Stone Temple Pilots - Purple

Stone Temple Pilots managed to hold my attention for 3 albums, but i never really cared about any of Scott Weiland's other bands after they booted him. He basically lived his life like the Thin White Duke, an irritatingly narcotic personality. All 3 or their first run albums are great in their own way, but Puple is my favorite.

I've said before that i don't consider grunge an actual genre, and i really don't. I will however accept it as a qualifying adjective. Like Nirvana is a grungy version of the Ramones, Pearl Jam is grungy arena rock, STP are a grungy Rolling Stones. Alternative rock is my preferred description, because they present alternative viewpoints, explore generally taboo subjects, and exude a this is what we are take it or leave it attitude.

Why are we in mid 90s heavyweights of flannel territory? Well Bowie was all cocaine and so was Scott. Maybe i'll run out of direct Bowie influences on the music i choose, but that project was so massively all-consuming that the ripples will carry on for quite a while. I'm highly susceptible to these kinds of haphazard chains of thought (like i'm sure you never noticed, huh?).

I should do a cocaine vs. heroin amongst musicians comparison sometime. That's like a graduate level seminar in its own right.

STP is probably the most compositionally complex of this weekend's bands. The DeLeo brothers played highly harmonically and rhythmically adventurous music that somehow maintained an incredible sense of cohesion. STP has an almost jazz trio feel in comparison to their peers. It's rock, but somehow much more than rock; it feels improvised, but so coherent that it obviously can't be, this is thoroughly composed and highly structured but so far beyond generic that it seems almost magical. Not one single note sounds haphazard or out of place. Not surprisingly, Brenden O'Brien is the producer behind all of the biggest stuff from this period and STP, Pearl Jam, Black Crows, and Red Hot Chili Peppers made him one of the go to guys for about a decade. He's like the evil corporate mirror doppelganger of Steve Albini who somehow manages to make records sound amazing in spite of how goddamned loud they're going to get mastered.

One of the magical things about these (dare i say) Post-Nirvana bands is that they all inject a self-deprecatingly humorous commentary on how ridiculous it is that they are making huge corporate mainstream albums. This requires a new paragraph with some historical context.

Welcome to the new paragraph (that's a joke on Jello Biafra's disclaimer for Offspring's Ixnay). Brett Gurewitz didn't originally want to sign Offspring. Buuuuut, he's a record label, he heard Offspring's first album published by soon to be defunct Nemesis, heard Butch Vig's dumb luck in engineering THE NEW THING, put two and two together and said "i don't want to be poor anymore." Weezer didn't even have to go through the hassle of being undiscovered, and tomorrow's Pearl Jam only needed Eddie Vedder to move from LA to Seattle before the remnants of Mother Love Bone got their advance.

They all knew they were riding the profit train to hate-my-corporate-overlords-ville and they put in ridiculous intros and spoken sections about parties you don't want to go to and jokes about this record being "like Johnny Mathis." It's a joke, so we might as well have fun while we're being the butt of it. I eat it up like birthday cake on a random Tuesday.

Even as obtuse as "Kitchenware and Candybars" is, i know full well the actual song is a tongue in cheek homage to Something In The Way from Nevermind. Cellos and being a homeless loser on the last track? Subtle reminders that you yourself are bipolar, but not suicidal. You're telling me you seriously didn't notice? I told you, Weiland was a prick.

Regardless, the unnamed Purple (what's the title? Neverind) is a fantastic album of great songs. You have to accept that there's some real nastiness lurking underneath the lyrical obscurity, but once you do it's fascinating to hear it play out.

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