Drag City

After the end of the Cold War there was a recession in 1990, and in 1991 Grunge music became popular as the cultural expression of the recession. This was widely seen as an event where 1980s underground and alternative bands became mainstream, and even as a “win” for the underground. However people had mixed sentiments about the development, as can be seen in the name of the documentary “1991: The Year Punk Broke”. In Europe there had been a genuine musical underground that smuggled First World music of “freedom” into the tightly controlled Communist Second World countries. 

Alternative music was a wide grouping of different genres. Over the course of the 1990s the various alternative genres blurred into each other, and also blurred with mainstream musical genres and by the late 1990s there was no longer much cultural or political distinction remaining between mainstream and alternative music. 

Bill was influenced by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, a band that was part of conceptual artist Andy Warhol’s The Factory. After the Cold War bands like The Vevet Underground became part of the new mainstream globalising culture, and President Vaclev Havel requested Lou Reed perform at a 1998 State Dinner hosted by US President Bill Clinton.

Bill signed onto a small Chicago record label Drag City for his third LP. 

Drag City was a then-tiny independent, started around 1989 by Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborne. its first release was by the band Royal Trux. Drag City appears to be a reference to the Drop City counterculture artists community in Colorado in the 60s and 70s. Drag City split the profits 50/50 with artists. Drag City had many artists from privileged backgrounds. Bill's parents were intelligence workers, Will Oldham and David Grubbs’ fathers were lawyers. Neil Hagerty’s father was in the US Army, and David Berman’s father was Richard Berman the right wing political consultant.

Drag City bands frequenlty wrote about cowboys, explorers, and the frontier. The American indie bands of this period were the beneficiaries of America as the sole superpower in the post-Cold War world, with English as the global lingua franca. The frontier they explored was the globalising neoliberal world.