Mudhoney
Digital Garbage

In the end, Mudhoney is one of those bands that emerged at the end of the eighties and then were grouped by most into the big cauldron of the "grunge" genre. Over the years, they have maintained a high standard and an inspiration, even ideologically, that still leads them today to release albums that are at once powerful, characteristic (because Mudhoney have their own distinctive sound that has set a precedent) and still have relevant social content and are a product of a counter-culture that, in the US as well as in the rest of the world, did not stop in Seattle in the nineties or in Genoa at the beginning of the last decade.

We could bring up old stories like how Kurt Cobain became a pop icon and was sacrificed on the cross (without resurrecting) by the same people who had idolized him; we could talk about Pearl Jam as a group of old, bloated musicians that makes Neil Young seem and appear every bit the youngster (also because this whole Pono story, truthfully, reminds me a bit of all of us kids between the late eighties and early nineties, who wanted a GameBoy, but it was too expensive); but, in the end, what is truly worth talking about is how "Digital Garbage" manages to be an effective album exactly thirty years after the formation of the group led by Mark Arm and Steve Turner (the lineup is completed by the historic drummer Dan Peters and Guy Maddison, who replaced Matt Lukin over fifteen years ago). A thirtieth anniversary that falls in the same year as the parent company Sub Pop and already celebrated by the group with the release of "Live In Europe" at the start of the year (a collection of tracks recorded between Germany, Croatia, Sweden, Austria, Norway, and Slovenia in 2016).

The band's sound is always that same reprise of MC5-like acidity, paranoid rock and roll like "Please Mr. Gunman," "Messiah's Lament," "Next Mass Extinction," suburban punk-blues recitals ("Night And Fog"), and a couple of more "accessible" tracks like "Kill Yourself Live". Yet, the garage component remains dominant, loaded with fuzz and distortions; nothing appears repetitive in an album where Mark Arm focuses his attention on contemporary reality, without hypocrisies or unnecessary nostalgias of a golden age that really never existed: these are the United States of Donald Trump, those of Charleston, and those of internet use and the web world in an aggressive and "functional" manner. We are in a period when everyone uses the term “functional illiterate,” while Michela Murgia in L'Espresso asks us if we are fascists with a test of 65 simple questions that if you answer yes, frankly, you're just jerks even if you graduated with honors in nuclear physics. Ideology is something that transcends educational achievement, and in the Western world, what is often labeled "illiteracy" is just a way to avoid taking responsibility. An alibi. Each of us is called to take responsibility. Mark Arm is a suburban preacher, telling us this, pointing the finger at the Pharisees of the twenty-first century, and maybe he will end up straight in hell like all of us, but for that, we'll have to wait a long time. Fortunately.