I saw Foo Fighters last Friday.
Or rather, I watched 40,000 men between the ages of 42 and 58 relive their divorces in real time.
Dave Grohl walked onstage like the human equivalent of a neighborhood barbecue. Everybody loves him. Nobody seems entirely sure why, but everyone agrees he’s a great guy.
And he probably is.
The problem is that nice people sometimes make terrible music.
Foo Fighters are a strange phenomenon. I know a handful of their songs, I can even sing along to the choruses, and yet I haven’t voluntarily put on a Foo Fighters album in, what, fifteen years.
They’re everywhere. If rock music were tap water, Foo Fighters would be that faint taste you barely notice but that’s always there.
They’re basically rock’s factory setting.
At one point I started wondering how many songs they actually have. After a while I wasn’t sure whether they’d played ten different songs or the same song ten times.
Everything blurs together into one endless stream of polished radio rock. Chorus. Guitar. Chorus again. A lyric about pain, survival or flying. Then another chorus.
It’s like listening to a greatest hits album where every hit comes from the same song.
When Kurt Cobain died, he left a hole in the universe. Dave Grohl filled it with melodies, raw emotion and a kind of off-kilter power pop that was genuinely great. That first album still sounds like a guy alone in a room trying to figure out what the hell he’s supposed to do with his life.
Somewhere along the way, Foo Fighters turned into a company that manufactures arena rock. Corporate rock, maybe. Not bad arena rock. But not particularly exciting arena rock either. Just… arena rock. Music that could play underneath a commercial for beer, pickup trucks or a home improvement store.
There’s something almost scientific about the way Grohl managed to distill grunge, power pop, punk and classic rock into a product that’s completely harmless. It’s as if he took everything that made Nirvana, Hüsker Dü and Sugar exciting, then filtered out everything weird, broken and dangerous.
What’s left works anywhere.
At the gym. In a sports bar. In a rental car. In your dentist’s waiting room.
And maybe that’s exactly why people love them. Because while I’m standing there grumbling about overproduction, tired lyrics and riffs that sound suspiciously familiar, I look out at the crowd.
They’re having a blast. A genuine blast. They’re singing, screaming and smiling.
Meanwhile I’m standing there shaking my head, thinking everything coming off that stage has blended into one big beige paste.
Maybe that’s why Foo Fighters have survived for so long. Not despite being the beige Volvo V70 of rock, but because of it.
It starts every morning. It gets you where you’re going. It’s not sexy.
But it works.
I leave with the same feeling I’ve had for the last twenty years. Dave Grohl still seems like a genuinely decent guy. But why does Nickelback get so much hate while Foo Fighters get so much love?
They’re basically the same band, built on the same formula, writing more or less the same songs.
I like maybe five Foo Fighters songs.
And I’m still not entirely convinced the rest aren’t all the same one.