Longreads

After one of the headiest years in Chicago rock history—a time when the city usurped Seattle as the new alt-rock hotspot, thanks to Smashing Pumpkins going platinum with the colossal guitar symphony "Siamese Dream," and Liz Phair and Urge Overkill releasing the critically acclaimed and demonstrably cool "Exile In Guyville" and "Saturation"—local music critic Bill Wyman stated an opinion that seems obvious now, but ended up being quite the shit-stirrer when he wrote it.

The perils of fame in grunge-era Seattle, and the trouble with avoiding it. "Still, the video for 'Even Flow' succeeded in doing for Pearl Jam what the 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' video had done for Def Leppard four summers earlier: It made you wish really hard that Pearl Jam would come somewhere near your town very soon."

There really is life after death in ’90s rock, provided you can retain enough of your old sound to convince people to move forward with you. But while the surviving members of Alice In Chains made sure to present their band as a newly evolved entity, Sublime’s Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson are trying to pick up where they were forced to leave off in 1996, when their lead singer, Bradley Nowell, died of a heroin overdose at age 28.

Alanis haters relished pointing out how many of the examples of irony in the lyrics to "Ironic" were, in fact, not really ironic. On this point I’m going to defend Morissette, if only because these are the same awful people that circle typos in newspapers and mail the clippings anonymously to editors with smug putdowns such as, "Maybe you should consider hiring copy editors," or some equally non-clever bullshit. I’m right next to you flipping the bird at those a-holes, Alanis.

Promoter John Scher insisted instead that the ugliness of Woodstock 99 reflected a larger moral chasm in the souls of the attendees. “I think, in some respects, the generation was irresponsible and they gave me and themselves the finger,” Scher told Spin. He wasn’t the only one who felt that Woodstock 99 amounted to a big “fuck you!” from legions of incorrigible kids. More than one writer likened Woodstock 99 to "The Day Of The Locust," the 1939 Nathanael West novel about wanton sin and alienation in Los Angeles that ends with violent mob violence.

Even if the hugeness of Hysteria can be plainly seen in statistical terms, wrapping your head around it is difficult nearly 25 years later. We still have hit records, and artists and producers obsessed with discovering the newest ways of making them, but being No. 1 on the charts doesn’t have quite the same significance anymore. If you reach the top of the heap, you’ll be disappointed to find that the heap is much smaller than it used to be, and there are lots of other heaps nearby that are approximately the same size.