A Cheeky, Hilarious Look At Seattle Rock

----------------------------------------------------------------- Movie review

XXX 1/2 "Hype!," documentary about the Seattle music scene directed by Doug Pray. Egyptian. No rating; includes profanity. -----------------------------------------------------------------

"Seattle . . . is currently to the rock-'n'-roll world what Bethlehem was to Christianity."

That bit of bald hyperbole, borrowed from a 1992 copy of Spin magazine, kicks off this cheeky, energized, frequently hilarious account of the selling of the Seattle grunge scene.

As the title suggests, "Hype!" is as much about the early-1990s media circus as it is about the music that helped create it. In its more serious moments, as survivors contemplate the long list of Northwest drug casualties, the movie questions the value of outrageous, instant fame.

"You start wondering if success is a good thing," says one devastated veteran of the local rock scene. "Your life as a private individual is over." Heroin abuse leads to Kurt Cobain's suicide, which "symbolically becomes the death of everything."

But most of "Hype!" is simply amused with the absurdities of the local music scene, chronicling its beginnings more than a decade ago, when Seattle had its own imitation versions of the Talking Heads and other groups from elsewhere ("People from Bellevue were singing with English accents"), and cataloguing the series of developments that led to Seattle being proclaimed as Grunge Capital.

We learn the first commandment of rock music: "Make sure you play music your parents won't like." A teenage boy with cigarettes plugging his nose is unhappy with his favorite group's success: "I liked them first!" We hear the Grunge Lite version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," while a veteran band member wonders why it took so long to be appreciated: "We were doing the same thing in 1985 and people hated us. Now they love us."

After a British publication officially acknowledges the grungy brilliance of Northwest music, Ron Reagan announces on television that "Seattle is the coolest place in the known universe." Andy Rooney worries: "Are they contributing anything to the world they're taking so much from?"

The movie reaches its comic high point with the publication of a New York Times story about "the lexicon of grunge," in which "harsh realm" is translated as "bummer," and "lame-stain" equals "uncool person." The Times interviewed Megan Jasper, a local sales rep for Caroline Records, who is delighted to admit that she made the whole thing up.

We also hear quite a bit of the music, including Nirvana's first performance of "Teen Spirit," Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, the Gits performing "Second Skin" (the murder of their singer, Mia Zapata, is not mentioned), and rare footage of musicmaking at the Rainbow Tavern in 1984.

The first-time director, Doug Pray, doesn't linger long on anything, but the movie is so crisply and intelligently edited that you never feel you're being rushed through it. Whether he's exploring the "Northwest noir" roots of grunge, or poking fun at the differences between traditional rock and grunge, he communicates such joyous involvement with the music that "Hype!" could even be recommended to disapproving parents.

Also on the program: John Keister's "That Night," which won this year's Golden Space Needle for best short subject at the Seattle International Film Festival. It had its local premiere on the same festival program with "Hype!," which won the Needle for best documentary.