Modern Rock No. 1s: Bush and "Comedown"

Bush breaks through to the top of the alternative charts for the first time with "Comedown," a song that captured rock and pop fans by carefully straddling the line between alternative and mainstream

Bush - “Comedown”

Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 2 weeks (September 23 to October 6, 1995)

Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Silverchair and “Tomorrow”

Next Modern Rock #1 hit: Goo Goo Dolls and “Name”

Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:

• Coolio featuring L.V. - “Gangsta’s Paradise” (9/9/95 to 9/29/95 - 3 total weeks)

• Mariah Carey - “Fantasy” (9/30/95)

(Note: This is the beginning of peak ‘90s Mariah Carey, as she will dominate the Hot 100 starting now through May 1996, topping the chart either as a solo artist or along with Boyz II Men for 26 of the next 33 weeks. Interestingly, 1996 is tied for the lowest number of unique songs that hit #1 on the Hot 100, owing to the Mariah Carey/Boyz II Men collaboration, and another song that I know you’ll all love to revisit!)

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I grew up in northwest Pennsylvania, a small but not insignificantly sized town with multiple radio stations and several niche genre stations. I hadn’t yet begun listening to super-niche college radio by 1995 (though I would eventually both love the format and eventually become a disc jockey at our local college radio station), but I was fortunate to have two radio stations that played rock hits: WJET-FM 102.3 (“Jet 102”) and occasionally from across Lake Erie, London’s Best Rock, FM 96.

Smaller markets back in those days had niche stations, but not on the level that they did in larger markets like New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles. Even “smaller large markets” like Cleveland or Cincinnati or St. Louis were likely able to diversify their offerings at a much larger scale than, say, Scranton or Toledo or Rochester (both Minnesota and New York), or in my case, northwest Pennsylvania between Buffalo, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. As such, when grunge and post-grunge were exploding, markets like mine definitely played the artists I’ve been profiling, but not on the same level as you’d see in other, bigger markets.

The proof of this concept in my small-town world was Bush. The British rockers had already established themselves in the alternative realm with Sixteen Stone, an album released in the U.S. in late 1994 that produced two alternative hits: “Everything Zen,” which peaked at #2 back in February 1995 behind Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” and “Little Things,” which peaked at #4 in June 1995 inexplicably behind Soul Asylum’s objectively and subjectively terrible #1 hit “Misery.” But in my hometown in the closing months of 1995, unless I missed it completely or didn’t play close attention, those two songs slipped past me.

Not so with “Comedown,” the third single from Sixteen Stone which effectively tore down any barriers between large-market niche alternative stations and pop/rock friendly alternative crossover broadcasters like my local radio stations.

I mention larger markets because I have family living in Columbus, Ohio, who I visited pretty routinely throughout my life, and they always seemed to have their finger on the pulse of what was happening musically (still do, in fact, to this day). I can’t recall the exact date and time when I visited, but before I’d heard “Comedown,” I can vividly recall my oldest Columbus cousin having a CD copy of Sixteen Stone in her car, and remember listening to it with her when we happened to be driving somewhere. Not long after that, I had my ears open to radio spins of songs from that album in my hometown and it finally happened with “Comedown.” (It would be a little later in the ‘90s when I finally heard “Everything Zen” and “Little Things” on my regular radio rotation, thanks to college radio, the advent of internet streaming, and a little-known program known as “Napster.”)

But even though “Comedown” was the third single from the album, it absolutely has “first-single” energy, with a little something for everyone. But let’s start with the obvious: As I mentioned in last week’s discussion with Silverchair, Bush had the benefit of sounding an awful lot like Nirvana. Indeed, if you listen to the opening riffs of “Comedown” and let you imagination take you back to that time and place, you’d be forgiven for thinking it sounded tangentially like the opening riff of “In Bloom” from Nirvana’s Nevermind album.

But then again, you don’t need to imagine it, as both the band — and critical critics of Bush at the time — acknowledge the connection, though from different contexts. In this Live Nation video from 2019, Bush lead singer Gavin Rossdale (along with Live frontman Ed Kowalczyk) talk about the obvious influence Nirvana had on their creative process:

“They had such an incredible space in music that it was hard not to be inspired by them. They’re a great band obviously.”

Alternative Nation used this video in the context of a larger discussion around the critical criticism of Bush sounding so much like Nirvana that they shouldn’t have been deserving of praise for their own talents:

Of course, the quote is important because Bush was dogged for much of their early run (1994-2001) by constant complaints that they were making money off of Nirvana’s sound and had little originality of their own.

In 21st century hindsight, a number of critics and fans looked back more fondly on Bush and realized that there were a lot of imitators out there. Whether or not they were too heavily influenced by Nirvana doesn’t matter as much anymore; Bush’s 1990’s output has a better reputation than it once did 20 years ago.

While I was very much into alternative music at the time and building my personal library of favorite grunge and post-grunge songs, I never paid much attention to music criticism (and still don’t, in general). So while I’m certain there was much hand wringing and teeth gnashing over Bush’s purported piracy of Nirvana’s sound, it didn’t keep me from liking or enjoying what the band was putting out there.

Your mileage may vary in the discussion of whether or not Bush’s similarities to Seattle grunge were intentionally copied or merely emulated and improved upon, but I can tell you for sure that “Comedown” did something that Nirvana’s songs didn’t do at the time: inspire sincere crossover appeal in the pop realm. As I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t heard “Everything Zen” or “Little Things” in regular rotation on my local catch-all rock/pop stations, but “Comedown” was a song that crossed over both into the rock/pop station AND the local top 40 station as well. It wasn’t just Nirvana and Pearl Jam fans digging this track: everyone was getting into it.

And for good reason: The track definitely leans into the grunge-rock stylings of Nirvana, but unlike the previous two singles, “Comedown” performs a balancing act between all-out rock during the refrains and more muted slow-rock and bass-driven grooves in the verses. The song sounds like a pop song, even though its DNA is largely alternative grunge/post-grunge based. Songs like Soul Asylum’s “Misery” and Better Than Ezra’s “Good” both try to straddle that line between alternative and pop, but I’d argue those songs are more pop than alternative. “Comedown” fits comfortably into both “genres” of music, and I think that’s why it’s the epicenter of the band’s breakout success.

In addition to chart-topping runs on both the U.S. and Canadian alternative rock charts (weirdly absent in the U.K., though we’ll discuss that next), “Comedown” was a bona fide top-40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #30 in the fall of 1995, nearly a year after the U.S. release of Sixteen Stone. When we discuss the band’s next alternative #1 hit, we’ll be engaging in the same conversation about crossover success, because I’d argue that single is more pop than alternative, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The biggest head-scratching moment related to the charts, though, is the U.K. audience’s complete lack of interest in the British natives. “Comedown” was a legitimate phenomenon in the U.S., but the song did not chart in the U.K. If you’ve been following along with this newsletter, you know that British acts largely diverged away from representation at the top of the Modern Rock Tracks chart, owing to a larger influx of U.S. and Canadian-based acts by the mid 1990s. A comparable phenomenon was happening in Britain with the emergence of Britpop.

Indeed, while Bush was topping the charts in the U.S., two of Britpop’s biggest acts — Oasis and Blur — were battling for supremacy on the U.K. charts, largely out of view from the larger U.S. audience. In September 1995, Blur’s “Country House” and Oasis’s “Roll With It” had recently duked it out near the top of the U.K. charts and were #1 and #2, respectively, within weeks of Bush’s U.S. chart peak. This was colloquially referred to as “The Battle of Britpop,” a battle won by Blur. You can read more about it here, or at your outlet of choice, but needless to say, the U.S.-themed alternative stylings of Bush were nowhere near the musical zeitgeist across the Atlantic at the time.

(“Country House” would have been very out of place on U.S. radio in 1995. “Roll With It” sounds almost Madchester-like, a musical fad that had already peaked and faded in the U.S.)

Despite their lack of success at home, Bush was embraced by a North American audience hungry for the last table scraps of grunge, and “Comedown” was the gateway drug to everything Sixteen Stone had to offer. The band would follow with two more singles from the album, releasing five total during the album’s promotional cycle. Within a year of the commercial release of “Comedown,” the band’s follow-up album to Sixteen Stone, titled Razorblade Suitcase, would keep Bush in the alternative zeitgeist for a prolonged period of time, further entrenching their fanbase.

I have fond memories of this time and my introduction to Sixteen Stone, and though “Comedown” would eventually become somewhat oversaturated on the radio during this time period, its infrequent spins on ‘90s nostalgia stations and playlists help buffer any negative feelings I might have about the song based on its ‘90s omnipresence. While there are Sixteen Stone radio singles that I appreciate and love more today than “Comedown,” I really found myself getting invested in the song leading into this week’s writeup. I appreciated Rossdale’s interpretation of the song, as noted in a Songfacts reference to a paywalled 2017 Entertainment Weekly article:

“I liked the idea of euphoria. But having that euphoria has a comedown. It’s inside your brain and just says, ‘I’m having the greatest time, and I don’t want to stop.’ But most of the time, people lose that zone and it changes and you’re like, ‘No, I didn’t want this.’ And that’s such a common feeling. I watched it being sung every night - it’s one of the songs where I can step back and let the people sing. It’s the best feeling in the world as a songwriter.”

In that context, “Comedown” resonates more with me now than it might have back when I was 16 years old. It’s tougher when you’re younger to appreciate just how amazing life’s moments can be, but with the benefit of years and wisdom, I know that those moments can be fleeting and you need to live in them and hang on as long as you can, because you only have so many. No one wants to come down from the euphoria of an amazing moment, and while Bush ultimately did come down from the top spot on the Modern Rock charts after two weeks, they’d find themselves back there again in short order, thanks in large part to the mainstream success of this track.

Rating: 8/10

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Chart Check

Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period

Full disclosure: I have a pretty substantial spreadsheet set up with every ranking of the Modern Rock Tracks chart throughout its history. I have an algorithm set up — the only ChatGPT-related thing I use when it comes to this Substack, as I loved “M-dashes” before AI thought it was cool — to help me determine when songs peak on the chart during the time period listed above. When I saw what it spit out this week, I had to check and double check the actual charts just to confirm the scarcity, and yeah, P.M. Dawn is the only song on the chart from Bush’s run at #1 to peak during those two weeks. Crazy.

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“Downtown Venus” by P.M. Dawn (#39):

It wasn’t until much, much later in life that I discovered P.M. Dawn’s first and only #1 hit on the Hot 100, the wonderful “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss,” but I vividly remember “Downtown Venus” getting tons of airplay in late 1995, and it quickly became one of my favorite singles from that fall/winter. This is the only time P.M. Dawn made the alternative charts, and they peaked at #39 behind Bush. The single only managed to peak at #48 on the Hot 100, and while they would squeeze out one more top-50 Hot 100 single before the end of the 1990s, this track effectively signaled the end of P.M. Dawn’s chart success.

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