Predicting Super Bowl LX Based on How Good Each City's Rock Music Is
Grunge is dead, long live grunge
I won’t mention the outlet that published it, but I read a preview of the NFC Championship game that must’ve been 2,000 words but could have been written in 25: “Los Angeles likes to create mismatches on offense, and the Seattle defense solves for that by having guys that are simply good at everything.” There. That was it. That was the preview. I saved you so much time.
This article will be a far better read and way better researched than any game preview could be. I’m not going to predict this weekend’s Super Bowl based on a hard-hitting analysis of the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. I’m going to predict the Super Bowl based on how good the rock music from each city is. For our purposes, we will limit the musical scope of the New England Patriots to the city of Boston.
BOSTON: A CITY THAT PAAAHRKS THE CAR
I don’t mean to imply that Boston has added nothing of value to modern American culture. I mean to state it very plainly: Boston has added nothing of value to modern American culture.1
I’m sure that the lab coats at MIT invent some good things when the defense department isn’t giving them $131 million a year to come up with new and innovative ways of vaporizing people, and I’m sure some good work come out of Harvard when its students aren’t dropping out to build tech startups called “Bloop” which find new and innovative ways of exploiting monetizing existenital dread.
There have been plenty of really interesting movies set in the city and the surrounding areas. The Departed, Mystic River, The Verdict, American Fiction, Good Will Hunting—all great films, all also directed by people not from Boston (New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Tucson, Louisville).
But in terms of music, there are many, many rock bands from Boston, though no meaningful, impactful group can be ascribed as inextricably “Boston.” We can point to any number of cities—Detroit, Liverpool, and, yes, Seattle—and immediately think of a handful of artists who come from there and we’d all agree that they are quintessentially of that city. These bands simply exist, floating and bereft of identity outside of vague concepts like “cool” and “rock.”
In terms of sheer popularity and legacy, Aerosmith is the biggest musical act from Boston. I’ve listened to plenty of their songs but had never stopped to consider where they were from. I would have guessed Los Angeles, New York, or maybe Philadelphia, with the latter only because they were heavily featured on the soundtrack to the Mark Wahlberg Disney vehicle where he plays a bartender who tries out for the Philadelphia Eagles.
At any rate, some would call Aerosmith a claim to fame for the city. Those same people can explain to you, through slurred speech, about how impactful they were in the 70s, how it’s a crime they weren’t properly appreciated until the 80s and 90s, and how much it sucks to have to blow into a breathalyzer before starting your car.
I’ll admit to liking Aerosmith’s hits. They’re the type of songs that transcend space, time, and taste. In a hundred years, people will still be listening to “Dream On,” “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” and “Sweet Emotion,” but they will be doing so armed with the knowledge that it’s knitsch, and the group’s history and output will be of artistic and intellectual interest only to a single music scholar writing an extremely niche thesis called “Constitutional Law as Intrepreted Through the Lens of American Idol Judges.”2
There are other bands from Boston. The Pixies, for example, whose cultural impact is limited to how their output influenced other bands rather than the output itself. The band Boston is also, shockingly, from Boston. Their first album sold about a bajillion copies because it dared to ask, “how hard is it to improve on prog rock?” And the answer was “not hard at all” because the thing they were trying improve on was prog rock.
SEATTLE: THE LAST GREAT ROCK’N’ROLL MOVEMENT
My contempt for Boston and Aerosmith and Aerosmith fans is mostly a bit. But my contempt for prog rock is not a bit. I resent the way it demands the listener’s attention, usually for 23 minutes at a time, and begs you to admire its complexity. “Look at me, look at me,” every song seems to say, holding up 52 pages of sheet music and staring up at you with cloying puppy dog eyes, “I wrote a song in 39/8 time and the key of up-my-ass-sharp, pat me on the head and call me special.”
Enter Soundgarden’s Superunknown. It slaps the sheet music out of pro rock’s hands and bellows, “thou shalt not mistake engineering for art.”
Your average man on the street would call Nirvana’s Nevermind the zenith of Seattle’s alternative rock scene, but that is why he is average. Soundgarden’s magnum opus is the best thing to come out of that scene. It’s a 15-track odyssey that blends heavy metal with The Beatles’ melodic sensibility, seamlessly moving back and forth between Led Zeppelin-esque riffs and the soulful mourning characteristic of the portion of the John Lennon songbook I call “The Mental Breakdown Specials” (“Nobody Loves You” remains painfully underappreciated). The record’s best remembered for its crossover hit single, “Black Hole Sun,” which sounds like a Black Sabbath impression of Sgt. Pepper (only good), but I’ll forever go to bat for “The Day I Tried to Live,” a compositionally weird song that follows the day in the life of a depressive trying to be optimistic even though everything keeps going about as wrong as he thought it would.
It’s emblematic of 90s grunge, a defiantly anti-commercial punk-meets-metal mishmash. It was the last great movement of rock’n’roll. The 2000s Long Island emo punk scene gave it a go by taking the genre’s angst and replacing the chuggy guitars with a more accessible pop sensibility, but it never produced vocalists like Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, or the Screaming Trees’s Mark Lanegan, or instrumentalists like drummer Matt Cameron and guitarist Mike McCready.
Seattle’s rock scene is not solely defined by a roughly ten-year period that ended in a wave of suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction. It’s continued to pump out good music. The indie rock crazy of the 2000s was powered, not insignificantly, by the Northwest, with the influential Fleet Foxes and Sunny Day Real Estate coming from Seattle proper. In terms of hip hop—which I don’t think of rock music but the Rock’n’roll Hall of Fame does for some reason—Seattle produced Sir Mix-a-Lot and, more recently, Macklemore, who released “Hind’s Hall” at the height of the Gaza War, making him the first major musical artist (and as far as I know only) to have the balls to issue a single calling Israel a genocidal apartheid state.
CONCLUSION: SEAHAWKS RULE, PATRIOTS DROOL
Almost everything cool from Boston is not actually from Boston. Dunkin’ Donuts, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Bill Burr—all from the suburbs. Bill Simmons was born in the suburbs but grew up in Connecticut.
If you did not get this joke, I regret to inform you that Steve Tylor was a judge on the show from 2009 to 2014.