Accelerator. Gumball. 1993. Columbia.

 In 1993, just one year before Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Gumball from New York City released its second single for Columbia Records. About a carload of musicians en route to a gig and pulled over for reckless driving, Accelerator is definitive American car radio rock and roll, and a blast of physics, its momentum pulling the listener in with centrifugal strength. Accelerator failed to connect with a mass audience, which had already pledged its attention—not undeservedly—to grunge. On commercial radio, an insidious trend that began long ago was showing signs of having created terminal spoil. Rock and roll’s principle binding agents, rhythm & blues and country & western, had been segregated into competing subgroups by moneyed interests motivated by market segmentation. By the time of grunge rock’s charts success, rock and roll had undergone so many iterations since its mid-century beginnings that a threadbare effect —of the kind Plato warned in his critique of the copy—was now evident. Without the unifying muscle of R&B’s and C&W’s combined influence to provide ballast, rock and roll was starting to lift like fog into irrelevancy. A more lasting damage, however, came with the ever widening gap between contemporary culture and those years of unprecedented collective deprivation that included the two great wars and the Depression. The awesome, shared experience of that time enabled American  hustlers and artists to forge, and express itself with, a lingua franca that was shockingly, radically, sui generis. By the 1980s and the Reagan presidency, we had—or were aspiring to—settle into a comfortable enough middle class to swallow whole the newly minted mythology of Morning In America, Reagan’s national vision based on his administration’s policies that deepened the divide between rich and poor, white and colored, the bourgeois and the boho prole.  The divisive politics practiced in the twenty first century have their ruinous origin here, as does the sclerosis of imagination that, a decade later, would see only four rock acts included on the Top 10 best selling albums of the year: Eric Clapton (an unplugged record on which he sounds not so much relaxed as he does barely awake) Spin Doctors, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots (debut records from those last two on which both bands sound committed to reviving the spirit of the 1970s by replicating its most average albums). A corporate takeover of rock and roll had slowed our instincts for recognizing the value of what Robert Hughes called the shock of the new, that is, those trends in modern art that reveal, with convulsive beauty and humor, the truth to us about how we live. Rock and roll, once the pedal on the right, had now become the stalled engine’s dying roar.

May 04 021