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.
In the business of popular music, things are supposed to work in a specific way. A sound or a scene takes off and grabs the public imagination, but many of the people who make that music are self-destructive or reluctant or unreliable in one way or another. So the music business goes off and finds someone else who will make that sound, except now the people making it are all professionals who know what they're expected to do. Maybe one of them is really, really ridiculously handsome. Maybe he's so handsome that the music almost becomes secondary. Maybe he's got a face that demands to be put on magazine covers and thrown into MTV rotation. This business as usual. For some of the kids who grew up on grunge, the arrival of Bush was a perfectly acceptable development. For others, it felt like some kind of betrayal. I was in the second category.
For the first few years that he was famous, Gavin Rossdale had to answer a whole lot of questions about Nirvana. If he was mad about that, he did a good job pretending that he wasn't. Yes, his band sounded a lot like Nirvana. Yes, he loved Nirvana. Yes, he'd been a rich and glamorous '80s London club kid whose previous music ventures sounded nothing like Nirvana. Yes, he was big in America but not in his homeland. All these years later, Rossdale is still making big, brooding rock songs, except now people are way more likely to ask him about Gwen Stefani than Kurt Cobain. There's no reason to believe that he wasn't entirely sincere about wanting to make grand, muscular big-riff rock 'n' roll. But context matters, and the context surrounding Bush felt overwhelmingly cheesy.