needn't agree with me; it's not mathematics, chemistry, or biology we're discussing, and frankly, so much of criticism is theory and opinion. But I like to think of culture, music, media, art, and so on as ephemeral constituents or aspects, displaced, misplaced, lost, and then perhaps found again, or emerging, recreating, or residing in multiple places at once, existing concurrently or otherwise existing in unlikely places, or even living forever beyond all other things, which doesn't necessarily mean various media or art forms are seeing "progress," but nor does it mean they've wilted entirely. Still, it's also true that they don't necessarily have to be innovative for innovation's sake (I've written extensively, albeit unsystematically, on the topic of "useless innovation" or "innovation for innovation's sake," as have many others, so no further points or arguments are required); a more apt and succinctly worded question is why must art and music continually be innovative? Why can't a song be a song? Besides, within the art and music world, there will always be some element of subjectivity; as it always shall be, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so too, music's transcendental nature and qualitative aspects exist in audiological residency within the heart and soul of their listeners.
I feel that Alice in Chains has always been more than a 90s-era nostalgia music group for many. They must be appreciated and discussed outside niche circles, particularly within (and outside) pop culture and music. And for both millennials and Gen Z (I can't speak for Gen X), Alice ably personified and perhaps indirectly anticipated the coming century as much as they personified and gave voice to the innate and inherent duality of being human and finding meaning and beauty in the other side of the struggle in an age where recent generations found themselves eye-to-eye with bizarre and hard-to-comprehend problems and issues, forced to cope with a new age of collective trauma, chaos, and sadness and one that has been complex and complicated for all of us. Still, I submit that Alice in Chains precipitated that struggle and made it all the more bearable - and their relevance and social and cultural necessity have only increased as time has passed because they embodied not just power, strength, and resilience in their music and repertoire, but because they lived and breathed it and acted upon it in their words and legacy; not just great music in an era that saw great music slowly get muddled as the new century approached, but as everyone collectively watched American culture decline in the ever-mounting face of technological innovation, honesty, time, and art became the most valuable of all possible currencies. Therefore, Alice still enables us to see the redeemable within the frenzy and within the lunacy, enabling us to feel the power of our strongest selves while putting out records that are characterized by essential antidotes to the showmanship, excesses, shallowness, and egocentric ennui of the preceding two decades. And we were and are better and stronger for having them.
Every single one of their songs is a veritable classic, and every single time you press play or repeat, it plays like you're hearing it for the first time. Sometimes, I feel like Layne and Cantrell are why I'm still here and still kicking. It feels like they lived through my pain with me and our collective pain with us and gave it meaning and substance. In their dueling episodes of mania and despondency, there is a certain solace to be discovered both in their discography and live performances. Indeed, Alice was always more than a simple grunge and pop act of the 80s and 90s. Were they not the true embodiment of what we all experience and feel, just as humans prior, then, ergo, always?
And so, with Layne Staley, Jerry Cantrell, Mike Inez, Mike Starr, and Sean Kinney, the metal rowdy rumble rounded out the most incredible musical group of the 90s (beyond the 90s, maybe the nod goes to RATM, but that's a separate discussion and one for another time and place). I am hedging my bets centuries (yes, I said it, actual centuries) could pass, and still, there won't be another rock musician or vocalist like Layne Staley, someone who could snarl their lips, cock their elbows, and belt and howl, just absolutely fucking howl like Layne did. It was that biker-like scream and whammy yell that could nearly melt industrial paint, and it all came from skinny little Layne. It contained a profound rasp, an admixture of raw power and unmitigated pain; to wit, I believed every goddamn word Layne Staley ever sang, full stop. And more often than not, honesty, pain, and imperfection lie at the heart of art and beauty. His deep, wailing, endless voice, often echoing into an emotive vibrato, was a rarity in popular music (and certainly in rock music) until Alice in Chains came along. And it was with that sui generis quality that degree of skill and intuitive musical might and prowess melded and forged in the frothy riffed firebrand and soulful collaborations between Layne and Cantrell, distinct but complementary, beset with a solid core and backed by the two Mike's (particularly Inez) super creative, and prominently badass basslines that it all came together.
Meanwhile, Sean's full-throttle extra-testosterone-energy-drink-like-infused Bonzo gone Gonzo drum grunge-meets-metal-meets-all-its-own worked in tandem with their respective purveyors of real-deal heavy metal to gloriously heighten the drama of every musical moment and every concert, every song, and every musical phrase the group ever radiated out into the universe or committed to record. Any bit that ever played on the radio or lived in your headphones, that stuff wore and shone outward, screaming into the mathematical infinities of the cosmos trillions of lightyears beyond the Milky Way, forever glowing with the immortal light of its own brilliance.
And it was Layne's distinctive, versatile, and ass-kicking voice; it was his precocity and his power, despite (or because of) his pain, perhaps the central energy converging like sixteen subcritical masses percolating to the top of everything and everyone he and his voice and lyrics touched, with a totally deathless sincerity, -- Layne and Alice thus were totally separated from their contemporaries in a multiplex manner; Layne was a natural-born talent who could destroy and heal simultaneously, perfectly paired with Cantrell's multi-talented, visionary virtuosity the requisite conglomeration of converging stylistics thus manifested and continues to echo down the decades; the group was an unstoppable force of nature, and in myriad ways, decades on they still live on at 110% amps jacked all the way up, and are just as breathtaking, and just as powerful as ever, despite there being a generation or two since their dissolution and since they released a record. And even though the overly-gifted Layne passed over twenty years ago, that voice ain't gonna die. Yeah, no, no, no, you know that voice ain't gonna die.
Thank you, fellas <3
~ alexej