Another month, another ten copies into the print run of Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide, plus a few ebooks but I haven’t double-checked that side of things in a few weeks. That’s 135 copies sold since December 14, 2012 purely on word-of-mouth and the friendly support of the Internet Nirvana Fan Club and LiveNirvana (who’ve promised their official review but can’t guarantee when.)
The core of the book came together as a response to an advert from Bloomsbury publishers inviting proposals for new volumes in their 33 1/3 series. For those who haven’t read one, 33 1/3 is a series of short books of around 30,000 words per volume, each one tackling a different album of importance from the last fifty years. Alas, their feedback was that the writing was good, the research clearly solid, however, (a) I was competing with professional journalists and music writers with decades of experience and (b) “we can’t imagine doing another Nirvana album that wasn’t Nevermind.” Again, fair enough when it comes to looking at the mass audience…And pretty well the opposite of the reasons why I’d written a volume focused on Incesticide; my reasons were that no one ever talks about Incesticide, it’s utterly underrated, there are already volumes on Nevermind and In Utero (Charles Cross’ excellent book and Gillian G. Gaar’s superb 33 1/3 entry respectively) and they’re well covered in the core biographies.
But it didn’t matter…By that point I’d written a core of work focused entirely on Incesticide that now conforms to chapters 1, 2, 4 and 13 respectively and I knew there was more than enough to say about the album. But also there was more. Certain thoughts related to the album seemed important to ground in the wider context of Nirvana’s music and history and those thoughts had started to expand beyond the initial brief of 30,000 words maximum purely on Incesticide.
As an example, the sample chapter (chapter 14) available via the About page of this site (https://nirvana-legacy.com/about/) came about as, firstly, in all the news coverage of Eric Erlandson’s comments about unreleased Kurt Cobain demos from 1994 there was no actual analysis of the likelihood of the news, and secondly, I felt that this news along with the release of You Know You’re Right (2002) and With the Lights Out (2004) showed Incesticide to be a truly top quality selection of the best of Nirvana’s outtakes. Other chapters had similar ‘jumping off’ points; chapters 10-12 used the songs of Incesticide, in the context of Kurt Cobain’s other creations 1987-1994, to analyse how his song writing evolved in terms of trends in his writing, models of his lyrics and thematic development; other chapters used prompts from Incesticide to delve deeper into the political commitments, the humour in his work, cover songs and a final chapter charting his decline as a creative artist across 1992-1994…
…Anyways, the reviews are on Amazon, Gillian G. Gaar is working on a review (very kind of her indeed!), ordering a copy of the paperback is still pretty simple; just email me at NirvanaDarkSlivers@gmail.com or nicksoulsby@hotmail.com. The book is £10, plus £0.50p packaging, plus postage of between £2.50 (UK) and £7 (US). Two copies of the first 135 got lost in the post, I simply sent each individual out a brand new copy and that worked perfectly. It’s a simply commitment, the desire that each person gets what they’ve purchased. I’m still honoured when people take a look…
And when people feedback…I liked one the other week, a guy said “bloody Hell, you could teach a degree course on Nirvana…” Nice…Nice…
Nirvana Legacy 