Year: 2013

If you look back across my two-part/three-part chats you’ll often see that I spend the second half cutting my own argument from part one to pieces. I’m not going so far today, given I successfully demonstrated Cobain’s completely normal musical taste yesterday, but I’ll still pick at a few stray threads.

I pointed to Cobain’s peak spells of musical inspiration, in fact, I think there are three; 1976-79, 1981-1984, 1987-1990. The peaks simply coincide with the primary phases of inspiration and development in the genre Cobain was devoted to; punk rock. What’s interesting is how thoroughly Cobain ignores the deeper American lineage of mid-Seventies punk rock — the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Johnny Thunders, the whole No-Wave spell. Instead, the line goes the hard rock route via Iggy and the Stooges and the Aerosmith. This is understandable, American punk made hardly a dent on public consciousness. Cobain’s own journey picks up the tale in 1979 with, on the one hand, The Knack reinforcing his new wave tendency (i.e., watered down and more pop-orientated punk) while Greg Sage and the Wipers lead into the deeper pool of U.S. punk-influenced music of the 1980s.

The 1981-1984 spell, again, simply reinforces Cobain’s strong attachment to a specific facet of music. In those years U.S. punk morphed into hardcore and a dozen other inclinations and Cobain was well-aware of all of them whether Black Flag, Flipper, the critical Void/Faith split, Swans, Bad Brains, Butthole Surfers, M.D.C. or Scratch Acid — there are few key names he misses out. It’s clear though that Cobain’s interests remained in a fairly narrow channel. There’s no room here for any of the electronic-infused material coming out of what would come to be known as industrial; similarly that one Swans record is as avant-garde as he gets; there’s nothing until Public Enemy in 1988 from any genre that isn’t (white) Anglo-Saxon guitar music so no jazz, no funk, no soul, just that one old blues record long sanitised by Sixties white-boy blues guitarists — this isn’t a racial point, it’s a music culture point; he doesn’t delve too far into hardcore (a fairly shallow pool of inspiration); and he erases any hint of mainstream taste altogether.

The final spell he captures, 1987-1990, is actually two-fold. Firstly, these years did see a number of genuine classics which he could hardly fail to be aware of — R.E.M’s Green, Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Mudhoney’s quintessential grunge album, Pixies and so forth. Cobain, really, was just showing his awareness of the albums that stood out and gained greatest acceptance as stand-out releases. On the other hand, however, he was demonstrating his allegiance to a very specific strand of indie music that was rising at that point. Beat Happening, Half Japanese, Mazzy Star, The Vaselines, Shonen Knife, Daniel Johnson — running back through the Eighties was a lineage of whimsical, playful music that Cobain adored and that reached its full flourishing in that late Eighties phase. The list captures both his more muscular punk taste and this separate, gentler side; both often equally in love with lo-fi fuzz and an embrace of amateurism as a defence against the sheen of corporate enslavement.

Separately, Cobain’s female-orientated side emerges and also seems to take over; the most recent three albums on his Top 50 — Mazzy Star, the Breeders and PJ Harvey — are all female-fronted bands. His choice of album by The Frogs is also a curious one; that album was a parody record pretending to be out-gay and caused wilful offence among conservative groups — again, it seems to be a push toward his interest in femininity. Other candidates more likely acquired in this late Eighties-early Nineties spell rather than at the time of their release are Kleenex, Slits, Marine Girls and The Raincoats (the Incesticide liner notes make clear he was running around in mid-1992 trying to find this album he cites — also, he met The Frogs sometime in 1993 which may or may not push back the date when he wrote this list if that meeting links to the acquisition of their album and the desire to include them.) It combines with the almost total absence of anything that could be deemed mainstream rock to present Cobain’s tastes as firmly on the side of progressive values and the underground which had a powerful openness to women long before Riot Grrl made it explicit.

That’s not to say that much of this list is overtly political. There’s nothing like Crass or the anarcho-punk scene; there’s nothing that foregrounded a political opinion. That suited Cobain’s belief that music should be music first and a gateway to wider socio-political thinking not something subsumed by a cause and a demand that someone listen.

Returning to a point made earlier, note the absence of anything truly mainstream other than Aerosmith’s Rocks; note the complete absence of anything even arguably mainstream until the very end of the Eighties. At first its fair enough given his oft-expressed hatred of most of what rock became in the Eighties. But then recall that Cobain was endlessly aware of audiences and not above tweaking reality to fit the right storyline. In the case of his musical tastes, it’s well-known that he was a big fan of Metallica — Metallica themselves remember meeting him sometime in the late Eighties and him explaining how much he loved Kill ‘Em All — similarly his inclusion of Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills within the Montage of Heck suggests he knew a little of one of the most unavoidable rock bands of the Eighties (also note the depth of his Metallica knowledge given he plucked a hidden parody they performed of said Iron Maiden song from a not particularly easily found EP). He loved Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin enough to name a song after the two bands, played Led Zeppelin songs fairly regularly with Nirvana, but eliminated them from this list altogether.

The list, overall, is a neat document capturing a combination of personal taste, wavering life circumstances (for example, his well-publicized boredom with guitar-based music in the Nineties doesn’t leave him many places to go given all but one of his favourite albums is in that arena), independent trends in the music scene, and potentially a mild touch of deception. As usual with Kurt Cobain, there’s always more to be teased out.

I’ve gotten into a habit of just calling him ‘Cobain’ at the moment. When writing Dark Slivers I bounced appallingly between Kurt Cobain, Kurt and Cobain depending on topic, mood and inclination — it took hours during the review phase to try and make some kinda sense of it. Please bear with me as I work through my typing tics and foibles.

Hand’s in the air if you HAVEN’T seen the list of Kurt Cobain’s Top 50 Albums? Yep, as I suspected, it’s only those miners in Chile who were stuck underground. Alas, in this visual age, what I rarely see is any real discussion of it beyond using it as an excuse to link to pre-written reviews of some of the albums mentioned or to blurb about the bands on the list — it’s easy space-filling fodder.

What interests me about the list is two elements; the nature of the bands present and secondly the eras shown. To start with, here’s the original list of albums, with the years appended. Please note immediately that the list can be positively identified as having been written sometime after the release of PJ Harvey’s Dry in June 1992 making it a relatively good indicator of what Kurt viewed as his key albums looking back across his still-young life:

Now, here’s the list rearranged chronologically from earliest to latest:

There’s no way to definitively connect the year of an album’s release to the year Cobain first heard it, but there are definite peaks in the eras to which he looked for pleasure and felt worthy of note on his extensive list:

It’s neatly poetic that the first phase of sustained musical interest commences the same year as Cobain’s parents divorced. I’m unsure, however and alas, whether I believe nine year old Kurt salved his woes in Aerosmith’s Rocks; it’s a possibility that the album marked a significant event, the Cobain family was certainly steeped in music as a mode of emotional expression, but it’s not definite.

Again, though it’s impossible to prove which years Cobain first listened to albums in, its notable that the peak of his preferences arise in the years immediately preceding and including 1983-84 when Buzz Osbourne was feeding Cobain the tapes of U.S. punk and underground music that Cobain describes as his epiphany. Even in 1992-1994, whenever he wrote this list, that period of music remains of critical importance to him with 1981-1984 yielding 19 of his favourite albums, well over a third of his entire list and matching precisely the most critical spell in the evolution of this teenager into a would be punk musician.

The lull from 1985 through 1987 could perhaps be put down to an absence of ground-breaking albums but it simply wouldn’t be true; numerous underground legends were kicking off in those years or burnishing their credentials so why the lull? To some extent I credit age and the inevitable aftermath of a revelation — after so many new discoveries its maybe inevitable that there might be a couple years where things felt a little ‘samey’ or more like reinforcement. Was 1986 really an off year for interesting music? All opinions welcomed on this point!

An alternative presents itself. I looked back to a previous piece from this site (https://nirvana-legacy.com/2013/01/28/life-long-latchkey-kid-kurt-cobains-homes-part-1/). Essentially, while preceded by a long spell of dislocation and movement between family members, from April 1984 onward, 17-year-old Cobain’s life enters a truly rough spell punctuated by three spells of temporary homelessness, a brief return to his father and an extended period as a guest of the Reed family. Cobain had left school, he was in paid employment for certain lengths of time, those few years simply weren’t suited to get to grips with music or absorbing new discoveries.

Finally, in April 1987, Cobain benefitted from the longest period of stable home-life he had experienced in many a year and, in fact, the final time in his life he would spend a year in a single location (https://nirvana-legacy.com/2013/01/29/life-long-latchkey-kid-kurt-cobains-homes-part-2/.) From that month, he moved in with girlfriend Tracy Marander, living in the same block, though two different apartments, and with Dave Grohl after Tracy moved out, right the way through until July 1991.
This coincides with and perhaps is a key factor in the second spell of new discoveries with the years 1987-1990 yielding twelve further albums from the Cobain Top 50, plus the Leadbelly record too. It’s easy to point to these years as ones in which Cobain was surrounded by fellow music-lovers and able to cherry-pick new discoveries and new moments…

…One thing I’ve underrated, however, is simply the matter of age. Really all I’ve shown is that Cobain’s years of maturity from age fourteen to age twenty four saw the majority of his musical favourites, in other words, that he was a perfectly normal young man in terms of the time in his life when music really meant something to him.

A year ago I purchased The Beatles box-set, the complete discography…Admittedly I don’t entirely remember ordering it, I may have had one or two drinks more than was mature and sensible, however, I don’t regret it at all. I’ll admit completely that I find the very early albums unlistenable, there’s something so alien to me about the dominant musical style of the early Sixties (“the Sixties” as clichéd era didn’t commence until into the middle of the decade as a chronological measure) that I find it hard if not impossible to entertain what sounds so cloying to ears that have been solidly wrecked by fifty years of musical evolution since 1963.

A friend of mine, who I really need to get on and lend this to, defines the problem as how to forget all the echoes and extrapolations and duplications that have occurred as a direct result of The Beatles and their ilk — it’s near impossible to hear such a theoretical concept as ‘the original’ as an aural quality with ears used to heightened volume, ever greater emphasis on bass, etc. The original often sounds weak, tame, unimportant compared to the sounds one is more naturally used to. When I listen to the early albums of The Beatles I’m struck by the relatively tinny sound, the skeletal quality, the harmony vocals, chord sequences and musical approaches drawn from formal dances…

Similarly, it’s hard to appreciate the truth of Nirvana’s status in 1992. An intellectual understanding that many other until then unknown bands achieved multi-platinum sales that year, that a large number of alternative bands emerged as rising stars in 1990-1991 and others would follow, that ultimately musical genius is relative, that for older fans Nirvana’s onstage antics and sound were reminiscent of the bands they had considered, in their youth, geniuses — none of it overwhelms that sense that the band was special, exceptional and different. It’s similarly easy to understand that Kurt Cobain’s death — exceptionally taking place at the height of his fame (or at least within very easy touching distance); not a common occurrence — prevented the band having to endure a more prosaic break-up, made them immune to the passing of generations and therefore the switching of taste that tends to come with it.

What’s harder to do is to truly set aside twenty years of hagiography, of positions in the regular top tens and top whatevers of music criticism and/or discussion, anniversary releases, the increasing reduction of interest down to a hardcore of fellow fanatics who are bound to confirm and re-confirm importance, significance and relevance.

That’s where this cartoon pleases me, it’s taken from an old VIZ annual and, beyond poking fun at the transience of teenage/student/young tastes (it started with a reference to The Happy Mondays), it opens two avenues for me. Firstly there’s the matter of the geographic significance of Nirvana. While the band did have a strong following in the U.K. and while Top of the Pops, The Word, various BBC sessions and Reading ’92 have welded Britain into the Nirvana story the local aspect of British taste is visible — while confirming that Nirvana were hot in Britain the comparisons made are to relatively local favourites, The Happy Mondays — a relatively brief flash in the pan who seem bigger and more significant in hindsight than the extent of their reign demands — and Curve — a band I can’t even remember now but who apparently stuck around until the middle of the last decade — are the acts chosen to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Nirvana. It simultaneously deems Nirvana to be no more than the equal of two bands that were barely known elsewhere and also robs Nirvana of the very American universe of comparisons in which they’re traditionally set; Guns n’ Roses, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and so forth.

Secondly, it shrinks Nirvana down significantly from this near untouchable position of power to a condition where they stand alongside a band that charted one album in five in the U.S. (in position 89) and a band that, again, barely charted outside of the U.K. and saw its albums march backwards from 22 in the chart, to 23, 103 and nowhere across its releases. This isn’t to denigrate either band; it’s to point out that Nirvana’s position in 1992 was as a stunning success but with no indication whether there was a longer-term significance. They weren’t exceptional.

On the other hand, it emphasises Nirvana’s international ubiquity by wedging Nirvana in as the international representative in between two local successes with a distinctly British accent. The sound of Nirvana has been picked over and either criticised or praised for drawing on mainstream hard rock, on Beatlesesque qualities, on punk, on underground flavours of the late Eighties and early Nineties as well. The company in which this cartoon places Nirvana suggests that the simplicity of Nirvana’s sound, built on a very strong awareness and knowledge of Anglo-American music trends of the era, allowed Nirvana to slip into the playlists of multiple audiences.

It also wedges Nirvana into the various worldwide alternative currents — for example, British guitar music went through a spell in which it was firmly wedded to the dance music scene that had spiralled out of rave in the late Eighties — and voids the mainstream/alternative argument to some extent. Nirvana slipped right in alongside U.K. ‘baggy’ culture and so forth. It was only in America, where the charts had never been dominated by an alternative to hard rock before (remember even The Sex Pistols didn’t hit platinum in America until 1992), that there was difficulty in judging the sound of Nirvana and emphasis was placed on what they shared with the mainstream tradition rather than what they shared with the underground.

…So, in conclusion, can you tell I sometimes think too much if I extrapolate all of that from a 1992 Student Grant cartoon in Britain’s premier adult-orientated comic? Do go read VIZ, it’s good for the soul.