Review: DINOSAUR JR.'s 'BUG' (1988, SST Records)

With at least 10 million and counting copies of Nirvana's NEVERMIND and a not-quite-as-flattering sales rank for Counting Crows' 1st 4 CDs + their 2004 best of CD, the answer would seem "yes", at least if you go under my creative writing teacher's shallow philosophy that the point of making music to make money. I say this album tops anything the "alternative" era (phases 1) produced, including the majority of Dinosaur Jr.'s work of that era. But, honestly, perhaps music like this is just too intense, especially coming out of the synth pop/hair band regime of 1979-1990...maybe if radio stations played this ultra-sad rainy day album circa 2004 instead of continuing the by-then (& now) totally futile practice of payola, audiences outside of the internet could relish in this sweet beauty of a record. Payola, btw, may have done some good in an ironic sort of way back when hair metal needed Nirvana to shoot it down with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the audience was gullible enough to buy into the record label's well placed nudges into the mentality that 'Nirvana is God', but since internet radio networks such as Pandora, Launchcast (which no longer has customizable radio, but it did last quite a while and was the first one I started using, personally) and LastFM and the Iraq War & 9/11 etc., people, generally, are a bit more 'in the know' about music in general, and 'indie' is actually seen to be a compliment rather than an insult, which was the not the case less than 5 years prior.

I once read a scathing review of Counting Crows' 3rd LP THIS DESERT LIFE claiming that the lead singer seemingly thrives on sorrow. Although I wouldn't say that Dinosaur Jr.'s lead singer/songwriter is a spoiled brat, or even intentionally imply that, I think he has a bit in common with Adam Duritz in the respect of the aforementioned scathing review's writer's reference to his state of mind. I haven't heard any of the new Dinosaur Jr. albums, so i don't know if J. Mascis (the lead songwriter) has found more to live for or not, but this album, in my opinion at least, does a far better job with its emotional content than that of the more concisely written however mild songs on Counting Crows' 1993 debut AUGUST & EVERYTHING AFTER. While sloppy and loud and noisy, it just about spills over with feelings of cold loneliness. The album differs from the short lived Joy Division - the ULTIMATE Prozac popper music - in the sense that there's a small ray of light, a sense of hope that things will get better.

One dude once said Kurt Cobain (lead singer/guitarist of Nirvana, who called home to the same record label as the aforementioned Counting Crows), was a J Mascia wannabe. Like I said, at the time this may have been too intense to sell to the former Madonna belly dancers of 1991/1992, but sometime after the Vietnam Conflict/War ceased to be the last "major war" the U.S. was involved in, and the "give peace a chance" state of mind of the nation gave way to a reluctant wake up call known as 9/11, and people's use of the internet became more heavily used than even most scientists could have predicted less than 100 years prior, I think this CD deserved a chance, a chance it would have perhaps got if the major labels weren't insistent upon trying to control the tides.