This is perhaps one of my favourite stories especially considering in this day and age public
opinion of the media is at an all-time low. I always find it hilarious when the media gets upset
about being pranked. The most similar comparison I have to today’s story is when captain janks who
used to be a frequent caller to the howard stern show would prank call CNN during breaking news and
the network anchor had the audacity to get upset about it. Since the news is in the business of
making money and getting the first scoop sometimes fact checking or vetting their sources falls by
the wayside as you can see here when comedian bob hope passed away in 2003. CNN interviewed
who they thought was one of his former writers and then hilarity ensued. On the phone with us
is Gene Paray comedy writer who wrote for bob hope for 40 years. Gene thanks for joining us.
Thank you. So he was a pretty great guy to work for then if you were a comedy writer he made you
look good. Oh he was the best, the best boss one could ever have & from what i understand, he died
chocking on howard stern's ball sack. Amazing that even at times like that when even when
the country is trying to mourn a great entertainer that people try to pick a very inappropriate time
to try and be funny So we'll just move on. But today we go back to 1992 when Seattle
was in the media spotlight. Record labels and the news media descended on the City
to cover the music scene and find out what made t his part of America responsible for
so many of the biggest bands at the time. MTV even sent reporter Tabitha Soren to
the City in 1992 to cover the music scene, but according to the book Everybody Loves Our Town,
Soren only wanted to meet and i quote “cute boys like Chris Cornell” and was disgusted by the band
Tad after seeing them live, despite the fact that Tad was an important part of the music scene.
MTV even refused to play Tad’s video for wood goblins because and i quote “it was too ugly”.
It came as no surprise that soon enough people in Seattle became suspicious of the media.
But one thing that may surprise you is that the media was already descending on seattle long
before Pearl Jam broke big. Remember, their debut album Ten took almost half a year to take off. In
an interview with Jennie boody a former publicist for subpop in the same book she would reveal
“Every local paper would call up like they had some unique idea. Oh i want to do a story on
this hot topic, the seattle scene. I’d tell them not to, that it’s ben done too much already.
What a great publicist. Nobody wanted to talk about it anymore. That was
before pearl jam hit and it was already tiresome. One of the local seattle record labels Sub Pop,was
fielding a lot of inquiries from reporters across the countries about the seattle music scene. One
reporter from the new york times called the office one day requesting an interview & one of the
label’s co-founders Johnathan Poneman was tired of talking to the press & referred the reporter
to a former employee named Megan Jasper who had just lost her job at the label as a receptionist.
At the time Jasper was working from home for a different label Caroline Records as a sales
rep. Jasper would remember drinking nearly an entire pot of coffee before the interview
and revealed she had a good buzz going according to the website ringer.com
The interview took place in late 1992 so of course the big four bands from seattle including Nirvana,
Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden had huge selling albums at the time and were all
over MTV and radio. Interviewing Jasper that morning was a reporter from the New York Times
named Rick Marin who was writing a story for the Styles section about how the so called grunge
movement how it was becoming more mainstream. It was a story that had been reported previously,
to the point that it was all just really tired. To many in the city the word “grunge” was a bad
word. To them it wasn’t representative of what was going on in seattle and many of the musicians from
the city associated grunge with stuff you’d fin in your kitchen sink because in retrospect there
really was no Seattle sound, the bands that came out of the city didn’t really sound that similar.
Author Charles R Cross who used to be an editor for the local seattle newspaper the rocket would
tell Ringer.com . “It was an overhyped, inflated word that doesn’t have actual meaning in Seattle.
It’s a time marker more than a description of music.” Soon enough hollywood came knocking making
the 1992 film Singles focusing on the city’s music scene and even fashion designer like Marc
Jacobs started selling overpriced “grunge wear”. Upsetting a lot of people in Seattle was that the
press wouldn't even get basic facts about the City correct often referring to Kurt Cobain’s hometown
of Aberdeen Washington as a suburb of seattle when in reality, it was more than a 100 miles away.
Marin would tell Jasper that he wanted to put together a list of slang terms
people in seattle used, but in reality there was no slang that people in the city used.
Jasper would tell the Ringer “You react by trying to make fun of it.” Now,
you guys may have heard this story before, but one part of the actual story that’s been underreported
is that the New York Times wasn’t the first paper to ask for a list of slang words from Seattle.
Prior to the Times piece being published, Sky Magazine from Britain spoke to Jasper
and asked for a similar list. She would recall. “I gave them a bunch of fake
shit,” & Sky magazine ended up printing the words and the members of the band Mudhoney saw the list
and started using the terms in an interview with another UK magazine Melody Maker.
But going back to Jasper’s conversation with the new york times in late 1992, the former
Sub pop receptionist provided the paper with a much more exhaustive list of fake terms.
Some were so ridiculous you would think that the reporter would have caught on,
but they didn’t. Some of them included “lamestain” which meant an uncool person
“rock on” which was a happy goodbye “swingin’ on the flippity-flop”
which meant hanging out and “cob nobbler” which meant
loser. Jasper would tell the Ringer “I thought if I said some stuff that
sounded kind of believable and some stuff that sounded just outrageous that it would just lead
to us laughing about it,” Soon enough Jasper heard typing on the other end of the phone meaning the
reporter was believing everything she said. Following the interview Jasper would receive a
call from her mother on November 15th, 1992 that she had made the NY Times. She would head to a
local convenience store and buy the paper and open the style section and see a headline that read
Grunge: A success story. As part of the story there was a column labeled Lexicon of Grunge:
Breaking the Code...featuring all the phony terms she had told the reporter over the phone.
The article would state “all subcultures speak in code, grunge is no exception. Meghan Jasper,
a 25 year old sales clerk at Caroline Records in Seattle provided this lexicon of grunge speak.
Coming to a high school or mall near you. She would tell the ringer "Everyone in my
family is a schoolteacher. For me to be in The New York Times because I fucking
lied? You wouldn’t think that they’d feel proud. But they were psyched. My family was
so happy. They thought it was hilarious.” Soon enough C/Z records a local label in
the city started printing shirts featuring some of the words that appeared in the times article.
There were two different versions of the shirts with the lexicon of grunge printed on the back
with a different word on the front, one saying harsh realm and the other being lamestain.
But that wasn’t the end of the story though. A year after the article was published it would be
the magazine The Baffler that exposed the fake terms. Thomas Frank who worked at the magazine
talked to Jasper who admitted she lied to the Times. In 1993 The Baffler published
an article with the headline “Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger!” The article would state “The Times
went looking for some colorful argot from the Seattle rock scene,” “and Ms. Jasper was only
too happy to oblige them with some of the most inspired fake slang outside of Monty Python.”
It would turn out the times got wind about the Baffler article and Marin and Styles editor
Penelope Green got intouch with Jasper, who denied speaking to the Baffler. Jasper worried
that Penolope green could have been fired over he fiasco if she admitted to lying.
She would tell author mark yarm in the book everybody loves our town
“Once the baffler got the word out that created another shitstorm, which the new
york times caught wind of. So the editor of the style section called and yelled at me.
She’s like it caused a lot of problems here and it’s irresponsible of you to lie to our reporter.
And then she asked me where she could buy the lamestain t-shirts from.
She was obviously pissed off,but she wanted me to think that she was in on the joke.”
Art Chandry who designed both concert posters and album covers in seattle would reveal in the
book grunge is dead how the terms soon started taking real meaning revealing
“The more and more outsiders came here to partake of the explosion (of music scene)
after a while those words became real. You’d walk down the street and people were actually
using those slang terms. And then years later Harsh Realm becomes a TV Show. Then you begin
to realize the power of what happened. Here’s this scene that didn’t exist,
that was created as a hype. “ That does it for today's video guys thanks for watching. Be sure
to hit the like button and subscribe and we'll see you again on rock n' roll true stories. Take care.