A Jar of Flies, A Bottle of Lightning


This year marks the 30th(!) anniversary of Alice In Chains’ seminal EP “Jar of Flies,” and a haunting question still echoes through the halls of rock music:

What the hell happened to rock music?

In 1994, grunge was king. Kurt Cobain’s anguished howls and Eddie Vedder’s impassioned growls dominated the airwaves. Alice In Chains’ “Jar of Flies” proved that even unplugged, grunge could top the charts. The future of rock seemed assured, a brave new world of flannel and feedback.

Fast forward three decades, and we’re left with a genre-shaped hole where rock’s next evolutionary step should be. Grunge, it turns out, was less a beginning than an ending – rock’s last great gasp before slipping into a coma it has yet to wake from.

Sure, we’ve had pretenders to the throne. Green Day could thrash. Black Keys too. Trent Reznor was no dandy. But none managed to capture the zeitgeist – or the charts – quite like grunge did.

Today’s musical landscape is dominated by hip-hop, pop, and whatever genre-bending pablum is currently trending on TikTok. Rock, once the voice of youth rebellion, now feels like your dad’s music – comfortable, familiar, but hardly revolutionary.

The irony is palpable. Grunge, with its disdain for commercial success and music industry machinery, inadvertently killed the very machine that had propelled rock to cultural dominance for decades. In rejecting the star-making system, grunge stars became the last real rock stars.

It’s not that great rock music isn’t being made. It is, in basements and bars across the country. But it no longer drives the cultural conversation. Rock, like jazz before it, has become a niche interest – respected, occasionally brilliant, but no longer essential.

I know we’re still angry as a people; rock just no longer seems to be the medium to express it.

As I revisit the raw emotion and haunting melodies of “Jar of Flies,” I’m reminded not just of grunge’s power, but of its finality. There’s a reason so many of its talismen have tombstones.

In exploring disillusionment, detachment and drug abuse, Alice In Chains captured lightning in a bottle – or perhaps, more fittingly, a jar. And in the 30 years since, no one has managed to replicate that magic.

Rock isn’t dead. It’s just irrelevant. Nothing a little Layne Staley couldn’t fix.

Ode to A Sneaker

Snoop Dogg’s One Take

The Olympics reminds me I used to love sneakers. I still do, but I used to, too.

Nike, Adidas, Chuck Taylors. I was a gym shoe junkie back in the day. Dad used to say, “Those clown shoes won’t help you jump higher.” But I didn’t care. Each new pair felt like a superpower.

Remember those Larry Bird Converse Weapons? I had a pair in ’86. They were garish and ridiculous, but man, did I feel like a baller. I was sure they’d help me sink threes from half-court. Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

Larry Bird’s Converse Weapon

I thought I was done with cool sneakers when I hit 50. My feet voted for comfort over style. But then Snoop Dogg, of all people, got me back in the game with his Skechers collab.

Gin and Juice Snoop. Blunt-smokin Snoop. Olympic darling and grandfather of three Snoop.

He’s concocted a mad scientist shoe, the One Take, tourquoise and orange and platformed like he was late for Soul Train.

I love them. I want to be buried in them.

Now my closet’s a timeline of my life. Old high-tops next to sensible lookalikes. From “I can dunk” to “I can funk” to “I just want to walk without pain.”

Funny how things change. As a kid, I wore sneakers to impress classmates. Now? I wear what feels good. My feet finally got their Ph.D. in Not Giving a Damn.

And yet.

Did I mention they were $100? Jordans should be so affordable. Sometimes, when I squint, the orange stripes resemble an outstretched Chicago Bull.

Wore my new kicks to the docs last week. Then to poker. And they’ve become my cycling clog.

Life’s weird like that. Sometimes you think you’ve outgrown a thing, but it turns out it’s just grown up with you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​