Archive for the ‘Nirvana’ Category

Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Recently I read Dave Cullen’s myth-busting, level-headed Columbine. I was in college when the event itself transpired. I recall being particularly interested in it, mostly because the coverage linked the shooting to teen angst and suburban rage and pop culture. Actually, I remember some cockamamie scheme that I was going to drive out to Colorado and poke around and write a book about Columbine. Of course, I never did anything of the sort – because I’m not actually the kind of person who seriously indulges his cockamamie schemes. Still, I was taken with high-concept teenage violence and the (erroneous) jocks v. weenies narrative and the (equally erroneous) rock and roll scapegoat business. I came of age in maudlin teenage times, after all – and self-aware ones at that. Columbine seemed a natural outgrowth of all that Heathers-Kurt Cobain-S.F.W.-style crap with some Tarantinoesque campy stock ultraviolence swirled in for good measure.

Of course Columbine was horrifically “real world.” But for most people it was a mediated event that existed in the realm of cable news (on endless repeat). September 11th has almost wholly supplanted Columbine as the big faraway unpredictable instant terror – likely because the footage was more horrifying, the socio-political impact greater, and the destruction much worse. Yet both incidents are similar in that they were planned for maximum shock value and achieved this impact through repetitious media coverage. The reality of the individuals killed and injured was soon overshadowed by the search for a “meaning” behind the events and by worrying about when and where the next, similar horror would come from.

Any big media shock generates mountains of noxious bullshit and speculation. In the fallout from 9/11, we have been visited by the “Truthers,” dubious justifications for pre-emptive warfare, cave-dwelling Bond villain terrorists, Anthrax scares, shoe bombers, and all other manner of unbelievable fright. It’s twelve minutes to midnight on the Wackadoodle Clock. It’s little wonder that zombies now plague internet prank culture. They’re no less ridiculous than people who unironically believe Zeitgeist – or the people who bought into the US Government as blameless victim of a Saddam/Osama Wonder Twins team-up. On a smaller scale, in the wake of Columbine, all manner of batshit nonsense washed ashore. The “Trench Coat Mafia.” All the handwringing about the myriad ways American culture had “failed” boys. The convenient “be nice to the freaks lest they snap” anti-bullying mandates. The public stoning of Marilyn Manson. The imaginary evangelical martyr who was shot because she said “yes” when asked if she believed in God. And of course, Bowling for Columbine.

These big happenings feed our fears back to us, recontextualizing them as “lessons” we can understand. September 11th confirmed the “presence of evil” in the world and the need for “action.” Columbine confirmed that teenagers are to be feared because they are shallow, cruel, and inscrutable. We “learned” that pervasive public surveillance or stricter gun control measures were needed to protect us. And then the next big thing happens and we forget about the details of whatever the last tragedy was. The only thing that remains of the previous horror is the broadest impression – devoid of nuance or real understanding.

I’ve been wrangling with this post for a while (see the previous entry), so it was odd to me that this post and my failure to finish it was one of the first things I thought of when I heard that John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, etc.) had died. When I was still a kid, John Hughes formed my ideas of what it meant to be a teenager. Sixteen Candles in particular provided a whole host of images and notions that I’m sure influenced how I acted out my own teenhood – the weird longing, the lurking about on the semi-popular rung of the food chain, the junior class warrior chip on my shoulder, the need to experience any emotional rawness as a personal crisis. And of course my tongue-in-cheek, half-joking “my parents ignored my sixteenth birthday” stories. In Hughes’ movies, teen-ness was a state of being, a performance (literally) that operated in a world where to be adult was to live with misplaced priorities or your head crammed squarely up your ass. This whole worldview is best summed up in Hughes’ teenaged Bugs Bunny Ferris Bueler who knew the score and could get away with just about anything while anyone who actually seemed to *CARE* about anything (working hard, delivering Ferris his comeuppance, living up to parental expectations) was upended, mocked, or forced to confront an unpleasant reality. Hughes certainly knew how teenagers like to imagine themselves – perpetually embarrassed by clueless adults, just an itsy bit on the outside but still mostly accepted, and in possession of the REAL knowledge of what matters in life.

John Hughes’ vision of perfect only slightly awkward teenhood is mostly a crock – as is the post-Columbine understanding of teens as scary, violent monsters ready to “go off” should adults fail to remove every possible trigger or trauma from their paths. In a popular culture that fetishizes adolescence as a source of both vibrant authenticity and uncontrollable power, it’s easy to forget that teenagers are first and foremost people. They’re not a collection of inscrutable buzzwords. Nor are they a great horde who need civilization imposed upon them. They’re people who are (by societal convention) given a sort of liminal period to “find themselves” and make choices about who they’re going to be. The advertising-driving mass culture in America is simply one source of potential identities available to these people whom we’ve told should be experimenting with masks and self-presentation.

During my last few teenage years, I became very interested in Kurt Cobain – not simply as the driving force in Nirvana as a band but also as a post-mortem famous person and icon. I remember the days after his suicide and the seemingly-endless footage of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance. The warm, yet somber lighting, the lilies, the after-the-fact meaning possibly tucked away in the lyrics to originals and covers alike — “All Apologies,” “Come As You Are,” and “The Man Who Sold the World” come to mind. And of course that soul-bearing, heart-rending version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” If one is given to the belief that Cobain knew that he would soon take his own life, it’s hard not to see this performance as final statement, one last act of self-presentation. It reminds me of my own petulant teenage thoughts, planning how I would kill myself and how what sort of note I would leave and how everyone would feel once I was gone. Part of Cobain’s enduring myth is that he, in his role as eternal teenager, he lived out this fantasy of making everyone miss him when he was gone. In the same way, Harris and Klebold lived out a teenage day-dream – making a big splash so that everyone everywhere would know who they were and how much they hated everyone’s guts. Just like Ferris, they were smarter than everyone and they got away with it all.

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Pete Townshend, Empty Glass

Friday, April 10th, 2009

“I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend,” wrote Kurt Cobain in his journal in the middle of one of his rants against the rock press establishment. Why? Because I had become a bore? Because I had failed to die young? Because I had become conventional? Or, simply because I had become old? In fact, in the early Nineties, when Kurt was struggling with himself over whether or not to do an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, I was not boring, neither old nor young, and I was not dead. I was, unlike Cobain, hardened. Tempered, beaten and subjugated by all that rock had delivered to me and via me over 30 years. Rock is, I think, particularly hard. And in this statement Cobain appears to be hard on me. But perhaps he is sad for me?

***

It is desperately sad for me to sit here, 57 years old, and contemplate how often wasteful are the deaths of those in the rock industry. We find it so hard to save our own, but must take responsibility for the fact that the message such deaths as Cobain’s sends to his fans is that it is in some way heroic to scream at the world, thrash a guitar, smash it up and then overdose.

– Pete Townshend’s reviewing Cobain’s Journals

I firmly believe that rock and roll can save your life – though if that’s the case, I’m not sure your life was worth saving.

– Me (during some snark spasm or another)

Conveniently for me, my birthday coincides with the annual soft-focus reminiscing on the passing of rock martyr Kurt Cobain. It’s a convenient hook upon which I can hang my reflections on mortality and my inability to remain squarely in the youth cult demographic which rock and roll (disingenuously) posits as its core audience. Of course rock and roll (especially the semi-popular smartipance stuff I like) has long been the weapon of choice for moody overthinkers way too old to qualify as a “kid” of any kind. As many smart folks have pointed out before me, rock and roll serves a vaguely pagan religious role for sensitive types who need meaning and ecstasy and whathaveyou. The analogies are pretty easy – the icons, the ritual of communal rock happenings, the frenzied adulation/dancing, the bedsit contemplation and adoration of pop stars, the call to authentic living, the empty going-through-motions faking it when ecstasy isn’t forthcoming.

Still, when you do see the real deal in person, the whole rock-as-religion thing makes a lot of sense. In honor of my birthday, I received a ticket to see Morrissey at the Midland Theater. I’m not going to bore you all with a show review wherein I splutter about Morrissey’s fabulousness as a performer and object of rock veneration. I just wanted to mention the frenzy that occurred when Morrissey discarded a sweaty shirt by pitching it into the crowd. Ripping. Rending. Snarling. Weeping. Mania. I was reminded of the anecdotes about newly dead saints torn to bits by relic seekers. I’ve been in hundreds of rock audiences, and rare are those audiences where actual group madness breaks out. Some performers have “it” and some don’t. Morrissey (as if anyone was still unaware) possess the ability to inspire this old time religion. Slate recently ran an interesting article about Morrissey in middle age examining the roots of his appeal. What I came away with is that the holy weirdness of Morrissey’s awkward youth.

“I’m sick of being the undiscovered genius,” scribbled the 18-year-old Steven Morrissey. “I want fame NOW not when I’m dead.” He’d have to linger in the bed-sit five more years. In the meantime, his life consisted of: the dole, writing letters to New Musical Express, reading manifestoes with titles like “Men’s Liberation” and The Female Eunuch, and taking up—and abandoning—the musical instruments traditionally associated with playing rock ‘n’ roll. At 19, he sang twice, poorly, in a band called the Nosebleeds and, refining his skills of lonely pop adulation, published two monographs—fanzine one-offs, really—one on James Dean, the other on his beloved New York Dolls. But New Year’s Eve, 1979, captures young Morrissey best: As the clock chimed midnight, alone in his bedroom, the 20-year-old Steven ushered in the 1980s by reading Pride and Prejudice.

Even more than the frenzied pagan mass of the rock show or the idol worship, the actual religious act of rock and roll practice is the time spent in the misfit wilderness of adolescence. Adolescents, historically, have not made much excellent rock music. And many of rock’s true geniuses have been the sorts of people who were weird enough that you could imagine them spending their teenhoods in pain and seclusion. Of course, the essentialness of an awkward adolescence for any true rock believer leads a lot of folks to manufacture phony bologna accounts of their troubled coming of age (See Stuff White People Like #83 and #17). Heck, I’ve got some self-mythology I can lay on you if you’ve got a few hours.

Because rock and roll – while self-involved – is not often a terribly reflective form, most of its saints are treated as savant-type shamans only barely aware of their powers. Of course this is a crock – one look a Cobain’s Journals will show that even the most authentic-seeming rock icon does a lot of intellectualizing and conceptualizing. Nevertheless, institutionalized rock and roll (the audience, press, etc.) is suspicious of thinking or trying too hard. To be seen working at it is to be, at best, inauthentic (e.g., Bowie, Beck) or, at worst, a hack or careerist.

Pete Townshend has always been an odd rock and roll star. In many ways, he helped create and promote the awkward adolescence model of rock initiation. The protagonists in Who singles like “Can’t Explain,” “I’m a Boy,” “The Kids are Alright,” “Pictures of Lily” and many, many others are screwed-up, awkward, sensitive types. Angry young men wrestling with their feelings. Townshend’s later long-form conceptual pieces Tommy and Quadrophenia are likewise about rock and roll and idolatry and alienation and junk culture. I’m sure there are plenty of second and third generation rock adherents who can’t honestly tell you where their actual teenhood ends and Townshend’s stylized myth of spiritually unmoored teen angst begins. I’m not sure if I know the difference anymore.

Because the teenhood myth is central to the religious experience of rock and roll, youth itself is often venerated in song, performance, etc. Some obvious examples are twee’s obsession with childhood or 28-year-old indie rockers referring to themselves and their peers as “kids.” There’s no good model or myth to support the adult practice of the religion of rock and roll. There’s craft – which is boring and requires chops and often leads to dull dabbling in “roots music” or jazz or Pet Sounds-style pop. Sometimes perversity or eccentricity or cult cachet can provide an escape hatch. Most often though, adulthood and rock and roll combine to form a smug, bloated arena spectacle reeking of nostalgia and reverence. Occasionally an artist (not usually an audience) will emerge from the other side of adulthood as a wild old coot still in command of his or her old spell book – Dylan is the most obvious example.

Empty Glass is (among other things) Townshend’s best effort at giving adulthood the kind of rock myth meaning that he helped create for adolescence. As with much of Townshend’s work, there’s a hefty bit of autobiography and spiritual seeking going on in Empty Glass. It’s an album about purging and transcending the pain and longing and pettiness that you accumulate once you quit being a holy dumbshit teenager. It’s a record about needing help. Empty Glass’ best-known single is a love song where God offers to fix all the crap you screwed up.

“Let My Love Open the Door” – Pearl Jam @ Soldier Field

In Townshend’s own words, the album is about hitting bottom and needing to be refilled.

And when I did my first solo album, I called it Empty Glass, ’cause of this idea that when you go to the tavern — which is to God, you know — and you ask for His love — He’s the bartender, you know — and He gives you a drink, and what you have to give Him is an empty glass. You know there’s no point giving Him your heart if it’s full already; there’s no point going to God if your heart’s full of Doris.

I suppose it is easy to imagine that we all had tortured teenhoods which we romantically endured. It’s much less heroic to admit that getting older hasn’t made things easier. Grown-ups are supposed to be on top of their personal shit. They’re not supposed to whine. They’re not supposed to be paralyzed by fear and fatigue. I think that’s why the rock and roll youth cult continues. It allows you to fantasize about a difficult trial already overcome while nostalgically ignoring today’s horrible bullshit. My mother is fond of dismissing injustice or pain in adult life with a glib “That’s just the way things are” – as if someone isn’t making it that way or as if you shouldn’t even try to change it. I think that attitude is comfortable, safe.

Seeking authenticity. Looking for answers. Breaking down. Transcending. These activities are unbecoming. They certainly don’t help you project authority and bootstrapping self-sufficiency. Angst is bad for business. Doubt seems a bit self indulgent when practiced by adults.

We live in interesting times. It can be tempting to retreat to our imaginary high school days and obsess over the now tidy concerns of bruised feelings and mussed pride and simple loneliness that seemed oppressive then. It makes the very real hurt of right now go away for a while. Still, nostalgia is a cop out. Perpetual adolescence is a cop out. I do think that rock and roll can point to some kind of personal transcendence. I think the best of it is spiritually nourishing. At the very least, it can encourage contemplation and sensitivity. Still, rock and roll does its best work in conjunction with immediacy. Yesterday’s rock and roll listening won’t do you any good today. There’s no point in coming to the bar if your glass is already full of yesterday’s fake memories.

Posted in Morrissey, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Pete Townshend | No Comments »

Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

I have a soft spot for phony records — what I like to call “false rock.” I’ve thrown this term around for a few years without ever defining it. Wimpily, I usually fell back on the “I know it when I hear it” excuse whenever anyone has asked me what exactly I meant by “false rock.” For instance, Ryan Adams’ Rock’N’Roll is a false rock record. R.E.M.’s Monster, too. And U2’s Zooropa. T. Rex’s Electric Warrior might be as well.

Before anyone gets in a huff, please note that I desperately love these records. They’re some of my very favorite records. They’re near perfect. They contain an entire WORLD within them, or rather they contain an entire set where you might film a movie about a totally artificial and fantastic world populated by robots and laser mice and witty holograms. What I’d say these albums have in common is their obvious, intentional bigness. Also, they’re not “serious” records in terms being overly concerned with songcraft per se. These records have some very good songs on them, but they don’t strike me as fussy, over-considered songs. Rather these “false rock” records strike me as inspired elaborations on a conceptualized sound. They seem like pop art experiments in a way, attempts to make something both shockingly individual and fully commercial. Just consider the boldness of the titles and the album covers. They’re very direct. Iconic almost. Like a cereal box or pop can.

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In many ways the flatness, the brightness of the music and packaging of these “false rock” albums seems Warholian to me. It’s overtly Pop stuff. Maybe this is what seems phony or “false” to me, this emphasis on surface and boldness and stylized commerciality.

As sounds, as packages, these big fake albums are big on allusion. On Monster, Stipe throws around references to Dan Rather and Kurt Cobain and finally offers to “be your Iggy Pop” over sound beds obviously cribbed from glam rock and grunge. The title track from Zooropa is lousy with pilfered ad slogans and sounds from Bowie and Eno’s Berlin period. Adams’ Rock’N’Roll is the sound of a once-upon-a-time enfant terrible mimicking the sounds of retro/revivalist bands whose best ideas belong to decades long past. And nevermind that Adams gives a number of his smartipance tracks the same title as established rock classics/hits.

And Electric Warrior – this record could very well be the source of “false rock” with its rockabilly-meets-American-Top-40-meets-Dylanesque-wordplay-meets-psychedelia choogle. It’s a record that is so very much EVERYTHING that it winds up as no one thing in particular. Electric Warrior is a clever album. It challenges you to a game of spot the influences. And it’s a certainly bit camp. I suppose that campiness is something all proper “false rock” albums share. Perhaps “false rock” is merely my own way of talking about records that employ the glam rock techniques established by Electric Warrior (i.e., self-awareness, campiness, lyrical and musical allusiveness, knowing post-modern simplicity/minimalism, etc.) outside of the narrow time and place of glittermania and T.Rextasy as going concerns.

Why all this dilly-dallying? What do these boring old rock records have to do with the Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak and its well-known, oft-reported back-story? Well, I suppose I’m trying to work through my little “false rock” concept because 808s & Heartbreak is, by my reckoning, a “false rock” album much more than it is a forlorn break-up record or a soul-bearing “fucked-up superstar” record. It’s a stylized, Pop Art version of a bleak, sad record. I’m not saying that West wasn’t feeling bad when he made it, but his sad robot music doesn’t have the real emotional fire and sonic raggedness of Joy Division’s Closer or Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Nirvana’s In Utero or Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. Nor does this record have the clarity and bitterness of my very favorite break-up record Blood on the Tracks. West, by my ears, just doesn’t sound at the end of his rope on 808s. He’s simply wearing an expertly-crafted designer mope mask.

One of the reasons why I find Kanye West compelling as a pop star is because he seems to be consciously angling for the role of hip hop’s Elvis Costello – the smart, winking artist with a firm grasp of pop history and a willingness to toy with convention. I like glam and punk because they’re forms based on breaking the fourth wall. And I like West because he’s willing to break mainstream hip hop’s pretentious, cred-obsessed fourth wall.

808s finds West intensifying his expressions of ambivalence towards to the conventions of hip hop boasting and materialism – an ambivalence that has always been part of his shtick. E.g. from “Welcome to Heartbreak”: “My friend shows me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.” Under the usual circumstances of a “typical” Kanye West offering, I’d consider this admission as just another snippet tucked in amongst the party songs and the wild hyperbole as a way to reinforce his image as a self-aware, conflicted artist. But within the context of 808s & Heartbreak’s complete image/sonic overhaul, I find it interesting that the one previously-established element of West’s persona that carries over into this new construction is his vision of himself as isolated superstar, as Midas imprisoned in/by his golden kingdom.

I suppose what put my on the scent of 808s & Heartbreak as a “false rock” record was its being an album-length exercise in image overhaul. Like the previously mentioned albums, 808s finds an established artist remaking himself by picking out new influences and then packaging his new identity for ready consumption. It’s not enough for West to dabble in vintage synths and Daft Punk samples. He has to doll himself up in a little grey New Wave suit and retro glasses.

Don't let the bullies take my lunch money!

He’s playing the Sad Black Prince to Bowie’s alienated Thin White Duke. If the dance-inflected mope, wavering vocals, and vaguely post-punk feel of tracks like “Say You Will” and “Love Lockdown” weren’t enough to suggest New Order, West makes his Factory Records influence apparent with an album cover that could comfortably sit on the shelf next to Power, Corruption, and Lies.

808s & Heartbreak

808s & Heartbreak

Power, Corruption, and Lies

Power, Corruption, and Lies

In short, this album that is being billed as intensely personal and “private” is actually a bit of studied simplicity and artificial sound meant to reimagine the public West as a pop star who has been transformed by personal loss and emotional darkness. It’s a neat trick – making yourself sound cold to appear warmer for having done so. After the first five bleak cuts on 808s, the poppy respite of “Paranoid” and the soaring phony strings and fake-Springsteen xylophone on “Robocop” are wholly refreshing.

By claiming emotional turmoil, West is able to jump genres and become a new pop star unfettered by the expectations of hip hop success/convention. He’s making a bid for art rock cred by making an art rock record that pushes all the right buttons (i.e., the right influences, thematic cohesiveness, personal pain fueling the creative process). If you have any understanding of pop culture, you can see what he’s up to. Still, it’s fun to hear. Perhaps I’m perverse, but I think I enjoy 808s & Heartbreak more for being able to see how it’s put together. I think that’s part of the kick I get out of these “false rock” records – they’re obvious and honest in their obviousness. You can see the artists at work, as they creating a commercial collage without the usual pretense of art being some kind of personal accident born of mysterious specialness.

Posted in Bob Dylan, Kanye West, Local (Chicago), Neil Young, Nirvana, R.E.M., U2 | 1 Comment »

Nirvana, Sliver: Best of the Box

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Last week my wife and I were buying shampoo at America’s favorite mod-themed mass retailer when one aisle over we heard two tinny teen girl voices giggle “OH! ‘teen’ spirit. I thought it said ‘team’ spirit. Like, what does that even mean?!?”

I turned to my wife and remarked that I felt about 40 kinds of old. Which I guess seems a bit weird. You hear a couple teenage girls discussing a deodorant brand marketed to teenage girls, and all of a sudden you feel old. Of course, “teen spirit” is a loaded-type phrase thanks to Nirvana — but even so, here I am feeling old because of some song that was really popular (and daresay important) when I was a teenager myself.

It’s striking the extent to which consumerism works to divide people into niches. Obviously, it’s easier to sell graham crackers and underpants to people when you can target precisely which “types” of folks want your particular brands of crackers and underwear. But all this relentless segmentation seems to leave people feeling disconnected from each other if only because they don’t share the same petty pop-culture, target-marketing reference points. I mean, I can remember the short-lived ice-cream-filled Twinkie as well as onslaught of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? merchandise as happening during my childhood, but do these things really mark me as part of a special, separate generation?

I wonder how much of our ideas about rock and roll and our listening habits are influenced by the “necessity” that each group of young people have a “next big thing” or a “voice of a generation” to identify with, to lead them in opposition to the “big things” and generational voices of last year?

I suppose if you compare the “generation defining” arguments made by a Dylan or a Lennon or a Cobain or a Pete Wentz or a Conor Oberst, you’d find all of those folks largely in agreement w/r/t folks needing to captain their own ship and while spending less time on the rat race wheel.

The way these messages are sold is that each new youth movement is a repudiation of the previous. Grown-ups see “kids today” as out of control and not in line with the time-tested bric-a-brac of times ten years out of date — and kids see adults as overbearing and condescending and out of touch partly because adults won’t shut up about their own childhoods. And of course, nothing really changes from year to year except for the brand names and the haircuts.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool makes a pretty convincing case that “the Sixties” — and I would wager all subsequent youth happenings — owe their very existence to advertising and market manipulation. I often wondered if “satisfaction” might not be the great driving mania of American life after WWII — and the reckless pursuit of satisfaction the cause of all manner of class troubles and inter-generational conflict.

* * *

I’m *this* close to being done with this horrible 1995 biography of Kurt Cobain by British journalist Christopher Sandford. I picked it up at a local thrift shop for $0.50. I think I want my money back.

Overall, this book is a lurid, tabloidish turd. I’d recommend believing maybe 1/8 of the total content in this thing. (The typos are pretty unbelievable too.) Still, what is illuminating about this book is that it captures the outrage and shock that Cobain inspired back when he was a real person and not merely a lunchbox decoration.

Smells Like Ham Sammich

Sandford pretty consistently sneers at Cobain’s punk pretenses and seems to think that merely mentioning his dirtiness and casual drug use is a proof positive that Cobain was a lousy person. Such a mainstream critique circa the mid-Nineties seems almost quaint in hindsight. We live in foul and desperate times now. Personal filth and illicit self-medication seem like moral panics from another century — which of course they are.

Also interesting is the extent to which Sandford attempts to compare Cobain with Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney and John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix. Now that Cobain himself is a canonical rocker of some mythology, one forgets the supposed risk that “grunge” or “alternative” music posed to the good sense and purity of first wave classic rock. The rock press worked pretty hard to shoehorn the Cobain “morality tale” (as Sandford frequently puts it) into a narrative that makes sense in light of what rock and roll is supposed to be per the late-1960s/early-1970s understanding of rock.

This book makes a big deal about Cobain’s paranoia about the press and his despair that Nirvana’s rise did nothing to do away with the boomer version of rock embodied by the Eagles and their ilk. Seems like Kurt saw it coming — “Just because you’re paranoid/Don’t mean they’re not after you.”

* * *

“Do Re Mi” is a simply great little song. The vocal melody is positively gorgeous — lilting and unearthly. And the cascading, descending guitar bits are so simple and so pretty. The lo-fi home demo treatment on Sliver leaves it as an aching half-heard dream of a song, like a wraith fading as you approach it. “You Know You’re Right” was the track that got the most attention when Courtney opened the vaults, but something about this barely-there track sticks with me more. It seems effortless and bittersweet.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for sketchy demos.

* * *

Being a thoroughly American character, it’s fitting that Kurt Cobain’s passing inspired a number of conspiracy theories. The best known rumor is the unsavory “Courtney did it” theory. I’ve always found this explanation unfair — based mostly on the fact that people see her as a shrewish, Yoko-esque figure. Courtney Love is a polarizing personality, but that hardly makes her a murderer.

One Cobain conspiracy I do find intriguing is the idea that Cobain faked his own death only to re-emerge as Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. (I stumbled across this batso argument a couple years ago, but can’t find a working link now.) Most of the “evidence” was based on the two singers having similarly clef chins and sharing a knack for mixing pop and punk.

As a well-supported, self-sustaining conspiracy theory, the “Rivers Cobain” theory is no JFK assassination. However, what I found poignant and suitably sad about this idea was that — if we take Kurt’s word for it — Cobain was a man who felt hemmed in by his fans and his band. And if he did fake his death to escape these shackles and start a new band, he ultimately wound up in yet another band that couldn’t live up to the expectations of either critics or fans.

Can’t get no satisfaction, I suppose.

Posted in Nirvana, Weezer | 2 Comments »

Le Tigre, Feminist Sweepstakes

Monday, August 11th, 2008

I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll.
– Kurt Cobain

I was recently browsing through my copy of Journals when I came across this line – it comes up in various iterations more than once. Sitting here in 2008 – in a post-Lilith Fair era – Cobain’s sentiment seems smartish but mostly un-shocking. The aughts have seen a number of female artists capture the spotlight and/or critical attention fairly regularly, right? Leslie Feist sold a kajillion copies of her blandly pleasant little slab of quirky rock. Amy Winehouse commands Cobain-level public hand-wringing. And Sleater-Kinney’s passing into perpetual hiatus found mainstream-ish rock critics FINALLY dropping the faint praise that they were “pretty good for a girl band.”

In short, it’s pretty easy on this side of 1994 to agree with Cobain and pretend that everyone always did, that women are as equally respected as men in the land of rock and roll. A comfortable boy could easily refer to his Neko Case and Liz Phair records and conclude that rock and roll sexism is a problem that’s been mostly eradicated save for Nickleback listeners and rap rock cretins. Of course Juggalos and Maxim subscribers and bros of various stripes are still stuck in the Clinton era. But today’s kinder-gentler “smart rock” fan is blameless, right?

I thought I was. I thought I had mostly wide-minded taste in punk-flavored rock music – that was until my wife got into Kathleen Hanna’s post-Bikini Kill band Le Tigre. She played Feminist Sweepstakes for me, and I recoiled. It was noisy, harsh, and hectoring to my sensitive little ears. It was up in my proverbial grill. I normally like ugly, pushy music. I normally feel like it’s on my side. But Le Tigre? I felt like I was being bossed around – and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. I mean, here was a band that was on *my* case. As a twenty-something liberal white guy who owned a ton of the right kind of records, rock and roll wasn’t supposed to be giving *me* a hard time. The nerve!

This experience has since given me a greater appreciation for Cobain’s slogan about women in rock. Confrontation and upending of the usual social order are a critical part of rock and roll – especially punk rock. And when “enlightened” white dudes reared on rock and roll become the established social order, the future of rock and roll as a force for change means upsetting self-satisfied dudes – no matter how well meaning those dudes might be. I’m guessing that Kurt’s attitudes were shaped in no small measure while he was dating Bikini Kill’s Toby Vail during the period when she and Hanna were inventing riot grrl.

Subsequent exposure to Le Tigre has won me over. Their live shows are genuinely fun and have the crackling energy of something new happening in real time. I can’t claim any great insight into what Le Tigre is up to. I like it on a gut level, but I still need some of the jokes explained to me. In short, this band is outside of my comfort zone.

I’ve actually been slyly moving this disc to the bottom of the Record Desk pile because I’m not sure that I have anything to say about Feminist Sweepstakes that will make me seem totally awesome and achingly smart. I think one of the persistent reasons why male rock fans and critics wind up writing and saying stupid things about women in rock and roll bands is because most rock fandom and criticism is all about nostalgia. And when women practice rock and roll outside of their traditional roles of ingénue, sex kitten, or member of a svengali-directed pop group, the rock and roll boys club doesn’t know how to process their contributions.

I’m guessing the reason why women-directed rock gets pushed off to the side is because male rock dudes aren’t used dealing with experiences or perspectives outside of their little club where every moments of poignant “outsider” discomfort is hand-selected and usually self-inflicted – endured so that the sufferer achieves meaning and has something to smoke in the old angst pipe when he tells tragic tales of former nerdhood in an attempt to win friends and become an expert-level white person.

So essentially, I stopped worrying and learned to love Kathleen Hanna. I admit my comfort zone remains boy-directed rock music that makes knowing reference to bands I’ve already learned to love. Still, I’m with Kurt. I think that if rock and roll is going to exist in the future, women should be at the helm. I look forward to my own obsolescence.

At the very least, I’m not sure if I can take any more nostalgic longing for someone else’s nostalgia. Teenage angst has paid off well, indeed. I hope Frances Bean uses her tee-shirt royalties to buy a Fender Mustang and an eight-track.

Venture with me to the land of anachronism and empty cultural signifiers — IF YOU DARE!

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