2021 #5: Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, and Punching Up
As you gain success in your chosen field, inevitably, people will always turn on you. Maybe it’s envy that drives it. Maybe it’s pure, unadulterated jealousy, or maybe it’s simply that you feel the person is undeserving of their success for whatever reason, be it their lack of perceivable talent, their seemingly bottomless luck, their ability to charm and disarm large groups of people by merely being affable, and at ease with who they are. It can be infuriating when more exciting and talented people wallow in obscurity below this person. In a similar vein, it can be confusing when people who should know better choose to worship false idols.
It could be argued that nobody has cultivated a stronger cult of personality for an extended period of time better than Dave Grohl. For 25 years now, the Foo Fighters frontman has carefully built up a trust with his massive fanbase by seemingly just being cool about stuff. He has roots in punk and hardcore, and obviously grunge, and doesn’t shy away from discussing them. In fact, he appears in seemingly every rock documentary to gush about whatever the subject may be, positioning himself—knowingly or not—as the final authority on such things. He plays marathon two-hour shows with a broken leg. He engages in drum battles with children. He tells improbable, name-droppy stories from his life on Instagram. You get the idea. He’s a nice guy whose massive fame and immense wealth hasn’t changed him. People can relate to that because they see themselves in that, and would like to think that if they were ever fortunate enough to become rich and famous, it wouldn’t change them, either.
In all seriousness, Grohl does appear to care deeply about his fans, and, I’m no doctor, but he doesn’t appear to have the Rich Guy Galaxy Brain that, say, Garth Brooks clearly does. I’m as susceptible to his charm as anyone would be. His affability is disarming. But he’s a performer, and maybe this is overly cynical of me, but what’s approachable and relatable to some comes off as performative and bullshitty to me. We all are from time to time, after all, but the vast majority of us aren’t rich and famous, with a gigantic platform.
Rock ‘n roll is largely dead as a mainstream juggernaut, and has been for some time. It’s a lot different from when I was a kid, and every major label was throwing millions of dollars at any band they could find in the hopes of finding the next Nirvana or Green Day. As a result, Grohl sees his stature as some kind of greater responsibility to keep the rock wheels turning, but by only looking backward and inward, instead of forward. The dust has cleared, and he and Rivers Cuomo (god help us) are the only ones left standing. Billie Joe Armstrong, too, I guess. The problem is, as performatively different as these excursions appear, these guys are still crossing the stream wherever it’s shallowest. This new Foo Fighters album Medicine at Midnight is just the latest excursion for a band who, no matter how hard they try to convince people otherwise, is just another assembly-line hard rock record when put under the microscope. Grohl has been doing this sort of thing for a while in interviews and press leading up to album releases. It’s a little strange that more people haven’t caught on.
The talk of a dance influence is a bit overstated. Lead single “Shame Shame” rides a slow, clattering groove; “Cloudspotter” boasts funky guitar and abundant cowbell; “Holding Poison” rocks a dance-punk beat; there’s quite a bit of rhythmic action on “Medicine At Midnight”; opener “Making A Fire” is enlivened by choral “na na na” backing vocals. They made a noble effort to mix things up here, and the result is another somewhat engaging, occasionally rollicking entry in their catalog. Yet even the danciest songs mostly blur into standard-issue Foo Fighters guitar churns with big howling Grohl choruses, and the rest of the album basically could have appeared on any Foos album since the second George W. Bush administration.
This isn’t the first Foo Fighters album concept that has more or less melted away into the same old poppy hard rock record. Their 2005 double album In Your Honor was split into one electric disc, one acoustic — probably the most basic self-imposed structure in the book. The follow-up, 2007’s Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, took the radical step of putting the electric and acoustic tracks on the same album. For 2011’s Wasting Light, they went all analog with Nevermind producer Butch Vig and continued to sound like Foo Fighters. For 2014’s Sonic Highways they recorded at various famous studios around the country, again with Vig in tow, and it turned out Foo Fighters sound like Foo Fighters no matter where they are geographically situated. 2017’s Concrete And Gold saw them switching out Vig for Greg Kurstin, the former Beck keyboardist who has evolved into a big-time pop hit-maker. You will not be surprised to learn that it still sounded like a Foo Fighters album.
There’s no shame (shame) in churning out reliably familiar but creatively bankrupt hard rock records every few years. But pretending it’s anything other than that with an exhaustive press cycle and interviews about how This One Is Different comes off as disengenuous from someone with Grohl’s track record. Who is he trying to convince, exactly?
The Wasting Light cycle was the last time the Foos put out a record while I was a full-time music writer, I guess, and I’ll never forget how much attention was paid to and how many words were spilled about the album’s garage analog recording process, with no attention paid to the fact that this is a multi-millionaire’s garage, with Butch Vig—the guy who “took Nirvana and made them sound like Boston,” in the words of the great Tom Scharpling—producing on a major label budget. Then the album came out and, well, it sounded just like a Foo Fighters album. I guess in this way you could argue Grohl is a shrewd businessman, adept at bending the narrative to his preferred lane. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me; fool me six times, and you might be past the point of realizing that Dave Grohl will never be your friend. Listen to Fuck Art or You Deserve Love or It’s Real instead.
No podcast this week but we released a teaser for our next episode, which will be out Monday and is about John Woo’s 1992 classic Hard Boiled. I loved this movie. It’s on YouTube if you haven’t seen it.
This week’s playlist is a quick burst of punk. I actually made this a while ago but never shared it, so, here it is. Enjoy, and play it in order.
One last thing: I got bored last weekend and made a video of myself making a drink on Instagram. It was really fun so I’ve kept doing them. I know folks do similar stuff on TikTok but I’m too old for TikTok. Sorry to anyone my age who is active on TikTok who lacks my self-awareness. Check out my Instagram here and follow along.