Music
AUXBituary: Jet (2001-2012) and the Return to Rock movement
by Tyler Munro
March 27, 2012
It was less than a few days ago when I was at this bar—I won’t say which—when Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” came over the soundsystem.
“Remember when Jet was a thing?” I said to a friend. And it would turn out that at that point they still were. But now they’re not.
Jet have called it quits. Broken up. Split. Whatever you’d like to call it, they’re not a band anymore. The bigger question, however, is now that they’re broken up, will they ever truly go away? Not likely.
If you’re too young (or lucky enough) not to know about Jet, their story follows a pretty simple trajectory. They came out at the height of what was awkwardly marketed as the Return to Rock boom, which was in a lot of ways the post-Willenium interpretation of grunge’s reaction to hair metal, replacing spandex and hairspray with backwards ball-caps and white-guy dreads.
Jet came out in 2003 and rode pretty comfortably on the coattails of the Hives’ slowing momentum. No longer flying high off the success of 2000’s “Hate To Say I Told You So,” Sweden’s most finely dressed retro rockers were stumbling through the gates as they prepared for the release of Tyrannosaurus Hives. That’s where Jet thrived. They found an opening and proceeded to fuck the hell out of it.
At that time, the Vines—who like Jet were coming out of Australia—were one of the it bands playing the style, but they were decidedly grungier, if not differently greasy. Jet, on the other hand, found a comfortable middle ground. “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” was an immediate success, mixing the Stooges song it so clearly ripped off with a “let loose” aesthetic tailor made for a new generation of strippers too young to live off Whitesnake.
And now, nearly ten years after the release of Get Born, that’s the legacy Jet leaves behind. They’re a footnote to an irritating movement; not because the music sucked (though a lot of it did), but because they survived on the hype of a response. Nu-metal had died (thankfully) and this was a back to basics movement Jet was lucky enough to latch onto. How they’d survived through to 2012 I can’t be sure. That they did, I suppose, is something to stand on.
Just don’t take their breakup as a sign of their music going away. It won’t. Try as they might, but Nickelback’s army of cock-rock clones have yet to usurp the bar rock throne Jet still so inexplicably reigns over. “Are You Be My Girl” still holds a comfortable place between easy to ignore and fun to reminisce over. Yes, Jet have broken up, but they might as well have been all along.
Shaka Rock, Jet’s last album, was released in 2009. This is an unscientific, unsolicited opinion, but we’ll wager it wasn’t very good. That being said, neither was Get Born.
