18 July 1993
Grunge: what were we thinking? Sludgy guitars, droning songs, whiny singers, lumberjack shirts – as a scene and a sound it hasn’t aged well, and to be honest didn’t sound all that great in the first place. Its performative angst became a tool for the US music industry to pivot away from ’80s hair metal and flog the most lucrative pose of all: “authenticity”. In 1992 Nirvana and Pearl Jam had top ten singles in Ireland, so the record-buying mainstream was coming on board, but by 1993 and the next wave of acts, the sound was already being watered down: ‘What’s Up?’ is grunge homeopathy.
Why did ‘What’s Up?’ get to number one here and number two in the UK? One possible reason is how 4 Non Blondes give an aggressive edginess to a song of stunning blandness: the chorus of “I said hey / What’s going on?” is such vapid grunge-for-beginners that it’s accessible to anyone. Also, most grunge songs didn’t have big dumbed-down singalong choruses like that one. This is all especially helpful in “foreign” markets where English isn’t the first language. (Aside from the UK and Ireland, where it had the cachet of American exoticism, ‘What’s Up?’ was a chart-topper across Europe but notably only reached number 14 in the main US Billboard singles charts, even lower in the US alternative rock charts, and a piddling number 33 in Canada.)
What also grates about ‘What’s Up?’ is Linda Perry’s ostentatiously kooky delivery: wide eyes, fake grin and showy vocals, like the Billie Barry kids doing grunge for the Toy Show. Every movement and fashion has opportunists, and fair play to them; I don’t believe that Perry’s later success as writer and producer for Pink means she’s a sell-out or whatever, not least because doing grunge in 1993 was the sell-out. We’ll see Perry’s work at number one in Ireland again in a chart-decade’s time, and it’s no great act of perspicacious music punditry on my part to say that it’ll be far better than this faddish My Friends Went To Grunge And All They Got Me Was This T-Shirt of a record.
