July 20, 2009

Why did people hate STP?

By: Sonny Bunch

Having grown up in the 90s, I’ve listened to a fair amount of the Stone Temple Pilots. They were a mainstay on DC 101, WHFS, and other DC-area stations. I was never a huge fan — never owned an album, never saw them live (until last year’s Virgin Festival, which was more for work than personal enjoyment) — but thought the music was decent enough. Then I read Kyle Gustafson at DCist write “time certainly has been kind to Stone Temple Pilots, unlike music critics and indiephiles (raises hand) that continually hated on the band during its 1990s heyday.” This reminds me that this weekend I was reading Jeff Gordinier’s “X Saves the World“* in which he writes

With the sterile insect technique, you’d gather a gigantic swarm of male flies in a laboratory, blast them with chemicals or radiation, and render them infertile. Then you’d release that swarm into the wild. The infertile flies, vastly outnumbering their fertile competition, would mate with as many female flies as they could, and the females would subsequently lay unfertilized eggs. The fruit fly population would plummet. In other words, you flooded an area with more fruit flies in order to wind up with less of them.

This was the most sensible way to explain the existence of Stone Temple Pilots. If the major labels flooded the airwaves with ‘alternative bands’ that were in fact sterile, those bands would mate with millions of listeners, and the listeners would quickly decide that ‘alternative’ music sucked as bad as Warrant did, and the infestation would peter out.

He then compares STP to Candlebox, Bush, Seven Mary Three, and Blind Melon, in addition to Warrant and pestilent bugs. This strikes me as unduly harsh. Why do the indie types come after Scott Weiland and company so hard? I just don’t get it…

*The book is fine enough, with plenty of boomer-bashing (good) and probably a little too much milennial-bashing (still good, though I think he’s off base) … Gordinier is at his most boring when he gets anti-corporate and rails against the young for selling out, though it’s unclear why they had any responsibility to live up to the Gen X “eff the man” ideal to which he seems to subscribe.