I’ve gone on long enough about this but I’d just like to say that I look forward to the continuation of the series, even if the gavotte will not be returning to fashion.

And I’ve never read anything that made we want to learn more about Kurt Cobain. A CCR cover-band! Now that is cool! I had always read he was some big metal-head prior to getting turned on to alternative/punk.

As for some of your broader points, we we’ll have other posts to go into them I suppose, but I do agree that Cobain likely couldn’t escape the rock paradigm.

Interesting tid-bit about contemporary dating there, too.

I don’t think many people have made the Hemingway-Nirvana connection, (even though the lyrics are literally a line-for-line stolen from the dialogue between the nurse and Lieutenant,) because of the way the band and Kurt Cobain marketed themselves. We are discussing a rather sensitive to the point of pusillanimity character who compulsively lied about who he was. And the band, to his own consternation, was sold as the “alterna-RAWK” anti-heroes: first as uneducated and unwashed simpletons from backwoods Washington then later as accidental savants speaking for a generation. After all, for all the talk of genius and art associated with Mr.Cobain by rock literati and the public alike, very few people seem to have taken the time to actually think through his innuendo…perhaps its because attributing the myth to him has always been more important than anything that could be truthfully said.

I wish not to psychoanalyze too much here, but most of his personal distress and anguish seems to be from an inability to “be authentic” to what he was attempting to fit into. This is why Nevermind particularly encapsulates the spirit of what Mr.Scott’s Songbook is elucidating. You get the sense from the album that he is saying, “Something is wrong here” even if he cannot, or will not, put his finger on it. And unlike the other alternative rock bands which either embraced the transgressive (Sonic Youth and Alice in Chains) or had full control of that rock idiom Mr.Scott is talking about (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins,) you get the sense from Cobain that he is totally overwhelmed by the rock medium and isn’t “making a counter-cultural statement” but criticizing the whole exercise, including the punk rock and feminism which inspired this particular album.

Mr.Scott’s criticisms aren’t too off- if he wanted to make art then he should’ve studied and he shouldn’t have whined about his fame. But I do not believe these criticisms get to the heart of the matter or trenchantly describe Cobain’s problem. He wasn’t the myth he presented himself as:

-All his lyrics, which throughout interviews he claimed to have written on the fly or in a William Burough’s cut-and-paste style were actually crafted over months and years in his journals. Even the playlists to his albums he would fret over- then when it came time to hand it over to the studio, he would pretend to make it up on the spot. He practiced the appearance of a punk rocker more than he was one.

-He constantly made up stories about who he was: he never lived under a bridge, his first concert wasn’t a punk rock show but Todd Rundgren; he was constantly embarrassed, criticized and dismissed by his artsy-friends for being too “mainstream.” The influences closet to his heart were the early Beatles albums (with the Beatles being his favorite) old bluesmen and New Wave bands. And I have heard first hand that when he moved to Olympia and started hanging out with his more educated peers going to school there, he’d reveal his naivete by playing them records by bands like the Paladins…Cobain and Krist Novoselic [the bassist] started as a Creedence Clearwater Revivial cover band.

*Here’s their 1988 cover of Bad Moon Rising:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrYia-5u3q8

-And unlike the gloom and dreariness that hovers over his legacy and the band in general because of his suicide; if you read those early interviews and reviews of their shows, Nirvana wasn’t a “serious” band (like, say Pearl Jam was and still is) but charming, quirky, constantly joking and meant to entertain.

…which leads to Nevermind, which is a frustrated and confused refutation of the feminist punk rock/DIY collegial alternative rock movment he found in Olympia, particulary in his relationship to Bikini Kill’s Tobi Vail- the paramour that thoroughly inspired the whole album if not each particular song.

The original title of the album was “Sheep” and split into a girl side and a boy side. Hit songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Lithium were originally apart of the “girl side” and seem to embody the frustration he felt in courting a woman who rejected all traditions, down to actual boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, as being patriarchal. This was both fascinating and repulsive to a man from a damaged home who for all his talk in the press about supporting feminism, obsessed over his masculinity and even wrote, (now more morbid considering what’s occurred,) in his journals that if he ever had a child he’d marry the mother and if divorce was imminent, he’d kill himself.

This comment is too long to go into detail about each song, but that most famous lyric, the one which captures the zeitgeist: “Here we are now, entertain us” is the strongest rebuke of that spirit he saw around him. As the album grew larger, the criticism and resentment he held for the audience he wrote it for (educated kids embracing perverse modernity) became turned on his audience in general. “In Bloom” was no longer about his best friend who used the medium to seem authentic while picking up women, but “frat boys” who came to his concerts to impress females. “Lithium” was no longer the confusion a female displays in the new post-marital world to his frustration in trying to form an actual relationship but a criticism of the “phoniness” displayed by the world at large when they started celebrating him as a rock star. The whole point of the album seems to have been to stick it to those peers who could never accept him because he wasn’t hip enough and had no formal education to make “art” which turns into out and out resentment when the world picks up the album and in interview after interview seem to miss the point- something Mr.Scott rightly criticizes. Yeah, it is whiny and not something one should expect but: In the end, he wasn’t educated enough to know better, nor was he educated enough in the idiom to be taken seriously by his peers, the one thing he seems to have wanted; there was no escape from the rock paradigm for him. A man like Mr.Cobain, sixty years ago, would pick up on the Johnny Cash idiom and run with it; it’s not something you learn in a school, which is the ultimately something Nevermind speaks of: what is celebrated as primitive is being perpetuated by our educated class, and the only way in the door to make a living at it is to be educated enough to be primitive. Chuck Berry, if born later, would have been swept up in the same culture. You don’t learn rock&roll in math class, you get it from what your peers do and seem to want and these idioms don’t really exist when you have to consciously go out of your way to play them.

I don’t mean to sound defeated and my interest here may seem like admiration but it is more so a fascination because it was Nirvana that clued me into what Mr.Scott is now writing, even if I wasn’t able to cogently explain what it was exactly disturbed me and I’ve been trying to reject or cope with. Without getting too personal, I’ve lived an unusual life where I’ve come into contact with some of these people and the culture they perpetuate. So if I sound defeated, it is only because these idioms, as mentioned, are being lost. For example, I’ve tried my best in keeping all my musical interests to the locale I’ve resided (I’ve never gone to a big rock show) or embracing older classical forms that are still played.

But such a position finds one quickly isolated from their peers in a bad way. You know how many dates have gone poorly because I wasn’t familiar enough with what’s on the net or in a subculture now a days? Or sitting at the piano, or with a guitar, to play fifties rock and roll with people who are both unfamiliar with it or hold disparaging connotations to that sort of music? I’m in my late 20s’ now, I’ve been around the world and sadly lived a bohemian life [I'm a horrible failure at trying to embrace bourgeois living no matter how hard I've tried] and my experience has informed me that things don’t look so pretty when you have a constant barrage of perverse modernity creeping into everything; where is the space for someone like me to adapt? Nirvana, and Mr.Cobain were a failed attempt at such an adaptation.

My (perhaps fatally uninformed) initial response to Nirvana’s most famous lyric, here we are now, entertain us, is basically to say, “What are you complaining about? Either you have what it takes to deliver great and profound art, and no Kurt, neither you nor most rock artists usually do, or, you accept the fact that you are in the entertainment business, and you don’t ask, the way Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Roy Acuff, Bennie Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, Dick Dale, the early Beatles, the early Temptations, and Johnny Cash all didn’t ask, for audiences that come to you for some grand purpose or message. All those artists, Kurt, were grateful for audiences who basically just wanted to be entertained. Your expectations have been screwed up somehow by this Rock and especially Punk imperative that it all mean something major. That it be some rescuing response to Modernity. If that’s what you’re after, then why aren’t you studying classical composition, or how to be the next Hemingway or Percy? Is Rock really capable of serving the ambitions you have for it? Is that Bob Dylan moment that repeatable? And Bob at least knew enough of the blues that he could move a dance-hungry crowd, whereas Kurt, we’re not so sure you could.”

Maybe that’s unfair, MFB, but it doesn’t have that tone of resignation to modernity/nihilism that pervades your comment, and seems key to your admiration of Nirvana. The same modernity that made Cobain a star also has preserved the sounds of the Paladins, Johnny Cash, etc., and so whatever “language,” including the language of blues dancing, that goes with such sounds can thus to some extent be ours, especially if we don’t demand in advance, as Cobain does in that song you linked, that everyone only talk to us in “their own language” which gets presumed to be a nihilistic/hyper-modern one.

Resistance is not futile. Indeed, to tweak the title of one of Lawler’s books, we are Stuck with It. That is also an unavoidable part, an authentic part, of our “own language.”

But MPB, thanks for calling my attention to “Talk to Me.” It does raise this very important question of what it means to be authentic, particularly in regards to one’s “class” and education, a question that, as I’ll explain a couple Songbook posts from now, was essential to the creation of the Rock sound and stance.

It’s a sort of musical Quietism.

Then again, I am of the opinion that anything that can be described as “new” to an existing convention is the last rites and ossification of that artifact [New Wave, New Coke, Neo-Scholasticism...] Your admiration for the Paladins and the other purists is noble and the only way to actually combat the more poisonous aspects of modernity is to pretend it doesn’t exist but then, you have to be prepared to live in an impossible bubble and risk losing any sense of mass media and confronting the problem head on- zealots can hold the line but they can’t win converts.

And I cannot help but recognize that what you are describing intellectually is what Kurt Cobain, for all his petulance, cowardice and inconsistency; described in his own tumult both musically and in his morose life, however inchoate. I know you are keen to focus on the 80s’ and have a disliking for 90s’ ROCK, but your whole songbook and its struggles with perverse modernism can be intuitively heard in Nirvana’s Nevermind. There is no other album that better encapsulates and capitulates to the failure of modernity with one man’s desperate attempt to hold onto something through the perversion.

From Gravity’s Rainbow [which seems to have inspired Smells Like Teen Spirit] to the appropriation of other writers (particularly beats) transgressions and attempting to tame it in something altogether altermodern- and unlike the popular narrative, his cowardice and need to fit in belied what was a rather conservative and conventional musical sense and weltanschauung.

Take Come As You Are for example, which is a blues riff with lyrics taken directly from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms [every line of the song is a part of the dialogue between the Nurse and Henry- and the refrain "I don't have a gun" can be found when the Lieutenant is confronted by the Italians who are carrying out executions for "treachery." Is not "A Farewell to Arms" the founding novel of the Modern Individualized Man who has no allegiances with family, tribe or nation- a man who refuses to dance to protect his individualism- a Will to Secure if not precisely (at least in the American mold) a Will to Power?

I'm not as perceptive as the lot of you, but I believe you are ignoring the prescience of the moment that someone like Mr.Cobain, as an actual outsider saw:

It's well and good to talk about revivals and recovery but as good as Culture Club was, they could not and they left no auricular children; these things died by the 1980s' (or with the last mass audience to grow up close to the transition and break from the past) and there was little left of it, on a national [popular?] scale, even by the time Mr.Cobain came around. There is no going back, and all we have left is to talk with the same nihilistic language:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuDLOYLIhpI&

Bayles is right that Culture Club were, beneath the surface, as much about a recovery of “soul” music as were more obvious candidates like the Fine Young Cannibals.

From the early 90s there is–somewhere–a video of Boy George (in his immense transgender effeminacy) singing the hits of Culture Club on MTV’s Unplugged. This was before all his drug troubles, or at least before they became out of hand. Regardless, he and his band played some of the most spectacular R&B music I had heard on TV in a while. It sounded both authentic and sincere, at least authentic and sincere for an Englishman of troubled gender (a la Judith Butler) singing such songs.

So Culture Club deserves more respect as a recovery of or at least perpetuation of a true importance of “soul” than its at the time bizarre and silly image would lead a typical listener to believe.