1992: Year One of the Culture Wars

Apr 06, 2024

It may seem like a stretch to include Nirvana in the Culture Wars at all, let alone to say they fired the first shot. Many would even disagree that the Culture Wars in America began in 1992. Typically, they are said to have begun in the ‘70s, with Roe v. Wade. This is like saying the Cold War began in the ‘30s because pro-Communist sentiment was suppressed in America, when we commonly understand it as a post-WWII phenomenon. Since the USSR collapsed on December 26, 1991, it should be obvious why I would say the Culture Wars got elevated in status during the Pax Americana, when Americans debated Americans about what made America excellent. Like most wars, what started out as an endeavor with a clear agenda turned into an overlong, winding morass of confusion and noise.

OK, so we see now why I chose 1992: why Nirvana? For this, we need to move the microscope a little closer. From today’s perspective, Nirvana succeeding Michael Jackson reads as a rockist act of white supremacy against an ethnically and sexually ambiguous pop star. Nirvana’s pioneering lyrics on mental illness (pioneering for an unlikely top 40 act anyway) are legible to Gen Z fans. But only Gen Xers who were there will truly understand how fast everything changed. What’s more, Nirvana replacing Michael Jackson is mentioned more to clarify the size of their impact than the intended direction. As we all know, Michael Jackson was still a massively successful musician after 1991. The intended target of course was hair metal, or, more specifically, the sleazy cock rock that defined the entire mainstream rock genre for two whole decades up until that point. From around 1971 (with the success of The Rolling Stones, Faces and Humble Pie [to say nothing of Led Zeppelin]) to 1991 (when Axl Rose sang “You could be mine/But you’re way out of line/With your bitch slap rappin’ and your cocaine tongue/You get nothin’ done”), saucy, denim-clad laddishness was all that anyone in rock radio (or even MTV in the late ‘80s) understood. The alternative rock format was called “alternative” for a reason.

So to be clear, Nevermind was not just an aesthetic victory. Although I still maintain that it wasn’t as revolutionary as the ‘60s either, my God it sure felt that way. For today’s cultural landscape, I constantly await a ‘60s-level mainstream pop culture intifada that actually breaks people’s skulls just like 60 years ago. To be real, though, even if there was a break from the algorithmic dictates of streaming or even a change in what the algorithm suggested, that would feel revolutionary. This would also be the best modern way of understanding the magnitude of Nirvana back then.

Right now, the algorithm pushes female pop with therapy-speak and/or pussy rap. Imagine, through some freak accident, either a huge force outside the algorithm or the algorithm itself opened a rift in spacetime where now all we heard were furious punk bands instead? That’s what Nirvana taking over MTV was like.

And yes, then and now, Billboard’s the official industry standard. But MTV, like TikTok now, was all the youth really cared about. 1992 was when MTV really changed. Hair metal videos were still popping up then, but the majority of them were wimpy, simpy ballads. Mr. Big’s “To Be With You,” Firehouse’s “When I Look Into Your Eyes.” Even the few hard rockin’ non-grunge songs (Def Leppard’s “Let’s Get Rocked,” Ugly Kid Joe’s “Everything About You”) were not about beer and babes. In 1992, scantily clad women were nowhere to be found in rock videos. Live concert videos would not show women taking their tops off and the guitarist shooting a look of excited disbelief to the camera. Grunge’s Big Four (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden) all had videos in heavy rotation in 1992. Non-grunge alternative acts like REM and The Cure also experienced a boost of popularity at this time.

But we have to report this fairly. Guns N’ Roses (arguably the precise target of Nirvana) let out hard rock’s last fiery shriek of a battle cry in the summer of ‘92 with their last hit song, “November Rain.” You can even argue that this is how you can tell a Gen Xer from a Gen Zer. A Gen Zer knows “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But you can bet they do not know “November Rain.” At the time, the song felt like a glorious return of AOR classic rock jamming with three guitar solos. As time went on though, it turned out that classic rock radio preferred the ‘70s version of this and “November Rain” would be replaced in the classic rock canon by literally any other song on GN’R’s magnum opus, Appetite for Destruction.

The fix was in though. Female MTV execs were tired of misogynist hair metal and pushed more sensitive acts like Nirvana. So we can say that, even though Bush was President, the liberals won the first battle of the Culture Wars.

April: The LA Riots

Race riots were still happening in the years between the civil rights era and April 29, 1992. What made the LA riots different was, for the first time since the civil rights era, there was widespread mainstream understanding of why they happened.

What led to this understanding was an amateur video given to the press of the beating of motorist Rodney King by four LAPD officers. The videotape brought national attention to the Rodney King case. There was a widespread assumption that the video would be damning evidence against the department. When the officers were acquitted, simultaneous with the riots was the viewing public’s shock that the officers were acquitted. They were caught in a crime. How could they be exonerated? This was before AI deepfakes, which goes to show, then and now, people believe what they want to believe. That April, I heard my Italian-American stepfather as well as several other classmates sincerely argue that, when a man is that crazy on drugs, they need four men to kick him when he is down.

Then and now, race has been a central hot spot in the Culture Wars. There would of course be many more videos, especially during the ‘10s, of police brutality that would lead to more riots. The major difference being that, in the viral era, the videos themselves led to riots, before any court cases. Between March of 1991 and April 1992, there was a widespread belief that video told a truth we could all plainly understand. That a video could be seen as not telling the whole story is yet another recurring refrain during the Culture Wars.

May: Vice-President Dan Quayle Blames the LA Riots on “Murphy Brown”

From Entertainment Weekly:

On May 19, Vice President Dan Quayle gave a speech to the conservative Commonwealth Club of California in which he blamed the Los Angeles riots on the breakdown of American family values and said, ”It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.”’

We can call Dan Quayle a hack and a dummy all we like: he gave us the term “family values,” with its current meaning. To this day, conservatives use family values more than they even use Christian values as a weapon in the Culture Wars.

In the spring of 1992, it was so absurd to liberals how conservatives could blame a fictional CBS sitcom for the woes of the real world. In the ‘10s, the roles were reversed: now, Breanna Taylor and Michael Brown were being killed because sitcoms did not have enough black representation. The stupidity of the conservatives infected and metastasized across and throughout the liberal aisle.

Quayle’s motives were similar to the hashtag hippies of the ‘10s: focusing on what can more easily be controlled to the detrimental expense of what should actually be changed. Quayle failed to get “Murphy Brown” off the air. But the ‘10s, and even a small part of the ‘20s, were full of entertainment diversity initiatives that cynically exploited the need for actual change.

June: Police Organizations and Conservatives Boycott Warner Brothers Until They Remove the Song “Cop Killer” From Their Catalog

Quayle had a few targets in his sight in 1992. Along with Papa Bush, Quayle went after the Body Count (a punk/metal side project for rapper Ice-T) song “Cop Killer” (an album track that was never released as a single). This followed a grassroots campaign starting in June of police orgs across the nation boycotting Warner Brothers until they got their way. The movement really gathered steam in July when, at the annual Time Warner shareholder’s meeting, Charlton Heston (himself a shareholder) recited lyrics from the song in order to pressure Warner Brothers from removing the song off the album.

As might be imagined, this led to more album sales. The WaPo in June 1992:

Sales of the album have doubled since last week's original boycott calls. The album, released in March, has sold 410,000 copies and is currently ranked 62nd on Billboard magazine's list of the top 200 pop albums. Next week the album moves to No. 49 on the charts -- with a bullet.

At several stops on the Lollapalooza tour that summer, Soundgarden played “Cop Killer,” which the crowd of course loved. It seemed like they fought harder for the song than Ice-T did though: after enough pressure, T voluntarily removed the song from the album. He knew he was outmatched against shareholders, who also play a huge role to this day in the Culture Wars.

August: Pat Buchanan Gives “Culture Wars” Speech at the 1992 RNC

From the speech:

Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America.

October: Sinead O’Connor Rips Up a Picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live

Stunned silence. Not only in the studio that night. Myself when I saw it. Longtime readers may be surprised to know that, even though I am queer and ethnically Muslim, I attended a Catholic high school and held conservative beliefs at that time.1 I certainly was not socialist or Marxist. So I was not only stunned, I was outraged. What did the Pope ever do? Though the Catholic Church’s involvement with molestation was an open secret back then, it was a secret.

What is easily forgotten about the Culture Wars is that the liberals started it. The Republicans had three successive terms in the White House. The ‘80s was a largely conservative decade, with liberal and leftist thoughts being pushed to the alternative margins. Radio was conservative. MTV expressed the aspirational exuberance of the Reagan era. After Iran-Contra, there was a slight return to leftist values in the media. That taste was not enough. Nirvana fought trad-rock. Rioters fought the racist police state, which was of course supported by the GOP. Now the religious right was in the cross hairs.

A bridge too far though. It would not be until Sinead O’Connor’s death that the TikTokers of Gen Z would appreciate O’Connor’s courage. I appreciated it sooner, but not much sooner.

November: Malcolm X is Released in Theaters and Rage Against the Machine Releases Debut Album

Something Gen Xers myself will remember that those younger will not: the X baseball cap rage. Before Batman was released in the summer of ‘89, Batman shirts and caps were everywhere. Similarly, the anticipation for Spike Lee’s upcoming November release Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington, was met with kids wearing X shirts and baseball caps as early as May, a month after the riots. Unfortunately the money that went to the caps did not go to the tickets: Malcolm X lost over $30 million at the box office. It was met with widespread critical acclaim though and is remembered not only as one of Spike Lee’s best films, but one of the best biopics of all time (not much competition, natch).

Rage Against the Machine’s debut album was released in November as well. Who cares if they were communist? The Cold War’s over; go nuts! The lead single, “Killing in the Name Of” had the incendiary line “Some of those who work forces/Are the same who burn crosses.” Turns out rage against the police was not a seasonal event for this band. The song was an alt-rock radio hit, cleansing the palate of all the relatively solipsistic grunge rock that preceded it.

Also in November: Bill Clinton won the presidency. The Democrats had the White House for the first time since 1980. This emboldened liberals throughout the ‘90s and for most of the Culture Wars the liberals would be the aggressors.

Epilogue: February

At the 35th Annual Grammy Awards in 1993, neither Nirvana nor Guns N’ Roses won. Eric Clapton swept with “Layla (Unplugged).” At this time, Eric Clapton read as politically middle of the road. But by 2020, even Clapton would fight in the Culture Wars with his anti-vaxx song featuring Van Morrison “This Has Gotta Stop.”

I used to have a bit back when I did stand-up: “Some may say ‘why would a Muslim be sent to a Catholic school instead of an institution that teaches Islam?’ (scoff) Why would a mother send her only son to jail?”