SHE WAS AN EMOTIONAL IDIOT
Feb. 19th, 2014 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogAnd while we’re on music/pop culture deaths:
This may or may not be news to you, but Maggie Estep passed away last week.
I only found out myself a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen a whole lot of coverage on it (though I don’t live in the Great American Celebrity Circus Media Bubble, so it’s easy for me to miss stuff like this). But I thought I should say something – partly because I had her debut CD, and partly because in some ways, she represented the pinnacle of 90s GenX® AltCulture™.
I don’t mean that as a putdown of her personally. (The headline of this post isn’t meant as an insult either – it’s a riff on one of her more well-known pieces. See below.) Estep was a talented spoken-word performer who managed to be both alarming and funny. She also had great (if serendipitous) timing – when Alternative went mainstream on MTV and created the whole Generation-X industry, the poetry-slam scene was taken along for the ride, Spoken Word became a bankable genre, and suddenly Angry Hip Free Verse Poets were accessible in every mall in America.
And thanks largely to (1) being a good Spoken Word performer and (2) MTV, Estep became one of the faces of what we think of as GenX Pop Culture® – something so firmly rooted in the 90s that it feels (to me) as dated as Flower Power, Disco, Hair Metal and New Wave. And it’s a shame that she’s associated with that, because there was more to her than that.
That said, I admit I don’t listen to her CD anymore – mainly because the music sounds both generic and dated in a way that (say) Jim Carroll Band doesn’t. I prefer Estep either in print or with voice alone.
Like this:
No more Mr Nice Girl,
This is dF
This may or may not be news to you, but Maggie Estep passed away last week.
I only found out myself a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen a whole lot of coverage on it (though I don’t live in the Great American Celebrity Circus Media Bubble, so it’s easy for me to miss stuff like this). But I thought I should say something – partly because I had her debut CD, and partly because in some ways, she represented the pinnacle of 90s GenX® AltCulture™.
I don’t mean that as a putdown of her personally. (The headline of this post isn’t meant as an insult either – it’s a riff on one of her more well-known pieces. See below.) Estep was a talented spoken-word performer who managed to be both alarming and funny. She also had great (if serendipitous) timing – when Alternative went mainstream on MTV and created the whole Generation-X industry, the poetry-slam scene was taken along for the ride, Spoken Word became a bankable genre, and suddenly Angry Hip Free Verse Poets were accessible in every mall in America.
And thanks largely to (1) being a good Spoken Word performer and (2) MTV, Estep became one of the faces of what we think of as GenX Pop Culture® – something so firmly rooted in the 90s that it feels (to me) as dated as Flower Power, Disco, Hair Metal and New Wave. And it’s a shame that she’s associated with that, because there was more to her than that.
That said, I admit I don’t listen to her CD anymore – mainly because the music sounds both generic and dated in a way that (say) Jim Carroll Band doesn’t. I prefer Estep either in print or with voice alone.
Like this:
No more Mr Nice Girl,
This is dF
