Ironminds: The Savior Is Coming Ironminds is by far the worst rockzine online. Every piece has about a paragraph of opinion puffed into four pages of tiresome off-the-shelf ‘attitude’. They have by and large wretchedly conservative tastes, trotting out hagiographies of the usual altrock suspects and anti-pop screeds with all the zest and originality of milkmen.
But even if they liked every single record I did, they’d still be shit, because they’d come on so bloody rock-critical about it – this piece rests on the completely stupid assumption that there is such a thing as ‘our generation’, and that it needs some unifying figure (just like Kurt) to come along and ‘save’ it. Oh, and of course it would just so happen that some rock critic or other (maybe, just maybe, one of the Ironminds people – oh, speed the day!) would ‘discover’ this prodigy: what glory would be his!
How about this idea instead: there is a lot of good music being released all the time. It doesn’t matter whether people are into it or whether they’re not, and you write about stuff when you think you’ve got something interesting to say. Less glam than the Ironminds boys would like, but maybe a little bit truer. Generational unity is fucked: if it wasn’t dead when hip-hop hit big it was surely finished off by Ecstasy. And Kurt Cobain didn’t save shit: he galvanised alternative rock and made it shift a few more units, and his style (like every style) produced a handful of good records and wore itself out in 3 or so years. It’s pretty sad that the kids of ’91 are already lazy nostalgists, but at least in Ironminds they’ve got a zine that’ll cater to them superlatively.