LAST SPLASH as the ür-text of 90s modern rock

Though the standard narrative of 90s alternative hinges on the explosive success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Gen Z pop star Olivia Rodrigo is known for having a different take: as she told the LA Times at the end of 2023, hearing The Breeders’ 1993 breakout hit “Cannonball” for the first time was so revolutionary that the event periodizes her life into a “before” and “after.” Whether this is a sincerely held belief or industry spin doesn’t really matter, as its effects are undeniably palpable. The Breeders’ influence on Rodrigo’s album GUTS is unmistakable, to the point that they also opened for Rodrigo on the tour supporting her album so audiences could connect the dots themselves. 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 role of the woman whom even Kurt Coban cited as one of his significant influences but whose influence the industry and the press didn’t find important to shepherd.

In the early 90s, the industry and the press were interested in the way heavy, angry white men like Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails could re-center cishetero white dudes in modern rock, a genre that as recently as 1989 was widely thought to be more than a bit queer. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Chris Radel wrote a December 1989 front-page Sunday Arts section feature that describes modern rock as “an unknown entity of abstruse lyrics and flighty, unconventional melodies performed by bands with names swimming in outrageousness, quirkiness, and alphabet soup” (FRR 39). “Flighty,” “outrageous,” and “quirky” (and probably also “alphabet soup”) describe acts like The B-52s, a band with out queer men and two women whose single “Love Shack” climbed to #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier that year. The grunge phenomenon put bros back at the center of the format. Likewise, NIN was known for “making synths tough” and “aggressively masculine” (22). The bro-ification of alt rock didn’t start in the late 90s with the collapse of the alt rock radio bubble; the entire narrative of “alternative” (as opposed to “modern rock,” which is what the format had been called since the early 80s and was reflected in the name of Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart) was designed to center cisheteromasculinity in a style of music previously seen to lack precisely that.

The alt narrative centered men so strongly that when Last Splash came out the press simply didn’t know what to do with The Breeders. The album got a full-page review in the September 1993 issue of SPIN, but the reviewer, herself a woman, treated the fact of Kim, Kelley, and Josephine’s gender as the album’s sole feature. The end of the third paragraph asks “What happens when a woman is the ‘I’?” of a rock song, and the rest of the review circles around this question which itself appears nowhere on the album. I am literally an expert on gender and popular music and let me reassure you that Last Splash is not an album about gender, about feminism, or about being a woman. But at the time, the fact that it was by (mostly) women was so out of synch with the dominant narrative about alt rock that this fact stood out as the album’s key distinguishing feature. SPIN’s March 1994 profile of the band is somewhat more generous and circumspect, but it nevertheless begins with a rumination on the author’s inability to find a “box” to fit them into. Unlike alt rock’s “middle-class dysfunctional boys under 30” like fellow midwestern suburbanite Billy Corgan, The Breeders are “normal” (and over 30 at that time). That’s the second article in the same publication in under a year whose organizing premise is that The Breeders aren’t men (there’s a joke here about fellow Ohioans Devo). Although there were “tons of women back in the day” as Kim told People magazine in 2024, part of what made alt rock alternative was that it was an alternative to modern rock, the genre of The B-52s, Kate Bush, Tracy Chapman, The Pet Shop Boys, Debbie Harry, Chrissy Hynde, Erasure, Siouxsie Sioux, Sinead O’Connor, Suzanne Vega, Annie Lennox, Bjork, The Cocteau Twins, Exene Cervenka, Cosi Fanni Tutti, Tanya Donnelley, and uh perhaps most notably in this case The Pixies. There may have been tons of women in modern rock, but the “alternative” narrative was so centered around men that journalists couldn’t figure out how to position The Breeders in it.

Fast forward to 2024 and popular feminism has so overtaken pop music that well-known do-gooders Live Nation agreed to hang the highest-grossing tour of any musician born in the 21st century around the narrative that The Breeders are the first band young people should think of when they think about 90s alternative. 

Though critics like Unterberger frame this as a re-tooling of alt rock’s gender narrative, it is much more than that: it peels away the “alt” narrative entirely and re-focuses the 90s on modern rock. 

By “modern rock,” I mean the radio format that existed throughout the 1980s that was defined by its genre-ecclecticism and -eccumenicalism. Modern rock grew out of post-punk, which scholar Mimi Haddon defines as a genre unified by its commitment to broaden punk’s narrow focus on rock’s distilled essence by incorporating influences from dub reggae and disco. Hybridity is in modern rock’s DNA. As the U.S.’s premier modern rock station WOXY defines it, modern rock is “a wide spectrum of music…which encompasses dozens of different styles and subgenres.” 

The station had hour-long specialty programming dedicated to the blues, reggae, “world music” as they called it in the 90s, electronic dance music, and a number of programs dedicated to local Cincinnati/Dayton area music. In addition to being the most highly-regarded modern rock station in the country, WOXY was also The Breeders’ home station. In southwest Ohio in particular, modern rock meant, as WOXY program director Mike Taylor put it, “variety, and lots of it.”

Written in Kim and Kelley’s suburban Dayton basement, Last Splash is a thoroughly modern rock album that exhibits influences from SoCal ska to downtown NYC experimentalism to Athens GA-style quirkiness to fellow-SW Ohioan Bootsie Collins-style funk. Each track on the album pulls on a different stylistic thread in the modern rock panoply, often filtering it through what sounds like The Pixies but is actually just Kim’s songwriting style, which by that time had left its own indelible mark on modern rock. Roi gestures towards Sonic Youth; Flipside is not a fraternal twin but definitely a cousin to Operation Ivy’s 1988 instrumental “Bankshot”; SOS starts off quite industrially with a sample of Ann Deal’s sewing machine; Drivin on 9 doubles down on the alt country; with its “ah-OOOOO-gah”s and “coo-coo”s and harmonized treble vocals, Cannonball recalls The B-52s. 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.” Last Splash adopts this modern rock ethos and gives us a stylistic tour of many of its eclectic corners. 

To take Last Splash as the ür-text of 90s rock is thus to foreground modern rock rather than “alternative,” which flattened out its predecessor’s stylistic and demographic spectrum into a narrow focus on dudes with guitars. It also re-focuses the geography of 90s rock away from Seattle and on Dayton. This is not just because that’s the Deal’s and percussionist Jim MacPherson’s hometown and the album was written there; rather, the specific modern rock ethos Last Splash exhibits belongs to WOXY, which broadcast into the Cincinnati, Dayton, and Richmond, Indiana markets. No single institution has thematized this concept of modern rock as thoroughly, extensively, and unwaveringly. Once KROQ, likely the nation’s first modern rock station, was bought by CBS, it was programmed like the corporate giant it had become. By the mid-90s WOXY was playing twice as much music per day than KROQ was, spinning big hits fewer times each day and leaving room for more stuff in the playlist.

Just look at the 97 Best of 1993, the station’s countdown of the best albums from that year:

Compiled from weekly request numbers, this chart is a record of what WOXY listeners liked best. And it includes everything from hip hop by Arrested Development, reggae from UB40, EDM from the Pet Shop Boys, singer-songwriter from Aimee Mann, alt country from Chris Isaak, and we’ll just give Bjork her own category. This is a very different, more diverse and adventurous picture than the one we get from the KROQ and 91X playlists Unterberger linked in his Billboard piece.

Though the station had long had international recognition in the press, when it started broadcasting online in 1998 WOXY’s approach to modern rock came to be known by listeners around the world — to the point that the station had a cult following in Brazil. In 2004 it was the most-listened to commercial web radio station on the internet. Given its reach on the internet, it would be wrong to see WOXY’s influence as only local to its FM broadcast area.

Live Nation is not the only institution pushing for Last Splash to be modern rock’s rediscovered ür-text. The press coverage of Kim’s 2024 solo album treats her (to use a formulation loved by WOXY DJ Dave Tellmann) like the Olivia Colman of modern rock. NME reminds us that Kim is literally your favorite rockstar’s favorite rockstar. Notably, that album also exhibits Last Splash’s genre-spanning aesthetic, with songs that recall LCD Soundsystem and The Prodigy as much as they do “Cannonball” or “Gigantic.” In this respect, the narrative around “Nobody Loves You More” is rewriting the myth of 90s alternative around both Kim herself and her solo album’s wide spectrum of influences.

The music industry’s currently high baseline level of popular feminism is certainly behind some of the push to rewrite the story of 90s alternative around Kim and The Breeders. 2024 was widely regarded as the year of the “pop girlie” as Taylor Swift’s Eras tour grossed gobs of money and the buzz focused on Charli, Chappell, and Sabrina. Live Nation wanted to give Rodrigo’s young fans a version of the unremembered 90s that they could connect with as young femme pop fans. What better musical foremothers for the era of the relatable pop star than the quintessentially middle American Deal sisters?

Related to the industry’s popular feminism is its lack of a need for the 90s alt rock narrative to do any rockist work centering white men with guitars. That ship sailed 20 years ago (literally – Sanneh’s “Rap Against Rockism” was published on Halloween 2004). Though the “alternative” narrative was designed to make modern rock more legibly rock and rockist, that functionality is obsolete in the 2020s. Since the 80s, pop as a genre has been defined by its mixing of different stylistic influences; in this respect, the modern rock narrative is much better suited to pop artists like Rodrigo, as it gives her a wide range of styles to play with. 

As someone raised by WOXY and a full-on modern rock partisan, I’m not upset that alternative is out and modern rock is in. The alternative narrative was always an industry narrative sent from the top down to mainstream formerly niche music. But I am equally certain that we would be remiss if we didn’t recognize that the modern rock narrative is also WOXY’s narrative: like the Islamic philosophers who preserved the ancient Greek and Roman philosophical traditions through the European dark ages so the West had the opportunity to rediscover them in the Enlightenment, WOXY preserved and refined the modern rock narrative while everybody else was going on about “alternative.” Jerry Springer and the Lachey brothers are not the only significant 90s media export southwest Ohio gave to the world – this modern rock narrative is another.