Dinosaur Jr
Maybe it was particular to the time and place–Minneapolis in the early 90s–but from what my girlfriends told me, lots of boys thought going to the woods with a girl and regaling her with an hour and a half of Dinosaur Jr trivia was a perfectly acceptable courtship ritual. If you liked him (or Dinosaur) enough, you could pretend it was a date. I withstood many hours of Dinologue during those awful teen years, and my memories of the band’s early albums–with their noisy, shimmery solos and arcs of warm feedback–are inextricably tied to memories of some dude who never liked me back. Actually there was a series of dudes–they only seem to blend into one because they all shared the same bell-shaped grunge hairstyle, unflagging devotion to J Mascis, and polite disinterest in me.
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Dinosaur Jr’s first three full-lengths, Dinosaur (Homestead, 1985), You’re Living All Over Me (SST, 1987), and Bug (SST, 1988), have only been out of print for five years or so and have never been too hard to find on eBay. Nonetheless, on March 22 Merge Records reissued all of them. They’re the only albums with the band’s original lineup: guitarist and front man Mascis, one-named drummer Murph, and bassist Barlow, who quit (or was fired) in 1989. (The “Jr” got tacked on after the first disc, when the Dinosaurs, a Bay Area band full of Summer of Love vets, threatened to sue.) Barlow subsequently dedicated himself to the tape-hiss horn of plenty Sebadoh, which he’d started as a side project a couple years before, and Mascis and Murph soldiered on with a rotating cast of bassists. In 1990 Dinosaur signed with Sire, and the following year they issued the flawless Green Mind.
In their lyrics, Dinosaur don’t even toy with the bilious, nihilistic Reagan-era sloganeering of many of their progenitors and peers. Mascis’s singing is endearingly amateurish, his voice gentle, his diction thick and vague. He never adopts an obvious pose or persona, but his words don’t reveal the “real” him with any specificity either; maybe he’s being honest, but he’s not being particularly forthcoming. In short lines capped with simple rhymes, he often tells of a she who cannot be had, or sketches a blurry metaphor about the fucked-up mess that stands between him and her–listening to this stuff is like reading a teenager’s frustrated, lovelorn poetry, written for an audience of one. Even when Mascis is using his most hypnotized-sounding monotone, his voice cracks whenever he hits the word “girl”–as though the fairer sex were like kryptonite, blazing with a radiation that strangles him with desperation and desire. Barlow barely ever takes the mike, but his one star turn on Bug is a doozy. On “Don’t,” a blatty, wretched stomper, he howls with the self-consuming rage of 10,000 virginal high school seniors: “Why? / Why don’t you like me?” Those are the only lyrics, and he repeats them 44 times–it’s emo, basically, distilled to its essence.
