This Blog / That Blog:
Pre-Durst

by Daoud Tyler-Ameen

Today’s post introduces a new feature to the site, which my girlfriend cannily suggested I call  This Blog / That Blog, and which will profile arts and culture websites that tackle their subject matter in engaging and provocative ways. The first installment is dedicated to my favorite new thing on the internet, Pre-Durst.

My sentiments are hardly unique; founded scarcely a month ago by Stephen Swift, 27, and Adam Zavala, 26, Pre-Durst has already received nods of recognition from the likes of NYMag, Idolator, Blender, and Flavorwire. Its focus is simple: YouTube clip by YouTube clip, the two authors chronicle the Top 40 hits that informed their lives between 1990 and 1997, the year Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill Yall$ hit shelves and became a bellwether for the dawn of nü-metal and modern rock. This week, Swift and Zavala submitted to an email interview and told This Blog / That Blog about their creative process, how YouTube has changed the game for bloggers, and what Everclear has to do with getting to third base.

So what is it about this time period that’s so dear to you?

Stephen Swift: Well, that’s when my childhood happened. 1990 is when I started listening to the radio, and 1997 is about when I started turning to sources besides the radio to find bands I liked, and I figure anything I heard in-between is fair game. It feels a little disingenuous to claim that the blog is easy to write because that’s when music was good, man, but it seems to me that every decade has its own little streak of popular culture aligning with the music independent artists are creating, and I managed to land squarely on top of one of them. If I were a decade older I’d probably have a lot to say about Kate Bush and The Style Council, and I think it’s happening again now with the interlocution of mass media and internet media, both with barely-signed Brooklyn bands playing TRL before it went off the air, and with artists like Cassie building their rep on MySpace, and with bands like Paramore, who are basically descendents of the Promise Ring and Jejune, selling out giant arenas. Either way, though, there was a distinct period in my life during which I loved basically everything that crossed my ears, and whether or not there’s some underlying cultural explanation for my young enthusiasm, I’d imagine “being thirteen” is more than enough reason.

What did the arrival of Limp Bizkit, Korn, P.O.D., and their myriad cohorts symbolize for you? 1997 marked a lot of big changes in pop music, including the start of the boy-band craze—so what was it about these specific bands rising to popularity that you found so disheartening?

SS: By then I had started actively seeking bands who weren’t getting radio play, so the sea change in radio play sort of tumbled off my back. Radiohead’s OK Computer—which came out in 1997, natch—was probably the last major-label release I was really excited about; six months later I would beg a ride from my friend’s mother to get to Newbury Comics on the release date of Hum’s Downward is Heavenward, and that was the beginning of the end for me.

Anyway! Navel-gazing aside, I think it’s natural for people who are so into music to find that the times change without them. The fact that a lot of what came after alternative rock’s heyday in the sun was either hammer-simple, major-key pop music or faux-aggressive, anti-feminist mook rock probably didn’t help. Did you know Staind used to be a Nirvana cover band? How bummed out do you think Kurt Cobain would be about “It’s Been Awhile?”

Adam Zavala: It’s funny, because I bought Three Dollar Bill Yall$ when it came out (only because of the cover of the CD). I was way into metal and what would later become nü-metal; I loved Korn and the Deftones and Sepultura and Coal Chamber and all that shit. But it’s hindsight that offers me perspective as to why that era is so disheartening: It took the humor and irony out of feeling awful, and turned it into fake aggression peppered with misogyny and homophobia, which is absolutely foul. Even now, thinking about that stupid George Michael cover that Limp Bizkit did, I can’t help but feel ripped off for the year I spent trying to sell my friends on rap-rock. There was just no substance, and whether those guys were jocks or the tortured nerds in high school doesn’t matter—they all ended up being the same pretentious dudes hocking cheap thrills and pop hits, with absolutely no love in what they were doing.

Some posts are devoted to critical discussion of the songs or videos, but the ones that really give the site its voice are the ones where you discuss a particularly vivid adolescent memory. Did you keep journals as teenagers?

SS: Frankly, I didn’t. I stopped keeping up with my diary in eighth grade, and didn’t start keeping a weblog until the end of my senior year. I did save an inordinate amount of ephemera from those years—school papers, notes from girls passed in history class, terrible short fiction—so this project has come to involve a brutal reexamination of my own past.

AZ: I tried to keep a diary, but I was way more interested in reading girls’ diaries. I rue the day diaries with locks were invented.

In those cases, what comes first—do you pick a song and then write about a memory it evokes, or do you think of the memory and then pick an appropriate song?

SS: It totally depends. My two best friends from high school and I are still very close, and they’ve been wonderful in reminding me of moments I’ve forgotten, so sometimes there’s a story I can’t not tell, and I have to remember what record I was into at the time to justify the telling. On the other hand, some songs are completely inextricable from their former context. There’s absolutely no way I’ll ever post “Santa Monica” without talking about the map my Everclear-loving girlfriend drew me of her vagina, clearly notated and labeled with instructions about what I was and wasn’t allowed to stick my hand in.

AZ: I usually pick a song first. It’s easier for me to remember a song and ask myself, “Where was I when I heard this?” I look at pop songs as mile markers in my life, points at which the ghosts of memories and feelings congregate, pour glasses of expensive scotch, raise toast after toast to the beauty of their lives and laugh until the sun comes up. I’m way too sentimental for my own good.

I was in seventh grade when the Living in the 90s compilation came out in ’97. My friends and I tore it apart; it seemed like such a wrong-headed, myopic representation of the time we’d grown up in. Is part of your mission to remind people that 90s pop radio had more to it than Vanilla Ice and Right Said Fred?

SS: I think time has been much kinder to the 90s than it might have been. Now that everybody who heard these songs in their teens is an adult, people trying to sell our childhoods back to us have to be more precise about what they use. Radio stations that include 90s songs on their playlists do a fair job of selecting songs I’d actually want to hear, and record compilations of the 90s are generally being curated by people who’ve got their own fondnesses to rely on. Of course, the selections I tend to post might be passed over by less personal curations, and we have an unlimited amount of wiggle room to play with, so if I can help remind somebody how completely fucking good Better Than Ezra’s “In The Blood” or Hum’s “I’d Like Your Hair Long” were, then that’s just gravy.

AZ: I don’t know if we really have a mission. Maybe we adopted one along the way, but this all just started out with us talking about “Stuck on You” by Failure (the first video we posted), and how goddamn awesome it still is. But yeah, I do feel a certain obligation to re-shine the light on the beautiful and ugly from my formative years. I understand now why I’m so neurotic.

Streaming video sites like YouTube and Dailymotion have plenty of original content, but they also serve as archives of cultural ephemera, stuff that might otherwise have been completely forgotten. Would you still be thinking about these songs if they hadn’t suddenly become universally accessible?

SS: I’m sure I’d be thinking about them, but I’m not sure I’d be acting upon those thoughts in this way. While Wikipedia and Google Books’ Billboard magazine collection have been pretty valuable in making sure I’m not talking out of my ass, the lion’s share of songs that wind up on Pre-Durst have leapt out of the back of my mind into the forefront and demanded entries. So probably I’m just a big sentimental weiner.

The thing that makes YouTube and Dailymotion and the like so valuable is the immediacy an embedded video grants—not only can you hear the song at the same time as you read the entry, but the videos are as much a product of their time as the songs themselves are. Here’s an example of this in action: I had a huge anecdote prepared for Seven Mary Three’s “Cumbersome,” as my very first band elected to cover it, and the primary guitar figure is so fucking boring I had to drag a bunch of Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins CDs to practice to convince my bandmates to play something with a little pep. That would have been a pretty monumental entry—discussing what sort of gear we had, lamenting the keyboard player that lasted all of three practices—but when I sat down and watched the video again in preparation, all I could think about was how lustrous and thick everybody’s hair was. The members of the band, the extras on the set, probably even the director and crew—everybody had these gorgeous, shining manes. So I had to nix the enormous, shaggy-dog entry, if only to get all of that hair out of my mind. That’s probably something Chad Hurley didn’t expect when he wrote the YouTube embedding script.

Any plans to expand the scope of the project? Maybe a podcast?

SS: Only if this stops being so much fun. I don’t think we’re even close to running out of songs.

Check out Pre-Durst at http://pre-durst.tumblr.com. Here’s a shortlist of TS/TS-approved posts to get you started:
The Offspring: “Self-Esteem”
Jamiroquai: “Virtual Insanity”
Aaliyah: “Are You That Somebody?”
Seven Mary Three: “Cumbersome”