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.
