The post-grunge era got a bad reputation for being a watered-down version of the music that changed the world. Those bands were weaker, lamer, and more ineffective at eliciting the kind of emotional resonance that made grunge the voice of an apathetic generation. Those bands were too faceless for the task, instead becoming a battle to see who was most insulting to the legacy of the true artists. There was not much appreciation even in the moment for those bands, and time has not worn particularly well on them. Most of those bands have either faded completely from our memory, or have become touchstones for the interregnum between cultural moments.
Some of us have lived in that pause for all these years, hanging onto a sound that might have been more inauthentic for most, but rang more true for us. Those of us who have always questioned the wisdom of emotions, or if we have them as we should, can find in post-grunge a stimulus that does not overwhelm us in the way that the more pointed depressive angst is likely to. While others need to be hit harder, the softer breeze of the less aggressive amps is still enough to push us off our bearings.
I can hear some of you saying that Matchbox 20 (as it was spelled at the time) wasn't a post-grunge band. This is one of those 'you had to be there' moments, because in 1996 they absolutely were. This was before we had Nickelback redefining the defilement of grunge, so it was bands like Matchbox 20 who were the initial wave of post-grunge. It looks and sounds funny now to look back and think of them that way, along with "One Headlight" or "The Way" getting lumped in as well, given how those bands were influenced by Americana and 60s pop more than anything with treble-less guitars, but that's what it was. It was a weird time, ok?
Rob Thomas was a polarizing figure. His songs were overly earnest, his quasi-yarling voice was off-putting to many, and he came across as being even more embarrassing to be a fan of than Rivers Cuomo in his full "Buddy Holly" regalia. There was nothing cool about Matchbox 20, which might explain why thirty years later I still listen to this record more often than I should. I had tried to convince myself over the years that they got better when they became experimental with "Mad Season", or that they were always a pop band at heart, but the truth of the matter is "Yourself Or Someone Like You" is an album from a band that would no longer exist after the cycle was over. The same characters were in the cast, but they were reading from a different script.
Grunge was an exploration of what it meant to be unhappy when the world was moving into a period of peace and prosperity. When there was no overriding reason for the malaise we often feel, it tells us the reasons are internal, which makes them harder to identify or fix. That was where music came in, as the gloomy Seattle sound was the cloudy haze that filled the empty space inside us. At least for the people who were slightly older than me, that is. I was too young to be invested in that scene at the time, so the post-grunge era was when I started to understand any of this. When "Real World" opened this album by asking what it would be like to not feel as if they world is conspiring against us, what it would be like to have any of the things we want, I'm not sure I had gotten to the point of asking existential questions before. Deep thinking and Matchbox 20 might be an odd mix, but is that really a worse origin story than being bitten by a radioactive spider?
What I did not appreciate for many years was how angry this record is. There are hints of it when Rob nearly breaks his voice delivering the key lines, but the lyrics tell stories of being lost, beaten down, and tired of trying to carry on as if we aren't already broken. The "Long Day" the song talks of is every day when we need someone to find a shred of hope at the bottom of their pocket they can lend to us. When Kurt Cobain was writing "In Utero", he was happily(?) married and making reference to his wife's vagina in his lyrics. Was that really any more desperate or angst-ridden than how "Push" talks about needing to be an asshole to justify our feelings of worthlessness?
Beneath that surface, Rob understands that he is pushing people away before they can do the same to him, a defense mechanism many of us understand all too well. Having a sense of control can be the only thing making certain circumstances tolerable, and writing songs that frame the narrative in a sympathetic light is exactly the sort of thing creative people do so they can choose to believe the story is the actual truth. Whether or not things were ever actually what Rob tells us, the thought of going "Back 2 Good" is written to give us retroactive hope that something that once existed can exist again.
For me, the most important moment of the entire record comes in "Kody", where Rob writes a line that has echoed in my head for all these years. "If you've never heard that silence, it's a god-awful sound" he sings, which is a truth you're fortunate if you don't immediately understand. We often think that the fights and dust-ups are the worst parts of our relationships, but those are welcome memories when all you're left with is the silence that comes from no one being there. It goes back to the adage about love's opposite not being hate because they are both passions, but rather that love's opposite is actually apathy. That thought, and the irony of Rob singing the line with such obvious passion in his voice, was an indication that the post-grunge era was more attuned to psychology than grunge ever was. Trading heroin for therapy might not have been as 'cool', but it might have saved us all from additional self-destruction.
I started this year thinking about 1996 as perhaps the most pivotal year in music for me, personally. Four records would come to define me and the music I have listened to over these last three decades, and while one of them got me thinking about writing, another turned me into a musician, and a third became the True South to measure my moral compass by, "Yourself Or Someone Like You" is the one that resonates the most with me in this current time. While it has never been cool, I can say the same for myself.
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