LAST FRIDAY, I related some of the things I told the Italian mag Jam about the Seattle music scene since the U.S. corporate media stopped caring about it.

Here’s some more of what I told that publication’s writer:

• Q: I think that one thing that united very different guys like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder was their attempt to negoziate the role of the rock star in the music business (it’s common opinion that only Nirvana did, but let’s not forget that it was Pearl Jam who stopped to do press and video, not Nirvana). Do you agreed? Is it something that still has an impact on today’s music scene and attitude?

  A: Nirvana tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and failed. Pearl Jam, which in its first year was more aggressively promoted than Nirvana, tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and succeeded on its own terms. PJ became a major-label act with the fan devotion of an “indie” act. By under-using the industry’s mass-marketing tools, it maintained its status as a “people’s” band.

• Q: Talking about the fifth anniversary of the Kurt Cobain’s death you wrote that now the town is as dysfunctional as it were then. And that the wrong people has a lot of career opportunities (so it’s not true what they say, that as ye sow, so shall ye reap). Can you elaborate?

  A: Let me clarify: A few people here are now tremendously wealthy, but those of us who aren’t on the upper rings of the high-tech and software industries are still struggling as much as ever. With the price of housing here having skyrocketed, some of us have struggled even more.

• Q: One big misconception about the Seattle music scene was that it was all grunge. Of course, it was a lie, or maybe ingenuity. Are things still the same? I mean, is the music scene still varied, with a wide range of different music?

  A: Perhaps even more so. Besides local outposts of whatever national trends come and go (alternative-country, lounge, techno, etc.), there’s a vital and growing avant-improv and postmodern-jazz scene. But, yes, the national magazines like Wallpaper still look at anything in Seattle that contradicts the “all-grunge” stereotypes and act all weird: “This is in Seattle but it’s Not Grunge–how strange!”

• Q: A friend of mine who went to Seattle two years ago reported to me that there’s no big exploitation of the ‘grunge era’ in town, apart from the Sub Pop Mega Mart and other little things that probably cannot attract massive ‘rock tourism’. Is it true? If it’s so, the reason is the ‘underground attitude’ of the scene, that refused to exploit ‘grunge’?

  A: Don’t worry. That will all come by the end of next year, when the Experience Music Project museum opens, including a big permanent exhibit all about the G-word era.

  But for now, yes. The ‘underground attitude’ was officially opposed to tourist attractions, theme parks, or the like. And the powers-that-be in local business and political circles have continued to eagerly play the role of intolerant authority figures (what all would-be “rebels” need in order to have something to rebel against), so there was never any threat of any city-supported Grunge Festival or anything like that.

• Q: Is Seattle rock scene still away from the starmaking machinery (the one that rules in L.A., for example)?

  A: Perhaps further away than before. Of the bands I wrote about in ‘Loser,’ the only ones still on the major labels are Pearl Jam, Built to Spill, Candlebox, Alice In Chains (who haven’t put out a lot of new stuff lately), and Chris Cornell’s new solo act. There are still bigtime producers and managers and promoters around here, but they work as much with out-of-town acts as with local ones.

• Q: The whole ‘grunge story’ showed once again that in the rock field success is a very transitory thing, that is all about trends, that rock fans today they like Nirvana and tomorrow Offspring or anything else. I’m wondering if there has been a moment when you thought that the incredible Nirvana’s success could change anything in that field? Did you ever believe that most of the people who listened to Nirvana really shared something and not simply listened to the band that was supposed to be cool listen to?

  A: Nirvana meant a lot to a lot of people. More than the studio-manufactured pop combos before or since, and more than certain California bands that sound sort of grungy but have much more industry-friendly business plans (appearing at snowboarding festivals, selling songs for movie soundtracks, etc.).

  The Industry did regain control of pop music from the upstarts. But it might just turn out to be a temporary victory. One of the six major-label groups has merged itself out of existence. The remaining five groups are cutting divisions, firing staff members, dropping bands left and right, and publicly whining about Internet-based “threats” to its well-being. While the techno-dance genre is still almost all indie-label-based; and cheap digital recording, Net-based promotion, and a club circuit invigorated by the early-’90s indie-rock mania make it easier than ever to get an act established (if not wealthy) without the majors’ waste or overhead.

• Q: How heavily the Kurt Cobain story weighted on the city’s conscience and life?

  A: It certainly made everything seem a lot less fun for a good long while.

  It also convinced some people of the wrongness of the music-industry system. Cobain had clearly been burnt out by the stress, not of being “the voice of a generation” but of being the locus of a multimillion-dollar business that used to be a little punk band. Geffen demanded videos, interviews, and long, overseas arena tours, and Cobain apparently felt unable to say no to these demands. (Of course, he was also sufferring under the drug-addict’s paradox of needing more money while becoming less capable of working for it.)

• Q: Do you think that the most popular bands (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden) departed from their background when they became successful? Or they kept on having a strong relationship with the city?

  A: None of them moved to L.A. (except Courtney Love and a couple of former Seven Year Bitch members).

  But it was traditional, in the pre-Microsoft years, for rich people in Seattle to withdraw from public life, to move out to gated suburbs or country homes and to stick to themselves. Some of the financially-successful music-scene people have done that, retreating to Idaho or Montana or the islands of Puget Sound.

  But others are still quite involved. Prime example: Krist Novoselic, who these days appears in public more often than he did during Nirvana’s heyday, and who’s been involved in anti-censorship drives and other political actions.

• Q: Do you think that the ‘Hype!’ movie correctly documents what happened in Seattle? If not, what’s missing? (Steve Fisk, for example, told me that the tragic death of Mia Zapata is underrated in the movie; he told it had a massive emotional impact on the sceners.)

  A: Anything running two hours or less, covering a topic so complex, will by necessity be a condensation.

  Home Alive, the women’s self-defense coalition formed after Zapata’s death, has had some attrition of volunteers and funding but is still active after six years. Zapata’s death, still unsolved, left a lot of people with a sense that they were in a seriously threatening environment; that death and violence weren’t just the stuff of goth or cartoon-heavy-metal fantasies.

• Q: Is the dj’s and electronic music big in Seattle now?

  A: You bet. It taps into one eternal Seattle schtick–the mistaken belief by would-be hipsters that everything in Seattle sucks, that the only really hip thing is to copy whatever San Francisco or New York says is hip. But it also taps into a certain spirit you can find in the Microsoft coprorate culture, where everybody’s young, ruthlessly “positive,” aggressively modernistic, and into hot-hot-hot hype.

• Q: What is now the impact and the role of Microsoft and Boeing in the city?

  A: Boeing’s corporate culture used to set the rules for mainstream society in Seattle–businesslike, rational, respectable, unassuming, consensus-oriented, square, and obsessed with quiet good taste.

  Today, Microsoft sets the tone–loud, fast, brash, aggressive, ambitious, arrogant, power- and success-oriented, and obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth.

TOMORROW: Is irony dead, or just playing possum?