I’m writing on The Breeders’ LAST SPLASH for the 33 1/3 series

The new batch of 33 1/3 volumes were announced today and I’m excited to be among the authors selected this time around. I’ll be writing on The Breeders’ 1993 album LAST SPLASH. Here’s the short description and ToC:

The contemporary music industry is desperate to cleanse 90s alt rock from its “bro-ified” image and reframe the genre for pop’s core audience of women and queer people. The February 2023 cover of Rolling Stone styled the queer femme supergroup boygenius to echo the magazine’s January 1994 cover featuring Nirvana, effectively passing the alt-rock crown from the kings of the 90s to the queens of the 2020s. In 2024 The Guardian’s Hannah Ewens interviewed a number of Gen Z musicians who appreciated Kurt Cobain for his “more inclusive style of rock stardom” that foregrounded feminism and anti-racism in an otherwise “hypermasculine” genre. That same year, Live Nation hung the premise of the highest-grossing tour of any musician born in the 21st century around the narrative that The Breeders are the most important 90s alt band of all. That musician was Olivia Rodrigo; as she told the LA Times at the end of 2023, hearing The Breeders’ 1993 breakout hit “Cannonball” for the first time was a watershed moment that periodized her life into a “before” and “after.” Billboard’s Andrew Unterberger writes that “Rodrigo inviting the ’90s alt greats to be part of her story helps stitch together a rock timeline that never should have been interrupted” by the “male aggression took [that]  over the sound of modern rock [when] alt radio essentially decided it didn’t need women” in the late 1990s. For Unterberger, Rodrigo has helped heal “the continued rock chronology” by highlighting the importance of Breeders frontwoman Kim Deal, the woman whom even Kurt Coban cited as one of his significant influences but whose legacy the industry and the press didn’t find important to shepherd…until now.

Critics like Unterberger frame The Breeders’ new prominence as a re-tooling of alt rock’s gender narrative. But the popular feminist angle on The Breeders’ legacy doesn’t capture the full significance of this push to make “Cannonball” and the album it appeared on the new foundational texts of 90s alt rock. Re-centering the 90s around Last Splash transforms the “alternative” narrative into one about modern rock.

A radio format that arose in the 1980s, modern rock was codified in 1989 by Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart. As America’s most critically renowned modern rock station WOXY defines it in a 1994 newsletter, modern rock is “a wide spectrum of music…which encompasses dozens of different styles and subgenres,” such as reggae, disco, country, and blues. In 1992 WOXY program director Phil Manning said that the station’s approach to modern rock “tr[ies] not to put any boundaries around the music” so that it is “folksy, industrial, funky, harder-edged, novelty, retro, party, ethereal, jazzy, rap, dance, punish, acoustic, synthesized, world beat, midwestern twang, nouveau hippy, and more, more, more.” Manning’s list of styles maps fairly well onto Last Splash. Listening closely to each track on the album, this book shows how each of Last Splash’s tracks pulls on a different stylistic thread in the modern rock panoply. For example, “Flipside” is a cousin to Operation Ivy’s 1988 instrumental “Bankshot”; “SOS” starts off quite industrially with a sample of Ann Deal’s Kenmore sewing machine; “Drivin on 9” doubles down on the alt country; originally titled “Grunggae,” “Cannonball” sounds like a riff on The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton.” Cataloging a wide range of musical references, including NYC’s downtown scene, British indie, reggae and ska, industrial, alt-country, Grebo, and power pop, Last Splash adopts a modern rock ethos and gives us a stylistic tour of many of its eclectic corners. What Pitchfork’s Lindsey Zoldaz described as “haphazard” and The Quietus’s Emily Mackay called an “idiosyncratic style-romp” is actually Last Splash’s unifying principle: its musical breadth makes Last Splash a quintessentially modern rock album. 

Taking Last Splash as the paradigmatic modern rock album, this book tells just the sort of 90s narrative that today’s listeners and media seek — a narrative that foregrounds the people, sounds, and places left out of the stereotypical story of 90s alternative. Last Splash depicts the 90s in a way that centers women, modern rock, and southwest Ohio. This is not just because Dayton, Ohio is the Deal twins’ and percussionist Jim MacPherson’s hometown and the album was written there; rather, the specific modern rock ethos Last Splash exhibits belongs to Oxford, Ohio’s modern rock station 97X WOXY. Broadcasting to the Cincinnati, Dayton, and Richmond (IN) markets, WOXY was The Breeders’ hometown station, to the point that Kim and Kelley’s mom Ann guest-hosted the WOXY morning show a few times. Putting Last Splash in conversation with WOXY’s extensive station archives, including a full set of weekly playlists from 1993, this book offers a detailed and historically-informed account of what modern rock was in the early 1990s and Last Splash’s place in it at the time. The book also shows how WOXY’s and Last Splash’s take on modern rock was shaped by their location in southwest Ohio as a geographic and cultural setting. Reflecting Last Splash’s modular, non-narrative approach, the book’s chapters don’t tell linear story so much as they sketch a Venn diagram illustrating how modern rock, southwest Ohio, WOXY, and the 90s all come together to constitute Last Splash as a singular yet prophetic text.

For millennial, Gen X, and boomer readers, this book shows that Last Splash is a coherent overview of not just modern rock, but a specific take on modern rock that began as a regional view but, once WOXY started broadcasting online in 1998, came to be internationally-regarded as the most influential modern rock station in the world. Taking its cue from lyrical and/or sonic details in the album’s tracks, the book also contextualizes Last Splash in southwest Ohio, and with respect to 90s cultural discourses like feminism and the “women in rock” trope. Readers will gain both a new perspective on the history of so-called “alternative” music, and a more robust understanding of how Last Splash fits together and fits into its geographic and cultural context.

The perspective I take in this book is informed by three main things. First, I am a popular music studies scholar who has written extensively on gender and popular music. I put pop music scholarship and criticism in conversation with my own close listenings to connect sounds to their broader meanings. Second, I am author of a book about 97X WOXY and have access to an extensive archive of station documents and network of former staff and listeners. And finally, in 1993 I was a 15-year-old WOXY listener living in the Cincinnati suburbs about 45 minutes south on I-75 from the Deals. I am not a main character in this book, but my on-the-ground observations and local knowledge do pop up where relevant.

Introduction 

1: Downtown. “New Year” references Sonic Youth and their experimental downtown-scene milieu. This chapter analyzes those musical similarities, discusses the impact of that downtown scene on modern rock.

2: A Grungy Reggae Song. Originally titled “Grunggae,” the album’s breakout single “Cannonball” is a microcosm of the album itself, with a range of stylistic references including The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” and The B-52s “Love Shack.” 

3: Special Relationship. With its muddy guitars, baggy beat, and whiffs of Americana, “Invisible Man” calls on the sounds of British act The Jesus and Mary Chain. Looking at WOXY playlists and charts from the era, I show the significant role that scene played in modern rock.

4: Quiet/Loud. “Quiet/loud/quiet” is a song form attributed to Kim’s first band The Pixies. “No Aloha” is structured as one big quiet-then-loud gesture. This chapter connects the sounds of “No Aloha” to The Pixies oeuvre and discusses Kim’s contributions to and tenure in the band. The chapter also addresses The Pixies’ long influence on modern rock.

5: Atomic Age. With its thick guitars and experimentalism, “Roi” gestures towards Grebo rock band Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. This chapter considers the impact of the Cold War on both modern rock and Dayton, home to Wright-Patterson AirForce Base, where dad Ed Deal designed missile navigation systems.

6: “Postamateur Raincoats”. “Do You Love Me Now?” is a melodic love song originally released on their 1992 EP “Safari,” which Robert Christagu describes as sounding like the “postamateur Raincoats.” This chapter explores the extensive history of women in modern rock.

7: Hardcore. “Flipside” reworks Operation Ivy’s “Bankshot” & takes the name of a venerable L.A. punk zine and record label. This chapter covers the evolution of American punk and the emergence of third-wave ska in the 90s.

8: The Personal… “I Just Wanna Get Along” is a riot grrrl-influenced track not about patriarchy but about Kim’s relationship with one individual man: Pixies frontman Frank Black. This chapter studies the changing ways Kim and the band are profiled in the music press to show evolving attitudes toward what modern rock is and womens’ place in it.

9: Year Zero. The Lou Reed-channeling “Mad Lucas” highlights one of Modern Rock’s two acknowledged pre-1977 influences. This chapter discusses this modern rock “year zeroism.”

10: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. “Divine Hammer” is a power pop song in the tradition of modern rockers like Matthew Sweet and Cindy Lauper, which this chapter discusses. 

11: Song Without A Singer. Starting with a sample of Ann Deal’s Kenmore sewing machine and featuring a guitar lick that The Prodigy will sample in “Firestarter,” “S.O.S.” is another entry in the midwest’s long tradition of industrial and industrial dance music, which this chapter explores.

12: …Is Political. Referring to themselves as “Riot Hags,” The Breeders wrote “Hag” less about feminism and more about the contradictory experience of being a woman in patriarchy. This chapter situates “Hag” in the context of feminism in the 90s, Rock for Choice, Exile in Guyville, etc.

13: Local Lix. Mom Ann Deal’s favorite Breeders song, “Saints” is about the (Montgomery) county fair and the Deals’ overexaggerated Midwestern “Rs”. With a title reflecting WOXY’s local show, this chapter discusses modern rock in southwest Ohio. 

14: ”Let’s Go Burn Ole Nashville Down”. A cover of Ed’s Redeeming Qualities’ 1989 original, “Drivin on 9” is solidly in the alt country tradition.

15: Conclusion