Alterna Wha??

I was reading a recent article in Spin about music-themed movies that are coming out this year (like the new Patti Smith and Joy Division documentaries), and it got me thinking about how far punk/post-punk/alternative/indie have moved into the mainstream (or the mainstream moved to it). In fact, the Joy Division documentary is the second movie about the band after last year’s Control. With more and more films like Control or even Last Days joining mainstream rock-star biopics like the rather dull Ray and Walk the Line I started to worry.

I think most of us would agree that punk was, among many other things, a reaction to the music and values that the boomer generation (ie: those dirty hippies) identified itself with. Likewise, 90s-alterna-nation/indie rock underground was the flipside to the commercial pap that was mainstream music and film in the 1980s. But with punk now in its 30s and Nirvana’s Nevermind three years shy of 20 (Kurt would be 41 if he were alive today) is this where we’re headed?

Both Ray and Walk the Line celebrated well known musicians who baby-boomers grew up with, but the films were essentially vehicles for their stars, Jamie Foxx and Joaquin Phoenix. So were movies like La Bamba and The Buddy Holly Story (Foxx and Phoenix should take a hard look at careers of Lou Diamond Phillips and Gary Busey as a manual for what not to do in life).

So is this where we’re headed? Johnny Depp in the Robert Smith Story? John Travolta as Morrissey: Born to Mope? It could be. But then Generation X, as Jeff Gordinier explains in his new book “X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking,” have always done things a little differently. Just look at the films I mentioned above -the upcoming Joy Division and Patti Smith films are documentaries, so even if they’re not exactly mindblowing, they’ll at least be worth watching and will in no way tarnish the good names of their subjects (with the exception of films made by Nick Broomfield, I find music documentaries are always worth watching). And while Control and Last Days were in fact biopics (alright Last Days wasn’t explicitly about Kurt Cobain, but we all knows what they were doing), but they were made by real filmakers - Anton Corbijn and Gus Van Sant - both who have more than a little experience with musicians. Generation X has seen the mockery that the boomers have made of their idols. They won’t be making the same mistake with their own, and they’re sure as hell not about to let anybody else fuck it up for the rest of us. While the boomers are continually content to rest on their laurels (the exception here being social security) Generation X continues to blaze its own path, not caring what anybody else thinks or says.