The Alternative Number Ones: Soul Asylum’s “Misery”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

A long-suffering B-list alt-rock band gets swept up in the maelstrom of grunge, a phenomenon that they predated by a lot of years. They have already been dropped from one major label, but they're suddenly cranking out wounded-bittersweet fuzz-rock hits at an alarming rate. Their album sells a bajillion copies. Bill Clinton invites them to play at the White House. The band's lead singer starts dating Winona Ryder, a movie star who virtually personifies disaffected gen-X longing, and he makes a cameo in Reality Bites, a movie that serves as a virtual shorthand for disaffected gen-X longing. Our boys are rock stars now, and they're not sure what to think of their new rock-star gig. So when they make their next album, the lead single is an extended metaphor about a company that makes and sells misery. That's not on the nose. That is the nose.

By the time Soul Asylum got around to following up their bajillion-selling 1992 album Grave Dancers Union, things were different. Alternative rock no longer felt like an exciting new wave crashing into the mainstream. Instead, it was a whole new mainstream of its own, with its own attendant rat-race fatigue. The boom was still happening commercially, but the people taking part in that boom knew that they were simply feeding the content mill, not changing the world. This realization led to its own version of grown-up angst.