MOULD IS IN THE HART
or
Tough on grunge, tough on the causes of grunge part two – the Husker Du Story.
Now having a go a Bob Mould because his surname is Mould would be the height of infantile purility, but hey, his surname is Mould right. The green stuff that grows on bread when you’ve left it out for a few days. Many might say the Husker Du were the mould which grew on rock ten or twenty years after it was invented. While everyone else of their generation were poodle rocking, making thoroughly contemptible but meaningless songs about having big hair – Husker Du were peddling their sensitive rock songs to a so called hardcore audience. What was so hardcore about the Du was unclear. Certainly you needed to be hardcore to listen to some of their one tone dirges, but there was nothing robust about their stab at rock. Instead it sounded like Mould fencing with a pair of knitting needles.
Of course, Mould was only one third of the Huskies (though admittedly the one with the worst voice – which rightly qualified him for singing chores). If we discard the bass player as just being an unwitting stooge we are left with Grant Hart – a singing drummer.
That’s a singing drummer. This is a sign I tell you, a Nostradamus like portent.
I need not say any more about Hart, though I will. Exhibit A would be his enormous Kitchener moustache that scared off the ladies wherever he went. Post Husker Du he formed a combo called Nova Mob that released a concept album about the Last Days Of Pompeii. Three months later the entire band were involved in a car crash. This would make you believe in a god except Copper Blue never caused a mysterious tree to fall on Sugar’s tour bus.
Post disastrous melancholy solo albums (on the sleeves of which Mould sat looking like the psychopathic twin to Black Francis scowling) Bob came to reclaim his mantle as the man who invented grunge via the band Sugar. He did this by ripping off a Pixies song. He managed to convince a fair few people too – not least our old mate and cock lookilikee Steve Sutherland of the NME (Steve gets bonus marks for noting that Du song “She’s A Woman But Now He Is A Man” is about a transsexual.) In the end though it became clear that Husker Du did not invent Grunge, they merely took the sound of a wasp trapped in a bottle and sang badly over it. It is quite possible that Mould invented the Plaid shirt though.
By taking the tunelessness of the Pixies and marrying this with the po-faced earnest flycore that Husker Du peddled up – grunge was apparently formed. What more can you say about a band who’s own manager killed himself? Perhaps there was more to it, but there does not need to be more to it. Just Husker Don’t.