If You Ask Me

Nirvana’s Nevermind as Cultural Bomb

            I suppose every generation has at least one do-you-remember-where-you-were-when-it-happened event. Some are Earth-, or at least nation-, shattering: the storming of the Bastille, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, the first shots over the walls of Fort Sumter, the Nazi invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbor, the launching of Sputnik, the moon landing, Watergate, the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan.

            Some are moments when world leaders die unexpectedly, changing our lives in less cataclysmic but still important ways—Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Princess Diana.

            Still others mark a change or absence in the art and culture that we experience every day. Take the realm of music for an example and you could pick several names from the last forty years: Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Lennon, Presley, Wallace, Shakur, Jackson. And if you made such a list, you would be remiss if you failed to include Kurt Cobain.
            Other people have written about Cobain. I don’t suppose my story is much different than theirs.  It might go something like this.

            “And lo, the 1980s came to pass, and in this time the land lay enshrouded in the shadow of a dark and evil force, an entity that ensured the unequal distribution of power and wealth and a return to the personal politics of a bygone era, and that force was named Reaganomics.

            “And the popular music of this era would uncritically reflect the thirst for material goods and economic excess for its own sake. The artists of the day would often symbolize the conspicuous consumption that prevailed throughout the land. And in the fullness of time this music would be called Hair Metal.

            “And many Hair metal bands would garnish their stages with enormous set pieces, models, blow-up figures, and laser lights, and they would dress in tight leather and spandex and multiple bandanas and thick make-up and whole cases of hairspray, and in their lyrics they would register their desire for never-ending parties and limitless sex and the unfettered flow of drugs and alcohol.

            “When these bands first appeared, they heralded the expansion of music into new and interesting directions, and their charming fin-de-siecle attitudes super-charged the youth of the land. But as the wealthy hoarded more and more of the land’s resources and the poor became more desperate and those in the middle disappeared, the land’s taste for Hair Metal transmogrified into a yearning for something new—something angrier than New Wave and more accessible than Punk.

            “And in the latter part of the decade, those who yearned discovered bands such as the Melvins, and later, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Mother Love Bone, and Dinosaur Jr. And new bands formed under the influences of these forbears, and their names included Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam. With regular rotation on MTV, these bands grew in popularity and mainstream acceptance. And perhaps their success is best epitomized in Nirvana’s second studio album, the 1991 release Nevermind.”

            I’ve got much love for 80s Hair Metal and the other bands mentioned above. But when Nirvana released Nevermind, few people were probably aware that the band had actually detonated a cultural bomb, one that would change the musical landscape and the youth of America. Nevermind is nothing short of a watershed moment in musical history, and now that we are twenty years past its release (!!!), I feel that I must consider it and its place in my life.

            Nirvana formed in 1987, and in 1989, when I graduated high school and saw the birth of my daughter Shauna, they released their first album Bleach on the famous grunge label Sub Pop.  I was aware of this album and liked it quite a lot. As many critics pointed out, Nirvana’s sound emulated the Pixies’ in many ways, especially the LOUD-quiet-LOUD structure of their songs. For influences, you could certainly do much worse, right? And I remember really liking songs like “About a Girl,” the simplified growl of “School” (“Wouldn’t you believe it? / Just my luck. / No recess!”), the metal-like anger of “Blew,” the speed-metal-ish “Negative Creep.”

            But with Nevermind, I went from being aware of Nirvana to being obsessed with them. The album sounded like a mélange of many things I’d heard before, but at the same time, it sounded completely new. It was angry in a way that you could only find in the punkiest punk or the speediest metal; it was sardonic; it was sincere and heart-wrenching; it was critical. I listened to each song and felt myself falling deeper and deeper in love with the album.

            “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the song for which they are probably most famous, is the borderline-incoherent scream of a new generation. Songs like “In Bloom” and “Come as You Are” demonstrate Nirvana’s range—the one hard and heavy, the other like something The Police could have recorded. “Breed” could be a punk song. “Lithium” and “Drain You” rock like metal, though neither shares the typical subject matter of the most prominent hair bands. “Polly” is, quite frankly, one of the creepiest songs I’ve ever heard. And the dirge-like “Something in the Way” is simply, completely different than anything else on the album. The repeated lyrics are both haunting and mystifying: “Underneath the bridge / My tarp has sprung a leak / And the animals I’ve trapped / Have all become my pets / And I’m living off of grass / And the drippings from my ceiling / It’s okay to eat fish / ‘Cause they don’t have any feelings / Something in the way, mmm…”

            As a band, Nirvana also looked different. We had already moved from bands like the Beatles, who first came to us in button-down shirts and ties, to long-haired, leather-clad, hirsute rockers to the 80s-era spandex and make-up. Nirvana, by contrast, looked as if they had just fallen out of bed at a college dorm. They wore faded jeans and t-shirts and cardigan sweaters. On stage, they leaped around as if they had just come from the mosh pit themselves, or else they stood still; they had no elaborate set pieces or enormous scaffolding that spanned the arenas or massive fireworks displays. If they tended to destroy their instruments a la the Who and countless other bands before them, they could not always be counted on to do so safely or in a way that seemed practiced; witness bassist Krist Novoselic throwing his bass into the air, only to have it land on his own head.

            In their televised performances they seemed to exude a barely-controlled anger perhaps restrained only by a distaste for excess. They could rip your spine out with their crunching chords or soothe your aching eardrums with an almost-melodic detour into a song like “Something….” Their music seemed to have been made by people who knew what had happened to America in the 80s—the false siren call of “family values” that marginalized alternative family paradigms and modes of being; the “prosperity” that stopped at the very top and trickled down to the rest of us not at all, in spite of the political rhetoric at the time; the belief in American exceptionalism that still hamstrings us today. Nirvana’s music seemed to rise up from the middle-class-to-poor spirit that had been trampled on. Starting off as a marginal voice from a marginal movement, it took center stage with Nevermind and reminded us that music could be more than what it had become.

            I will always love my Hair Metal bands, both the fun ones like Poison (yep, I’m not ashamed of that) and the more serious ones like Dio. But I can honestly say that Nirvana reminded me of what rock music could be, beginning with Nevermind. Kurt Cobain’s death was every bit as important and traumatic to me as John Lennon’s. Cobain might not have reached Lennon’s level as a songwriter, but as a voice crying out in the wilderness of our lives, Cobain has no superior.

            In this, the twentieth year since that watershed moment, I salute Nevermind all over again, and its three creators, whose collaboration was, like Cobain himself, gone too soon.

Follow me on Twitter @brettwrites.

Email me at semioticconundrums@gmail.com.

An Introduction

Back when I thought I might be a poet, I wrote this as an introduction to a collection that I might publish someday. These days, I’m confident in my prose, but not so much in my poems, so I don’t know that any of those works will ever appear in print, other than on this blog. I offer the introduction here because it tells you how I feel about poetry–why I read it and still try to write it. Your thoughts are welcome.

Introduction: On the Club Tour and other Figures of Speech

     To most everyone but poets and academics, poetry is effectively dead. It’s part of our past, something that should be on display in the Smithsonian. And like many such displays, it is easily overlooked, a hulking shape that fades into the scenery of the great Museum of our lives. Most people look at poetry and nod, stifle a yawn, and move onto the next exhibit. Occasionally they might spot an item of interest, one that beckons them to pause and consider. But for the most part, they seem ready to get the tour over with so they can get home in time to catch the Yankees and Red Sox on ESPN.

     This elaborate conceit is not my metaphor of choice, though. I liken poetry to 1980s hair-metal bands. The genre ain’t dead; it’s just not playing arena shows anymore. Now you’re more likely to find it jamming on stage in the seedier part of town, where the smoke is thick and the pool tables have so many blood stains that they look like relief maps and the beer is stronger than the odor of the bouncers. Poetry looks older now, its hair streaked with gray, its eyes crow-footed and seemingly always on the verge of tears. The audience consists of die-hard fans with beer guts and twenty-year-old concert shirts; of the odd suit from the label, the one dispatched to measure how many tickets are sold and, therefore, whether there might be enough interest for a greatest hits package; of ambivalent drunks who hope to score with the slutty chicks with the big hair and fake boobs. In a lot of ways, the scene is pathetic.

     But put poetry in front of the right crowd and the old magic can reappear. Sometimes the singer drags that old barbaric yawp from way down in the diaphragm. At times like these, the lines and stanzas sometimes seem to come fully formed, without conscious thought or action. It’s the moment when emotion and human experience condense into a few well-turned phrases, when the raw truth of being erupts from the singer and into a deep place in the audience, so that all they can do is bang their heads, raise their hands in unison, and shout

     Yes!

     Moments like these are what poets live for, when just one reader finds that, for the space of a line or a phrase or a word, everything is exactly right. And one great, tragic truth of writing is that you seldom know whether or not such moments occur.

     Of course, for many readers (and for far too many alleged writers), poetry is nothing so transcendent. To them, poetry is cute. It’s the roses-are-red love poem or its bawdy parody that we all memorized in sixth grade. It’s the patriotic screed set to rhyme, inspirational didacticism in ABAB. These so-called poems have no rhythm, no meter, no reason to rhyme except that that’s what so many people think poetry is supposed to do. It’s enough to make you cry, and you would, except that somebody might write a bad poem about it.

     Others seem to have some idea of what poetry can and should be, yet they seem intent on ruining their own work by throwing in some all-knowing, here’s-the-point-I’m-getting-at statement. These lines hit the reader about the head and shoulders like a brickbat. Forget image and repetition and symbol; what we apparently need from these writers is meaning, and only one meaning at that. No room for growth, for interpretation, for experiences other than one’s own—even the reader-response critics could do little with these.

     I try to avoid these pitfalls when I’m on stage. I hope I got some things right. I don’t know if my work is another sad club date in a genre whose time is passing or a gig that proves the old band can still crank it up pretty well. I hope for the latter. All I know is that I’m still ready to pull up my stool and jam.

     This club’s got no drink minimum and a pretty small cover charge. Imbibe with me and let’s see how long the party can last.