You're With Stupid by Bruce Adams
The early 1990s was an important time for the rise of alternative music in America. Not surprisingly, this history is often explored through one album--Nirvana’s Nevermind – and one specific city, Seattle. This is understandable, as the 1991 album went on to sell more than 30 million copies, in the process casting Seattle as the alternative music capitol of the world. The popularity of the genre then exploded during the post-Nevermind moment, leading to what can best be described as the “alternatification” of mainstream American culture.
Yet such an understanding of this era, as Bruce Adams’ recent book You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music begins to highlight, obscures as much as it reveals. By the late 1980s Adams found himself working for Touch and Go Records, an esteemed Chicago-based independent record label whose roster of artists—including Big Black, Die Kreuzen and Killdozer—influenced the career trajectory of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain (and rumor has it that he sent Nirvana’s early demo to Touch and Go, in hopes that the label would sign them). The seeds for the alternative rock revolution, in other words, were planted in cities like Chicago well before that fateful year of 1991.
For Adams, existing in such an environment proved remarkably inspiring. “It felt like things were happening all around me,” explains Adams, “and they were happening at an approachable, accessible ground level.” Music by the dawn of the 1990s seemed to be everywhere in Chicago. “I could listen to the radio,” continues Adams, “see a band in a club, a park, or the basement of a coffee shop.” And such activity attracted the attention of artists from outside of the city. As Adams recalls, “Bands from around the world came to Chicago, and bands from Chicago went all over the world.”
Challenging Music
The creation of such networks allowed Adams and fellow music fan Joel Leoschke to found kranky Records in 1993; the label’s first release was the debut album from Labradford, a post-rock band from Richmond, Virginia. As bands like Bush, Candlebox, and others highlighted the potential for mediocrity in the post-Nevermind moment, Adams and Leoschke used kranky to put out truly challenging releases. Bands like Labradford were “so outside the boundaries of indie/alternative/whatever rock in 1993 that they presented the perfect way for the new kranky label to stand out from the crowd.”
You’re with Stupid does an excellent job of documenting kranky’s evolution into the early 21st century and the broader cultural context in which this evolution occurred. As he did during his tenure with kranky (he would step away from the label in 2006), Adams approaches his work as an author with a profound respect for the culture he is documenting. Speaking of those discussed in the book, Adams notes that “I owed them and the music a professional level of representation and delivery.”
Adams stepped away from kranky in 2006, and the time since that moment provided him the “emotional distance” to objectively assess the importance of the label, before he put pen to paper. “I needed the passage of time,” concludes Adams, “to give me perspective on what I saw, heard, and did in the ‘90s and early ‘00s.” Ultimately, this distance allows Adams to provide more than just a case study of one independent record label. You’re with Stupid also emerges as a significant study of the long arc of American alternative music.
Bruce Adams will discuss You’re with Stupid: kranky, Chicago, and the Reinvention of Indie Music at The Sugar Maple (441 E. Lincoln Avenue) 5-7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 23. The event is co-sponsored by Lion’s Tooth Books and Rush-Mor Records.
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