Hype!

365 Films

Entry #83

Hype! (1995)

Directed by Doug Pray

The exclamation point at the end of the title of Doug Pray’s 1995 documentary about the Seattle music scene supernova hardly seems accidental.  Hype! implies the sudden burst of worldwide interest that quickly engulfed the region while simultaneously deflating it with an emphatic piece of punctuation that calls it exactly what it is.  That kind of self-aware, sarcasm-laden critique is exactly what makes Hype! such a charming and effective piece of musical history revisionism.  The whole Seattle phenomenon is particularly interesting to me because it hit at just the right time for me hop on the bandwagon, yet be blissfully unaware of my poser implications.  In fact, there’s a brief interview with an angry teen local late in the film whose face subsequently became the poster for the theatrical release.  His pissed-off tirade bitterly indicts someone exactly like me whom, as he puts it, “wears his Pearl Jam shirt and dresses like a poser.”  His solution for my type of music fan is to be violently spat on by him and when asked why this type of behavior enrages him so, he puts it rather succinctly, “I liked it first.”  It is within this incredibly brief interview that Pray cannily posits the lose-lose situation involved with being a fan of anything that has potential to grow.  The thing you love the most will be exploited and loved just as much by an entirely undeserving audience and turn you into a maniacal hoarder of cultural cache.  To my ears, “I liked it first” is just an empty an axiom, as “I like them because they are cool.”   Pray’s approach to the material is admirable because his detached observant technique allows the musicians, photographers, and other historical witnesses tell their own story with humor and a sly perspective.  The film was released only one year after the death of Kurt Cobain (and I have no idea if this is accurate or not, but we can probably agree that’s when the whole thing imploded, right?) so everybody’s insights are still fresh and plenty bitter.  You get the sense that while the community faced an onslaught of carpetbaggers and other resilient sponges of cultural detritus, Seattle was able to maintain its sanity by banding together in unison.  If the city was initially a hodge podge of every single kind of musical iteration under the sun, the grunge hype explosion definitely helped those bands coalesce and become (in theory) the kind of city the rest of the world wanted it to be.  Some twenty years removed from this extravaganza, Seattle seems like merely a blip on the pop culture radar.  The end of the Nineties saw the ascension and quick decline of a rainbow coalition of flash in the pan smile time variety hour acts.  From boy bands to nu metal to Latin pop, to even the entirely fairly maligned Everclear, musical tastes seemed to hop from one part of the world to the next every five seconds.  This is what finally makes Hype! such an emotional viewing experience, the corporate hypocrisy being railed against comes off like the most important thing in the world to the participants of the film.  Little did they know, it would all be reduced to some vague nostalgic touchstone of a subsequent generation entirely too young to appreciate it at the time.  We do have one thing for which we will ALWAYS be indebted to Seattle, the band name Butt Sweat.  Best band name ever.  Also just wanted to share, as a final thought, Roger Ebert’s appraisal of Eddie Vedder’s interview in the film (this is entirely a propos of NOTHING but being a life long Pearl Jam fan, I couldn’t resist).

“Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder is probably the key musical figure from grunge, and in “Hype!” he comes across as intelligent and thoughtful. While acknowledging that the grunge phenomenon was dissipated by its fame (it was most at home in small local clubs), he sounds like the survivor of a war or a shipwreck: “It will be a tragedy if we don't do something with this.” But, of course, they did.”