1994: YEAR IN REVIEW : It’s Still All the Rage : Anger has never been a stranger to rock. This year the emotion became even more acute for both artists and fans

The defining rock ‘n’ roll moment of 1994 for me didn’t occur in a concert hall but on a Seattle street corner in April. On this night--two days after Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered--the corner served as a chilling dividing line between the opposing sides in the deepest generation gap in rock’s 40-year history.

Waiting for the light to change, you could see outlines three blocks away of 5,000 young people leaving a park surrounding the towering Space Needle. For the last two hours they had stood in the evening chill, largely in silence, to pay their respects to Cobain, whose frequently sad, melancholy songs with Nirvana touched them deeply.

Along with the sadness, there had been frustration and hostility--not directed at Cobain’s shotgun suicide, but at adults who do not understand them or how much Cobain’s music meant to them.

“Aw, shut up,” one fan shouted angrily when a minister stepped to a microphone to offer words of comfort. “What do you know about the way we feel?”

Elsewhere in downtown Seattle, many adults were more than simply indifferent; they were openly hostile to Cobain and his generation of musicians, who had made Seattle a center of their scene.

“They ought to pass out shotguns to all of the rest of (the bands), if you ask me,” said a man in his 40s who described himself as a fan of Bob Seger-type “old-time rock ‘n’ roll.”

In the past, the generation gap in pop music divided rock fans and parents who initially considered the music trivial, but by the ‘60s, had come to see it as the product of a talentless, drug-crazed horde. Today, even the parents who grew up on rock ‘n’ roll find it difficult to relate to today’s angry young bands.

On one side of this generation gap, you have millions of young people who have found comfort and support in the music of Nirvana and other young bands whose dark, unsettling themes deal with issues of betrayal, hypocrisy, abuse and self-destruction.

To parents and others, however, the music seems negative and assaulting. Why, they ask, isn’t there more of the celebration and idealism of the rock of their youth? Why is it so hard to make out the words? Why, they ask mostly, does it all have to be so angry? Is the anger even real?

Chris Cornell of the Seattle band Soundgarden shrugs at the last question. He’s an articulate, serious-minded 30-year-old who looks back on rock ‘n’ roll as a life raft during his own troubled childhood. Many of what Rolling Stone magazine describes as his “doom-laden” songs focus on life in an age of lowered expectations and ideals.

“I can see how an older generation which thinks it already has dealt with the problems we went through doesn’t want to hear any more about it,” he said in a recent interview. “I can see them thinking, ‘Shut up and stop whining!’

“But the anger in rock ‘n’ roll is going to get worse. Just as the world was a harder place for my generation, it’s even tougher for kids who are 10 and 12 today. It’s so much of a jungle out there . . . so much more negativity and violence and with no family support system for millions of those kids. If you think I’m angry, wait until you hear the music they’re going to make.”

Yes, the anger is real.

The new ‘90s bands have taken rock’s traditional aggression and personalized the themes--giving us the explosive yet relevant and introspective music that Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden might have made if a songwriter like Neil Young had been at the helm.

They weren’t the first to do it. In the aftermath of the Sex Pistols, a generation of independent-minded American bands--from Black Flag and the Minutemen in Los Angeles to the Replacements and Husker Du in Minneapolis--wrote songs that reflected the alienation of their working-class roots. The difference is that their music was too radical for radio tastes at the time, so it remained largely underground. When Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with its Beatlesque melodies and seductive guitar lines, hit mainstream stations and MTV picked up on it, the door was kicked open for similar-minded groups.

We’ll probably have hundreds of bands trying to duplicate Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Hole--and most of their music will be calculated and hollow. But this first wave of bands is built around the purity of musicians telling their own stories.

In separate interviews over the last year, the leaders of this new generation of musicians--Cornell, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Courtney Love of Hole--all spoke about the factors in their own lives, elements that sociologists frequently cite when explaining the low self-esteem of so many of today’s teens and twentysome-things.

They spoke of broken homes, unsympathetic schools, generally hostile environments and bleak job prospects. Vedder and Cornell even said they had contemplated suicide like Cobain.

By the time Vedder was 15, his mother and stepfather had separated and he was living on his own in Encinitas near San Diego, filled with the bitterness that’s expressed in many of his songs.

“I felt helpless and alone and resentful,” Vedder said earlier this year. “I can understand someone saying, ‘Well, hey, that was years ago. Forget it.’ But even after things start getting better for you, there is a part of you that always goes back to that time and you feel the hurt building again. It’s not something you ever forget.”

In a key song from Pearl Jam’s new “Vitalogy,” Vedder strikes out at adults who have lost their youthful idealism:

All that’s sacred comes from youth

Dedications . . . naive and true

With no power . . . nothing to do

I still remember . . . why don’t you.

Cornell, a Seattle native, quit school at 15 to help support his mom and his five brothers and sisters after his folks were divorced. He didn’t mind that responsibility, but he does see the lack of family stability as a major problem these days.

“As starchy and sterile as the ‘40s generation was, the baby boomers still had that as a crutch to lean on . . . a sort of solid pillar, whether it was their parents or grandparents,” he said. “But that’s no longer true for millions of kids. My family sort of disintegrated at a certain point and that seems to be the norm now.

“I’m not saying a single parent can’t raise a kid well, but it seems to be difficult in a lot of cases. The way the culture is, with the violence and the economy, it’s hard to keep up your self-esteem and your strength on your own.

“When you have a support system at home, at least you have reassurance that you are OK. If you have been victimized one way or another, you know it’s not the entire world that’s violent and evil. There have been too many times when I didn’t feel that.”

Courtney Love’s childhood was also far from idyllic. Her parents were divorced when she was quite young and she was so trouble-bent that she was sent briefly to a juvenile detention center.

“I don’t know if it was something in me or just the world around me,” she said. “And it still isn’t easy. Maybe we just got programmed wrong. There can’t be that much bad luck out in the world.”

Because rock was a salvation for them, it’s easy for these rock heroes to now see how young people today are responding to their music.

Reznor, whose music with Nine Inch Nails deals in self-destructiveness and self-loathing, grew up in tiny Mercer, Pa., where he was raised by his grandparents after his folks broke up when he was 5. Unlike the others, he doesn’t remember his childhood as a particularly painful period, except that he found it hard to relate to anyone in the town.

“I realized that I didn’t fit into any scene in school very much so music became the soundtrack for my existence,” he said. “The music told me that it was OK if I don’t fit in. Albums like (Pink Floyd’s) ‘The Wall’ told me that you aren’t a freak because you aren’t accepted by everyone at school or down the street. And that’s important because you don’t have anything else saying that to you.”

Director Oliver Stone was so impressed by the fury in Reznor’s music that Reznor was asked by him to produce the soundtrack album for the film “Natural Born Killers.” In a song written for the project, Reznor captures the embittered rage of someone who feels life has cheated him:

This world rejects me

This world threw me away

This world never gave me a chance

This world gonna have to pay . . . For Cornell, “Music in general and rock is part of your identity. If you think about introspective music and mind music, the music is a journey you can take. If you think of visceral music and aggressive music, it takes the place of actually going out and shooting somebody in the head. It gives you a chance to release those dangerous impulses without hurting yourself or anyone else.”

For Vedder, rock was a way to combat the anger and despair--a reason to keep living. Much of the anger in his songs seems directed at the adult world for leaving him with so little hope.

“I don’t know what it was like 20 or 30 years ago, but being a kid can be a very lonely, strange time these days,” he said. “It’s hard to find anybody to accept you for what you are. If you try to do something different, you are just cut down. You are trying to grow up and someone is trying to keep you down.”

What’s lost for the over-30 crowd that closes its ears to this new generation’s best music is the chance to get insights into the disillusionment of so many sons and daughters. It also means you miss the chance to sample what is proving to be one of rock’s golden ages--a repeat of the energy and relevance of the late ‘50s, mid ‘60s and late ‘70s/early ‘80s.

Some of today’s stars, however, see the hostility of adults as a positive sign. “Your parents should hate it,” Reznor said in September. Agrees Cornell, “Rock ‘n’ roll has always been something that your parents don’t like. For me, in a sense, I say, ‘Thank God.’ ”

Like the others, Vedder is trying to come to grips with his anger. While he shares the impulse to feel good about adults rejecting his music, he acknowledges that he is intrigued when parents do find in Pearl Jam’s music the elements that have made rock such a powerful and inspiring art form for four decades.

“I always get nervous when an older person says, ‘I really love your music.’ . . . That their kids turned them on to it or whatever, “ said the leader of Pearl Jam, which has sold more than 14 million albums in the last three years.

“But it may be good because it may open a door to communication. It’s really something to think that some people are getting along better because of the music or the words. At least it’s a start for those kids lucky enough to have someone to talk to.”*