When I heard a few days ago that Nirvana’s In Utero was turning 20 years old last Saturday, I had a rush of emotions:
“Wow…am I that old?”
“It can’t be that long…I remember when and where I was when I bought the album!”
“That also means it’s been nearly 20 years since Kurt Cobain died.”
Almost immediately, I went and listened to some of my favorite Nirvana tracks, not just from In Utero, but from Nevermindand Unplugged in New York. It had been far too long, and those songs are like an old friend.
Then it happened – I was transported back to my mid-1990s self: awkward, yet outgoing, athletic, yet awkward (again), somewhat intelligent, but mortified of being labeled that way. In other words, I was transported back to the first-world problems of American teenage angst. The whole period of being a teen can be defined as ill-conceived and awkward.
And as Nirvana got popular, I was hitting that most-awkward phase, between the ages of 12-14, where you don’t know what the heck is going on every day. Your life is constantly in a state of physical, emotional and mental flux (partially because you make it that way, partially due to hormones). One day, I was a jock, the next day I was a geek. I worked on a farm and grew up with country music, but I liked kneeboarding, Airwalks and a killer guitar solo. WHO WAS I?!?
I felt, as I am sure most youths do, an identity crisis, during my teenage years. What are the characteristics that make up who you are, what you were and what you will be? Music set the tone (no pun intended) for so much of what took place during that time of life: how you dressed, spoke, acted. What friends liked, what those who weren’t friends liked.
In this reflection of youth and Nirvana and music, it occurred to me that I was listening to it differently than I did before. And then it became clear: what a reflection that is of real life.
We hear what we want to hear – in conversations, relationships, friendships, in music. I heard what I wanted to hear the first time I listened to “Heart-Shaped Box”, the same as other people did when they watched Johnny Carson or Richard Pryor. A connection is made because you become a receiver open to the message in the first place.
Basically, you’ll find what you’re looking for in all aspects of life. It’s just that you don’t know that as a teenager. Hence, the aforementioned angst.
And as adults, that lack of angst, as we wade through life’s turbulent waters and figure it out, creates the need for nostalgia. Which is how or why Nirvana is re-releasing a special edition of In Utero with remastered tracks. The problem is, the album and the band, are themselves a reflection of life in general: it was never meant to be mastered in the first place, because it cannot be.
Humans are built for conflict, for drama, to operate in a state of threat from time to time, due to how our brains were hard-wired during hunter-gatherer days. And in the absence of genuine conflict now, or real tension or threat, sometimes, we’ll just create it for ourselves. Hence, perhaps the chorus of “Heart-Shaped Box”: “Hey! Wait! I got a new complaint…forever in debt to your priceless advice.”
We’re a constantly critiquing society. We are the ultimate critics, intent enough to not leave well enough alone or mind our own business. And nothing is ever good enough. Which is where my thoughts usually go when I hear In Utero. It wasn’t good enough for everyone. But it wasn’t intended to be. How, in any manner, could Nirvana follow-up Nevermind? It was a nearly impossible task.
The record company and all the big-wigs wanted another Nevermind in 1992-93. Kurt Cobain, all things considered, was a wildly intelligent and introspective individual. He knew he couldn’t please everyone. In fact, he knew that by and large, he wouldn’t please anyone with a follow-up. So he did what he thought he would want to hear if he were a fan: he went more raw and unpolished.
Recorded in a few weeks, in Minnesota, in February, with little embellishments, In Utero is in a weird way the best follow-up album I can think of. The drums were recorded in a kitchen, and rumor has it Cobain recorded the vocals in six hours. It is raw, and it is quite good. And the music still sounds amazing, 20 years removed.
Naturally, the corporate machine rejected it at first. Which is exactly why the band – and namely, Cobain – loved it.
Cobain knew you can’t keep doing the same exact thing. First of all, it’s boring, secondly, it wears out eventually. What’s popular doesn’t stay popular forever.
Listening to the band again, intently for the first time in a long time, I wonder if Nirvana would make it today, with that increased cynicism? I fear they would have been torn apart by critics by 1998 or 2000, after a few more albums anyway, and Cobain probably would have ended up doing the same thing he ended up doing.
Cobain never wanted that life, that fame, that “voice of a generation” status. I honestly don’t think he was THE voice of a generation. There really is no one, true voice. You can argue that it’s a hodge-podge, random allocation of voices that define us every so often.
The boomers reacted the same way with John Lennon as Generation X did with Cobain. The preceding generations in both instances could have cared less – it meant little, I am sure, to my grandparents in 1980, that John Lennon had been shot, the same way mine could have cared less about Cobain’s death in 1994.
For the baby-boomer generation, the Beatles were alternative the same way Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins were alternative to a generation in the 1990s. Alternative essentially means what it’s always meant. It’s rejecting whatever the current status is in favor of something else.
And before you become an adult and start to stop caring so much about what other people think or what other people do, or how you look and how much money you have and turn away from that machine and just live your life, you are actively looking for something else. Something that tells you don’t have to like what all those people in movies and magazines and music videos tell you to look and act like, largely because you don’t look or act anything like them.
Any number of people or events can serve that role. Throughout history, we’ve had probably thousands of them. From public figures to national events, these voices come from music, art, sports, politics, religion, science, farming (seriously, check out Paul Harvey). They all become voices because we listen, we are receivers. We intrinsically memorize and memorialize.
But these voices stuck out because we were out looking for them in the first place. And it’s deemed popular because so many people found it appealing. Remember, pop culture is defined as mass consumption of something. Being too high brow or underground just means not enough people to make a majority relate to it.
To this day, I don’t know if it was good or bad in Nirvana’s case. Do you want enough people relating to you if your mindset is that of apathy, regret and angst? What does it say about us when the underground or alternative becomes popular culture? Probably nothing and everything at the same time. Some people actually relate, while others sort of fake it because their friends say they should.
The answer exists where it usually always does – somewhere in the middle – which is usually equated to being stuck or trapped. Cobain felt this – that he couldn’t become popular and maintain the respect of the artists and genre he admired, yet he couldn’t stay there, either. Again, this is a relatable occurrence for us, for our lives. We can’t stay teenagers forever, we’d go crazy. We can’t sit in limbo in our jobs, our relationships and our friendships.
We’re constantly seeking change – and it doesn’t totally matter whether it’s positive or negative; any change will do so long as it’s not in the middle. Yet that will remain where Nirvana resides, in the middle of the height of 1990s and the grunge/alternative scene, because that’s where Cobain chose to end it.
Think about it though: as humans, we are in a state of constant change. Every single second of our lives, in fact, we are changing. There is no constant, truly, in our lives. This rises to hyperactive levels as teenagers (at least in our own minds). But then we gain more freedom, more control. We mature, for the most part, calm down, settle down and move on with the process of just being alive and enjoying that wonderful, sweet fact.
Music provides the total opposite effect of change to us: it stays constant, forever captured in the state it was recorded and released in. Within that consistency, we find comfort.
When our head is telling us we’re so busy and we have all this drama and conflict, we seek out something that comforts us. So we go back and find what we know, something that won’t change as the world does around us: music.
And Nirvana represents that period of time in large part because they remain unchanged, forever there, in the middle. A place where we don’t want to live, but don’t mind visiting from time to time. I may not be anything like that kid I was, I may dress differently and have a much clearer understanding of exactly who I am, but I can still feel welcome to drop-in.
In a way, you can truly come as are.
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