The great American music machine still maintains its twin capitals in New York City and Los Angeles, but its epicenter is inclined to shift as frequently and erratically as a tropical depression. Athens, Ga., was the regional rage just . . . well, was it yesterday? And there was Minneapolis only a few years back; before that it was Philadelphia, Detroit, Memphis.
These days -- these moments -- it's Seattle. One band after another has sprung from the environs of the city's fast-lane bar scene onto the national charts. The lyrical metal band Queensryche has sold more than 2 million copies of its album Empire. Alice in Chains, which lays down a kind of altered- consciousness heavy metal -- the Doors, slamming -- is approaching platinum-level sales with Facelift. Nevermind, by the Seattle-area trio Nirvana, has sold 3.5 million, and the group's single Smells Like Teen Spirit, with its arch lyric ironies and crusher guitar chords, hit Billboard's Top 10 and helped get the band on Saturday Night Live.
Seattle boasts four thriving independent record labels; six key music clubs, like the Vogue, in the downtown area alone; and nearly that many recording studios. Representatives of rival record companies prowl the streets in major- label wolf packs, looking for the next bust-out band: Heard War Babies yet? Checked out Mudhoney? Get on it, and get with it. As Steve Slaton, regent of the local deejays, puts it, "Seattle seems to be the center of the musical universe. It's just the real deal."
The Seattle sound is cussed, aggressive, incisively individualistic, and it comes, like matching tie and handkerchief, with its own attitude: cut down on flash, look regular, sound loud and sound off. "People here do what they want," says Terry Date, producer of Badmotorfinger for Soundgarden, which has toured with Guns N' Roses. "There aren't a whole lot of love songs that come out of here. It's not happy music. It definitely has a dark side to it."
More than any other group, it is Nirvana that typifies the new Seattle heat. "I feel stupid and contagious/ Here we are now, entertain us," is one of Teen Spirit's more memorable lyric refrains, fully characteristic of the band's spiky style. The core members of Nirvana, lead singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain and bassist Chris Novoselic, teened together in Aberdeen, Wash., and teamed up to form Nirvana in 1987 (drummer David Grohl signed on later). Both were fans of the brooding postpunk musical musings of Husker Du, as well as of the shameless theatricality of Kiss. Nirvana's first album, Bleach, was recorded in three days at a cost of $600 and, when distributed by an enterprising local label called Sub Pop, made the band's members stars on the underground circuit.
Seattle rockers take almost as much pride in their ornery individuality as in their music. "I can't stand it when people come up to me and say, 'Congratulations on your success!' " Cobain told a music magazine recently. "I want to ask them, 'Do you like the songs?' Selling 2 million records isn't useful to me unless they're good."