The Silverchair syndrome
NB: This article is primarily aimed at those who remembers the theme-song of “Ducktales”, even if your mother tongue is not English. If you can’t remember how much of a bop it was, send this article to your older sibling. THEY will know what I am talking about….
In 1995, there were three major earthquakes in my short little life. The kind of earthquakes that no six-year-old could ever forget. I know it sounds over-dramatic but that’s what makes this story great.
The first one happened on 18th April, when my dad turned 30. For some reasons, he decided that being a nice guy was overrated and gave up on this. You’d be glad to know he’s been thriving as a prolific major bell-end ever since and at this point, all I can say is “good for him?”
The second one happened on during the summer when I started to see pictures of the Bosnian wars on television and I was traumatised. I cried every time we had to start dinner as the 8 pm news would be on (or le 20 heures, en français) and I knew that seeing bloody images of kids my age running through the rubble of what was left of Sarajevo would at best break my heart, at worst start an unrelated fight between my parents.
The third was happened before all of that. It happened in March of that same year when three Australian teenagers released their debut album on a major who stamped them very quickly as being “the new Nirvana”.
I’d like to pause it there, just a second and try to be in the frame of mind of those kids.
Picture this: you are young, you are somewhat cute, you just turned 15 and you released an album with your schoolmates, your best mates, you speak with a nasal but endearing accent because you are from ‘Straya and when you play, people are stunned by how mature and raw you sound, how loud you play, how organic it feels and how big you are going to be. This is exactly what happened to Ben Gillies, Chris Joannou and Daniel Johns. Now, I want you to be in their shoes. I mean, not their 2020 shoes, but their 1995 boots and imagine how this feels. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it? The screams of fans going “Silver-chair! Silver-chair! Silver-chair!”. It feels right it’s almost wrong. Yeah, you can feel it too.
You are back in the room. You got my attention, now you will hear my theory, which is the following:
“The music you make when you are at peace with yourself will not be as good as the music you made when you had wars inside your head.”
Now, I cannot stress that enough that I am not saying that in order to be a good musician, you have to suffer great lengths or be broken inside. You don’t have to, history has proved us many times, and in all honesty, we need you right here among us freaks. All I am saying is that sometimes, you do things and people love you for your authenticity and then you grow up and you do the same stuff you used to but the magic is gone. This happened to a lot of bands and the list is long but it became apparent with Silverchair.
*****
Frogstomp was the debut album of Australian rockers, Silverchair. It was released on 27th March 1995 and became rapidly a major hit for all the teenagers who were still mourning Saint Kurt Cobain from the Church of the Fallen 27 Club. The cover was a white canvas with a gooey fluorescent frog. It contained one of the greatest bangers of the nineties, which is Israel’s Son. If you know that song, you know what I am talking about. If you don’t, please indulge yourself into those five minutes and eighteen seconds of pure delight. All I am saying here is that when you start your debut album with a banger that is, literally, a lesson of grunge given by a bunch of spotty 15 year olds, you know that you will have it for your money. The lyrics are good, the sound is raw, the drums are impeccable and when you go past the singles (Tomorrow, Pure Massacre, Findaway) you will be able to find little gems like Suicidal Dream and Madman. I cannot speak for the band and tell you what went through their minds when they wrote, composed and recorded those songs but I can assure you that they spoke volumes to thousands of teenagers around the world… and an awkward six-year-old from Paris’ banlieue. They were ten years older than me, they knew life just a tiny bit better than I did but as soon as I started to understand English — so around the same time, approximately, I’d say — it made sense. What they experienced made sense to me because, erm…. let’s just say I wasn’t your regular first-grader, let’s put it that way.
It would also make sense for 16 year-old me when I discovered that England tried to get their Silverchair on their own with Bush and failed to reach our neighbourly shores because, according to a former friend of mine and teenager at the time told me five years later “the French press and the French rock scene couldn’t give a fuck of Bush or Gavin Rossdale and his pretty face. Nobody cared! We still had [Michael]Hutchence then…” and rightfully so, the best attempt to grunge music these guys did was a parody made by the Simpsons. Bush was bad. Silverchair were good and they kept doing that for the rest of this millennium with follow-ups Freak Show in 1997 and Neon Ballroom in 1999. I begged my father to buy me the cassette of Freak Show because I loved them on TV and he did purchase it, then destroyed it months later after a drunken brawl. I didn’t bother ask him for Neon Ballroom or any cassette whatsoever after that. The morning after, I discovered a new feeling: resentment. Thanks to this new friend, I went on discovering new music that would equate this sense of profound resentment and I did it well. Fast forward to 2005, I bought both records secondhand in a discount retailer and rediscovered why I loved Silverchair so much. Because the sound was unfiltered and so were their lyrics. And oh my gosh, how I missed that!
Abuse Me was a song where singer-guitarist Johns, who was not yet 17 when he wrote it, was expressing his feelings towards the backlash he and his mates received after Frogstomp’s success. It could have been the cautionary tale of a misunderstood loner who stands up for oneself or it could have been the soundtrack of my unfortunate time at middle school. Either way, it works. Cemetery or Emotion Sickness’ outro could have been played in the sitcom of my life during I time I would have contemplated the worst. Miss You Love could have been me, aged 17, starting to have weird feelings for that guy I always saw as nothing but a good friend. And Steam Will Rise? Well, I was repulsed by sex at the time but liked to exaggerate in front of my friends because I was insecure as hell, so I added unnecessary saucy details at recess. Anthem for the Year 2000 was supposed to be a flagship of an era in time though, it became a red flag for what would happen next.
When their fourth album was released, I was eager to know what they will deliver. All I knew back then is that the world is a messed up place in 2002, Britney and Justin were no longer a thing, KoRn is selling millions of awful albums and also, I hated my parents so much. So, when Diorama came, I went to the Virgin Megastores nearby (which was a mere 20 minutes bus ride) and tried to check it. It wasn’t there. So I went to the Fnac shop in a shopping mall in the 13th district of Paris where my cousins lived and it wasn’t there either. I gave up and thought I would surely hear something on the radio. Nothing. I found it in my small-town public library two years later and gave it two listens. One full listen to check if the music is good and another one to grasp the wow factor that drew me to them moons ago. I wouldn’t listen to it again for another decade when I fell for an Aussie with good hair. And that was it. The magic was gone. They became adults who had other ambitions, other visions, they started to get their shit together and that’s all good and well. But you can’t deny that this organic thing they had isn’t there anymore. It was dreadful. I hated this album and the hastiness I had for it.
Was their wow factor their youth? Their fame problems? Daniel Johns’ physical and mental issues? I still don’t know but I’d found myself frustrated many a time when other bands ended losing their wow factor after the said band changed their musical direction in a way that was a tad too radical for their fans. See, the reason why people like AC/DC is because they are doing the same shtick ad nauseam and they’ve been doing just that for more than four decades and it worked. BAM! It’s the reason why Queen is still revered when Queens of the Stone Age isn’t so much. It’s the reason why we love to hate Limp Bizkit but hate to admit we kinda love them. It’s the reason why Taylor Swift can fill stadiums but no longer hearts of thousand of young adults. It’s the reason why we rely on nostalgia so much when you talk about a band of the nineties, noughties and even of the twenty-tens. Because we find comfort on the things we know. It’s yet so simple. Nothing gives you more joy than a simple a + b formula that worked ten times, twenty times, fifty times even. If it works, then it must be good, isn’t it? And that’s why we end up being so disappointed when Incubus starts doing sickly love songs and ballads about a dude and his “pink tracto beam” ding-dong about to get some instead of the nerdy funk metal bops we got accustomed from their first demo Closet Cultivation in 1994 right until the track number 10 of A Crow Left of the Murder, Zee Deveel, a decade later. Honestly, nobody deserves to have hos virginity taken while listening to this ghastly joke of a song — it’s called Here in My Room, by the way.
The Silverchair syndrome is nothing more but a reminder that sometimes we prefer when our favourite artists are going through hardships because it makes our hardships a little less harder than they seem. It’s the cheap therapist you’d be happy to give money too (or wait patiently during the midst of a terrifying pandemic). It’s the madeleine de Proust you like to go for, every now and then. It’s the little nugget you cherish in your times of uncertainty. We like a good redemption story but we like them in movies, not in music. Has a redemption song ever made a hit apart from Bob Marley’s Redemption Song — which actually about his own mortality and the state of the world in 1980? I can’t think of one. When it comes to music, an artist live up to their fans’ expectation of them and their own expectations of themselves as an artist. It goes so many ways. And then, they’re gone and the music they made lives through their legacy. Even though Silverchair’s legacy will not reside on that crazy theory I made up during my early twenties in a bar but it explained a few mishaps in alternative rock history. In the end, it’s just a question of making sense of things and once again, it did make sense. Of course, it does!
