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Stoner Rock, a hallucinatory history

of Matteo Monaco

the late '80s, the music "hard" had taken a road to nowhere. The Minor Threath hardcore and thrash metal of Metallica, Megadeth, Exodus, and a thousand others stood with their backs to the wall in dead-end street close to dying genre with the unique opportunity of selling out to pop the plastic coating in order to survive.
As for Metallica, we know that in part has happened, for Orthodox groups, this meant a handover to the next generation. The bearers of this "renaissance", according to the classic vulgata were Pixies, Melvins and Nirvana, or the first rock artists to break down the bridges between metal, punk and pop in a fit of extreme creativity and existentialism. Not to mention the post-rock, created a table in the remote Midwest from these four visionaries of Slint, went down in history as one of the best and least concerned (because Cobain-mania) groups of the '90s.


If this reconstruction is plausible, it is also likely to be partial: indeed, during the delirium that grunge deluded a generation, only to be the best weapon of MTV, there were only Slint's part of the extras. A whole host of artists, far from Seattle Lanegan and Cobain, referring to folk and blues to metal, come up with something completely new, both in terms of musical aptitude in the general silence.
Or rather, imagine you are after Black Sabbath Johnny Cash and after the punk, then not much beyond the incredibly futuristic (for the time) work of Blue Cheer, year 1968:

If the "revolution" went from grunge flannel lumberjack and the most ancestral teen angst, Stoner knows the more mature side: it is made of the relentless desert sun, and black doom metal, but in a way it seems (and sounds) as the treatment of anger, like a transfiguration into a work of art of raw urgency. Vera
art, one that saw players from 1992 Kyuss (pictured), Unida, Fu Manchu and Monster Magnet, briefly defined as the scene of Palm Desert.
These artists, lovers of pick-up and sand of the desert, they have created a kind of nothing: they were the aforementioned Blue Cheer, as Lemmy of Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult, who gave the first impetus to this "rock junkie "in the 60s, to leave the continuance of the first doom metal and then a dense undergrowth of groups that kept him alive, quietly, in the '80s. For example, the Melvins Buzz Ousborne:

The explosion of the scene in Palm Desert meant two things. First of all, John Garcia of Kyuss and Josh Homme, but also the beginning of the end of grunge. The fact was born as Kyuss stoner reworking of metal, punk, blues, and the same pop culture that has made great Pearl Jam, in short, did a bit of grunge past and ran up to the millennium as a dominant genre.
Homme and Garcia was precisely to raise the heavy legacy of Cobain, the grunge movement during the collapse and after the death of his nihilistic prophet, and their blend of metal, blues and rock in Seattle, already in itself seminal was combined with the grand opening to the public that has made great masters of heavy, Deep Purple and older:

With "Blues for the Red Sun", the distance every rival Kyuss, and already act as masters on the rock scene, not just an orphan of Nirvana, but also a shared reference to heavy music.

Years of stoner true, however, are the 90's. The scene in Palm Desert, driven almost exclusively by those in the mainstream Kyuss and Monster Magnet, the end of the decade, shows several signs of weakness, culminating in a reduction of the whole.
In 1997, Kyuss broke up: is the year of the revolution within the stoner, because Josh Homme, guitarist, drummer, along with the last of the group and with the help of bassist Nick Oliveri, founded the Queens Of The Stone Age.

The first disc, "QOTSA" was an instant success. All the power flows in the Kyuss songs much more formally dressed, with the addition of the unexpected discovery of Homme as a singer. If the 1997 seemed to be the date carved on the tombstone of stoner, 1998, he suggested, with only one disc, how much could be said.

Queens of the Stone Age, from wiping too much sand that surrounded the Mexican stoner hard and pure, are proposed as one of the few bands that play good music, without being limiting contain labels. This is demonstrated, "Rated R", the band's second album:

This, for example, is pop, of course, pissed off, but it's the pop of "Come As You Are." Comparisons between Cobain and that handsome Homme are now cleared, and excluding the arguments between the unconscious need to find a replacement to idolize, there really are things in common, irresistible song-form, mixed together with the delicacy and urgency is in the songs "hard" in that the softer ones, are features Not to mention the air of both a hero decadent, that music often counts more than substance. As the movement

stoner, the twenty-first century certify the sudden stop at the end of the millennium. A few ideas, all concentrated in the major groups, leaving the impression that the entire genre has ceased to be followed. On the edges of this advanced oblivion, Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss as a decade earlier, their work has not only been kissed by success, but it summarizes the whole soul stoner to elevate to something still unknown, a rock like no other. From "Songs For The Deaf"

The group of Homme and Oliveri is not limited to reinvent. Since '97 it became the focus of the Desert Sessions project open to anyone who wants to play at Rancho de la Luna, in the desert between the coyote and a good amount of marijuana. Regular guests, the likes of PJ Harvey and the former leader of Screaming Trees, Mark Lanegan. These meetings between
talented friends have arrived at an altitude of ten publications, often reserving nice surprises, among them, "Make It With Chu", formulated anew last QOTSA album, "Era Vulgaris"

After years of bath crowds and critical praise, these are difficult for the entire Movement: cut off the last two QOTSA albums, the public seems not to expect anything new from Homme and the Desert Sessions project. In this criticism, if that's true attitude to denote an annoying pop star in this latest work, it is not difficult to see the relief of those who hitherto had no grounds to complain, and now wants to rebuild with interest.

What is certain is that the stoner in the proper sense has ended his parable of gold. The big names of the scene are gone, but their work lives on in rock today.
The grammar of a rock to 360 degrees, the cold technical expertise to the heat of stoner-pop of QOTSA, would never be completed without the passion of these artists, who prefer the quiet anger of the deserts, the concerns the grass, and mechanized life a group of friends with which to make great music on a ranch.