(Credits: Warner Bros. Pictures)
Wed 21 May 2025 19:30, UK
Jack Black has always been a student of rock and roll from the moment that he heard his first records. Whereas most people claim to like the music now and again, Black has absorbed all stripes of rock as part of his DNA, to the point where School of Rock really felt like him living his normal life while teaching a classroom of kids. But one of the greatest strengths that Black had was knowing how to see rock and roll from every possible angle.
If there’s one genre that Black will be defined with until the day he dies, it’s hard rock and heavy metal. This is the same guy who insisted that people like Ronnie James Dio was in Tenacious D’s movie and wanted to get Led Zeppelin’s permission to use ‘Immigrant Song’ for School of Rock, so he always knew that there was nothing better than a kickass guitar riff and a screaming singer howling their way above everything.
That kind of music is all well and good for when people are getting used to rock and roll, but when they start delving beneath the surface, there’s a lot more to explore when they reach the underground. Because if someone like Ozzy Osbourne was a madman, he paled in comparison to what Iggy Pop had been doing a few years prior to him, like cutting himself up onstage and walking on people’s hands in the crowd.
But whereas most people from the underground seemed fairly laid-back, no one was prepared for what Nirvana did the minute they hit it big. Kurt Cobain may have been looking to be a rock star, but ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ took alternative rock into the mainstream, to the point where every single kid who was listening to Warrant and Poison were starting to look well behind the times when they came out with records after that.
Then again, Cobain would have been the first to tell people that he was only listening to what he heard in his record collection. Sure, some of that record collection did feature pop songs by bands like The Beatles and the riffs of Aerosmith, but Black knew when he heard them that they weren’t doing anything that Pixies hadn’t been doing as far back as the mid-1980s on albums like Surfer Rosa.
When talking about the band later, Black felt that Pixies predicted where music was heading years before Kurt Cobain even had a single record to his name, saying, “Black Francis’ melodies and vocalisations were so primal and original. And that Santiago guy was from another f—in’ planet with genius guitar licks. They were Nirvana, but no one knew it.”
And while Black isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s not like Black Francis is responsible for all of Nirvana’s success, either. The dynamic changes in their songs are certainly an influence from Pixies, but there’s a good chance that the Pixies frontman could never have come up with something like ‘In Bloom’ or have the strange melodic left turns that happen in a tune like ‘Lithium’.
But, really, Pixies are as essential to rock and roll history as the true legends of the genre even if they didn’t have the same amount of zeroes on their royalty checks. Because had their records not come out at the right time, there’s a good chance that we would be living in a world that still considered bands like Winger and Skid Row to be the almighty titans of what rock and roll stood for.
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