Klosterman’s 90’s: Nevermind the 90’s

February 12, 2022February 17, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

When I first saw Charles John Klosterman had a new book coming out about the The Nineties. I knew he would devote space, for too much space, to Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Klosterman’s essays and books cover a wide array of topics, but his primary focus has always been music. As such, we can call him a music critic without feeling too much guilt about limiting his curriculum vitae (or CV). As a music critic, Klosterman is professionally required to one superlative per every one hundred words. His awareness of this is quota is illustrated by various attempts to qualify his superlatives with qualifiers. The problem with this exercise is that he uses superlatives in conjunction with qualifiers so often that reading a Klosterman book can become a literal exercise in the form of mental jumping jacks.

Some readers might view an Klosterman’s excessive use of superlatives as silly, but others might view the practice as the author making bold statements. If, that is, the author can back them up, and Klosterman does. Most readers, whether they agree or not, also view it as better reading when an author litters his narrative with bold statements. As my 8th grade teacher once told me after failing an opinion piece of mine, “If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong with conviction.” The problem with superlatives is that most authors feel compelled to address subjective tastes with qualifiers. I write this for those readers who might have a tough time making it through their jumping jacks.

The best way to call Nevermind the greatest album of all time, as Klosterman does, is to say everything but. This literary device allows the author to load their but with supporting evidence to allow the reader to reach their own conclusions. Yet, those of us who read music critics, like Klosterman, on a regular basis, can’t help but think Nevermind is overrated. Most of us think it was a fantastic and transcendent album (I can’t remember meeting anyone, even those in the “sellout” crowd, who told me they thought the album sucked, but I’m they’re out there). Reading music critics, however, Kurt Cobain walked up Mt. Sanai and came down with these thirteen songs.

Klosterman qualifies his superlatives in his first essay on Nevermind, saying, “The video for Smells Like Teen Spirit was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style [heavy metal] of Western culture ends and another begins.” Once he gets that humorous qualifiers out of the way, Klosterman writes that “In the post Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way he did.”

This theory reminded me of a conversation I had with my uncle’s friend on the weekend after John Lennon was killed. I was not yet a teen, and this guy was well into his forties. As such, he had his finger on the pulse of the culture surrounding John Lennon far better than I did. When he said, “The man changed the world,” he said that to defend Lennon against the charge I made that Lennon was nothing more than a rock star. Even at that young age, I knew Lennon was a significant figure in our culture, but I thought the media attention devoted to the man was a bit over the top. “We were all asleep before John Lennon,” he added. “He woke us up.”

“Really?” I asked. “He affected your life that much?” He maintained it did.

I lost a lot of respect for my uncle’s friend when he said that, for even then I had a tough time understanding how a rock singer, or any entertainment figure, could alter an individual’s philosophy to such a degree that it changed how they react with people, and the way they lived their life. As I’ve grown older, I realized some people read too many music critics and watched too many retrospective shows with cultural doyens dropping such bromides. The latter often occurs after the tragic death of a cultural icon, and we all rewrite our past to fit that narrative.

As if to address this issue, Klosterman quotes Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. “I suspect that [Walter Benjamin] would be a little surprised by the extent to which what’s given us by the media is our memory now. The media not only supplies us with the memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories too.”

The media permits us to touch the touching sentiment of the moment, so that we might become part of it. We remember where we were when we first heard the news. “I was eating a chili dog at the Dairy Queen that was just three blocks from my home, when a fella in knit cap told me that John Lennon was shot. I’ll never forget that cap. It was blue with a yellow line on it. He also had a beard similar to the one Lennon wore in his solo years. It was almost eery.”

We repeat the lines media figures and figurines say and write with their king of the mountain characterizations of iconic figures and figurines to impress their peers, because we want to be their audience. We also want to be the writer writing to other writers, and we do so by speaking in superlatives to suggest we understand profound greatness. Common, every day people turn to their friends and say things like, “The voice of a generation, he woke us up, and I think about him every day.” We talk about his music changed our life, and how we’ll never be the same. These are touching sentiments that we might mean in the moment, but they’re enhanced by the media, and ultimately untrue.

I tried to establish a link with an impressive individual I met. The best way to do that, I thought, was to relay whatever information I had about his hometown, Dublin, Ireland. I mentioned that I read most of Ulysses, and I added the joke, “I’ve probably read as much of that book as anyone has.” That joke played on the Larry King quote, “Everyone I know owns Ulysses, but no one I know has finished it.” The impressive individual looked confused, but I didn’t realize how confused he was, until he said:

“Is that a book?”

“Well, yeah,” I said completely thrown off, “by James Joyce?”

“Never heard of him,” he said.

“The author,” I said. He shrugged. “You’ve never heard of James Joyce?! I thought he was the most famous Dubliner this side of Bono. Don’t they have statues built for him in the town square?” Nothing.

This lifelong resident of Dublin had never heard of someone I considered one of his city’s top five most famous residents. After all my reading on Joyce, I considered it impossible that a Dubliner had never heard of him. I considered it the cultural equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. I realized that I fell prey to cultural insiders writing to impress fellow insiders. I love reading Klosterman, but this, too, is his motif.

To Klosterman’s credit, he does qualify his superlatives at the beginning of the essay, writing, “The songs on Nirvana’s Nevermind did not tangibly change the world. There are limits to what art can do, to what a record can do, to what sound can do.”

After submitting that qualifier, he writes, “Nevermind changed everything.” (Perhaps in an intangible way?) He focuses this thesis on advertising, specifically an ad that involved Subaru’s introduction of the Impreza. Klosterman concludes that Subaru’s spokesman in the ad had to “talk about Nirvana without talking about Nirvana,” because “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.” Klosterman basically admits that the pairing would’ve been disastrous if it happened, but he doesn’t explain why. He simply contributes to the narrative Cobain parlayed with the “corporate magazines still suck” T-shirt he wore on a Rolling Stone cover.

I have no doubt that if Subaru approached Cobain, he would’ve laughed it off. Cobain gave us no reason to believe he was into the whole corporate sphere, and for the most part, he never wavered from the punk ethos. (Though he did force his bandmates to sign over most of the writing credits for Nirvana’s music. We should have no problem with that, since by all accounts Cobain wrote the lyrics and most of the music, but that action doesn’t align with the “One for all and all for one” Three Musketeers, punk ethos.)

What if the Subaru proposal hit Cobain’s desk at Nirvana Inc., and Cobain was all about it. “Punk ethos be damned, look what they’re offering to pay me for a couple hours of work.” His business partners would’ve informed him that this move would not only irreparably damage Cobain’s image, but everyone involved and the legacy they were creating. “This will force your fans to defend the Subaru ad for the rest of time,” a member of his management team, probably named Todd, would say, “and I don’t care how much they’re paying you, your bottom line will be affected long-term.”

Klosterman does admit that Nirvana (without singling Cobain out) made “conscious choices in order to become the most popular band in the world,” but Klosterman still feels the need to write “Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement.”

One particularly obnoxious and useless complaint I have is Klosterman repeating the line, [Kurt Cobain] “didn’t know” about a company putting out a deodorant called Smells Like Teen Spirit. By writing this open-ended line, Chuck Klosterman contributes to a fable on par with “I cannot tell a lie. I did chop down that cherry tree” or every president in the last thirty years telling a reporter, “I haven’t read the report in question.”

Klosterman relays the story of how a girlfriend (Kathleen Hanna) of one of Kurt’s girlfriends wrote, “Kurt smells like teen spirit” on his wall in lipstick. This was her note to Kurt and the girlfriend that informed them she was onto the fact that they were involved romantically. Now, it’s plausible that Kurt thought the lipstick message referred to the general smells of sex, but Kurt was a writer, and her message obviously inspired him. If he was so inspired to write a song about it, wouldn’t he say, “That’s hilarious, but what did you mean by it?” to Kathleen Hanna. If that didn’t happen, wouldn’t his friends ask him what it was about? If he told them what he thought it meant, wouldn’t they correct him, if he thought it was about the smell of sex? “No, what Kathleen Hanna was saying was your girlfriend uses a deodorant with the brand name Smells Like Teen Spirit, and the fact that you smell like that deodorant means she knows you’re having sex with her friend.”

If the origin of the message managed to escape his friends, family, and all of the small venues he played in to test the material out, wouldn’t someone in his band or any of the teams of people involved in the production process of the album inform him of the name of the deodorant before they released it?

Michael Azzarad writes Cobain claimed that he thought Kathleen Hanna’s message was in reference to “the conversation we were having, but … I didn’t know the deodorant spray existed until months after the single came out.” I’ve never been involved in the process of a song, granular to final press, but I can only guess that in the 90’s, a song passed through hundreds to thousands of ears before final production.

My thoughts, for what they’re worth, are that so many people hit Cobain from so many quarters that he asked for help. I imagine Cobain saying something like. “I love the name of the song so much, and I’ve tried to come up with other titles, but none of them feel as right. How do we escape this unfortunate tie-in that everyone goes on and on about? I can’t play it anywhere without someone telling me about that damned spray.”

To which, a friend or a management type, probably said, “Just feign ignorance.”

“But they’re not going to stop asking about it.”

“They’re not, but when they do, just maintain that you didn’t know. Don’t include a timeframe. Just leave that comment open-ended, because it’s true, you didn’t know for a time. No one is going to ask a “What did he know, and when did he know it?” question about the name of a song. Nobody’s going to care that much.”

Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree, did Led Zeppelin sell their souls to the devil, did Kurt Cobain know about the similarities between the name of his most famous song and a deodorant’s brand name, and did he seek fame and fortune?

On the latter, I suspect that Cobain wanted to make the best album possible, and he allowed some corporate guys to do whatever they had to do to make Nevermind as great as it could possibly be. Some, including Cobain, say that something was lost in the mixing process. So, why did he do it? Why did Cobain succumb to the pressure from label execs and permit Andy Wallace to master it with what some call an “airplay-inviting varnish”? I’ve read that many in his inner circle were against it, and Cobain later regretted it. To understand why he did it, we probably need sort through some deep psychoanalysis of Kurt’s past and present, but that would likely be so far off base that it’s not even worth trying. Some of those who were close to Kurt in the present tense of Nevermind’s pre-production and production, suggest he wanted it more than they will ever tell you. What is it? We don’t know, but I believe Kurt when he said he never wanted to be famous, and I don’t think he ever strove to be rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I have to imagine that he wanted greatness bestowed upon him by his peers first and foremost, rock critics and journalists, and us. I don’t think he necessarily wanted or needed the spoils that come with it however.

All theory and analysis is autobiographical, as I wrote, and most of it is probably wrong, but the one thing we do know is Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana, wrote one hell of an album. Did the iconography of Kurt Cobain lead to rock critics, like Chuck Klosterman, using so many superlatives that Nevermind is now overrated? Perhaps. If Cobain’s worldview didn’t align so well with most of the rock critic world, they might have had a different take on his music. If the timing of the release of Nevermind was different, and it didn’t change the face of music (allegedly, single-handedly), would it have been regarded with such superlatives? Ifs and what if are for children, however, and when we wipe away all of it, and the myths, the narratives, and iconographic worship of Kurt Cobain, we still have to admit he and Nirvana wrote one hell of an album. On that note, Chuck Klosterman wrote one hell of a book, containing essays on Nirvana, 911, and other matters. His book on The Nineties is chock full of deep, entertaining insight into what made that decade what it was, and the reverberations that the decade sent down (or up?) to the modern era.

Beat The Beatles

February 4, 2022October 3, 2023 Rilaly1 Comment

“The Beatles are overrated,” wrote someone who probably wears black sweaters, prefers goatees, and still considers the ascot a mandatory fashion accessory. “While many find enjoyment in singing along to Hey Jude or I Want To Hold Your Hand, I find the vast majority of [The] Beatles’ lyrics insultingly simple, and [their] individual musical talent is surpassed in almost every regard.” Those who wear normal clothes don’t truly care about such accessories. To us, song is sacred. When we hear The Beatles, we might hear evidence of the critic’s complaints, but we view the songs they created as simplistic brilliance.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to suggest that one artist’s artistic expression is superior to another, but the author draws many comparisons. She focuses most of her critique on the technical proficiency of The Beatles stating that three of the four musicians are inferior to their peers. The author conceded that George Harrison proved a gifted musician, but The Beatles restrained his abilities in most of their songs. This begs the question, does the sacred nature of the song require some level of restraint? We might enjoy hearing gifted virtuosos play their instruments, but how often does technical mastery lend itself to crafting great songs? We can all think of some songs where instruments commanded the music, but even the most gifted musicians learn to restrain their abilities for the sake of the song.

When we attempt to examine our favorite songs dispassionately, we might acknowledge that some of the lyrics might be simple, and that a novice might be able to play them on a piano, but as Bill Murray once said, “It just doesn’t matter”. We enjoy a clever relationship between the lyrics and the music. Our favorite composers often write lyrics for the sole purpose of developing a relationship with the music.

Most people will express awe over an eighteen-minute guitar solo at a concert. My question is do they really appreciate an eighteen-minute solo, or do they want to appreciate it? I might be alone, but I consider solos, in the midst of a rock concert, self-indulgent drivel. “Get back to the songs!” I want to yell. Unless someone wants to play guitar, and they want to learn from the masters, I don’t understand their appreciation. Unless they want to say they love it, so they can say they love it, because that’s just kind of what we do, I guess. Some of them, and I’ve met them, actually appreciate a big long solo so much that they time it. Perhaps they think a big, long solo from a guitar god gives them their money’s worth, or something, but I don’t understand it.

***

An argument put forth by Ashawnta Jackson, however, suggests that we don’t really consider bands like the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys great. By enjoying their music as much as we do, she writes, we’re just doing what we’re told. We don’t know any better. She appears to believe that the underlying reason 1965-69 bands are still part of the modern canon is a result of a multi-generational mass delusion based on an institutional, repetitive messaging. She writes that others chose this music for us, and we haven’t examined those who decided what music we are to enjoy well enough.

The inference is that hundreds of millions of people throughout the world still love the music of these bands because everyone from the corporate types to the DJ’s constantly play them, and our parents and uncles and aunts have propagated this notion that we should continue enjoying listening to the music they enjoyed. This mass delusion is so entrenched now that listeners from all over the world, and from just about every demographic, now accept the fact that certain music “overrepresented in the 1965-69 era” is now considered so great we want to listen to it often. The cure, Jackson states, can be found “by examining the who chooses and why, the “dominant canon of the dominant” can be opened up as listeners reflect on their exclusions and “find their own ways off the beaten track.”

Rick Moran’s piece counters that young people are falling under this spell too, as “[Media Research Center Sales data] states that “old songs” currently represent an astonishing 70% of the U.S. market.” Listening to music is often a solitary activity. Suggesting that those listed above do not influence our choices is foolish, but to suggest that it constantly influences what we stream in our cars, at our computers, and all the other times when we’re alone appears equally foolish. One might think that young people, who traditionally abhor everything their elders prefer, might be a demographic that Jackson could count on to put an end to these institutional decrees, but the data suggests they went and had their minds melded.

Sparks are Strange

November 24, 2021 RilalyLeave a comment

“When you’re strange. Faces come out in the rain. When you’re strange. No one remembers your name.” –The Doors.

When you’re strange, they will compare you to strange, when you’re strange. Don’t make them look ugly when you feel strange. Don’t make them seem wicked when you feel alone and unwanted. It won’t even things out when you’re feeling down and unloved and strange.

When I first learned of the documentary being made on the Mael brothers in Sparks called Sparks Brothers, I figured the comparisons to Queen would be inevitable and constant, as they have presumably throughout Sparks’ career. Thankfully, I was wrong on the quantity of comparisons in the documentary, but I was right about the quality.

When faced with the inevitable comparison questions, most artists follow the time-tested, thoroughly vetted art of embracing comparisons and distancing themselves from it at the same time. After watching comparisons of the unconventional for decades, we’ve seen professionals approach this in two ways. They either embrace it or distance themselves from it, and we’ve even heard some manage to tight wire both, “Thank you for comparing us to them. They achieved what we can only dream of achieving, but I honestly don’t see the comparison. We’re so different in so many ways.” The worst strategy I’ve seen, and that which Sparks employed, albeit subtly, is to bash the other strange artists. The other ones might lose, but you will not win by doing so.

The Sparks Brothers documentary is a mildly entertaining, overlong discussion of a modern band who started in the 70’s. I’ve now listened to the entire catalog of Sparks, and while I admire the band for their weird, strange, and just plain different efforts, they are not Queen. To someone who appreciates any efforts made at being unconventional and just plain different, in the art-rock milieu, I think they had enough songs to create a quality greatest hits album, but I don’t think their greatest hits would’ve qualified for Queen’s greatest hits volume II.

The Sparks Brothers documentary also tells the tale of a band who refused to play by the rules. Yet, when you’re strange and experimental in nature, you’re going to drop some duds. The problem with that, of course, is that when a listener chooses to click on one of your songs, and it’s one of the duds, that sample unfortunately marks your entire catalog in their mind. In his review of the documentary, comedian and social critic Adam Carolla concluded his review by saying, “No one listens to Sparks.” Some find the experimental nature of Sparks frustrating, because they come so close to making great songs. Some find it weird for the sake of being weird, but others find it inspirational, and that’s the reason some of us listen to Sparks. Sparks have some great singles, but no great albums, and they are not a great band. We do like them for who they are however.

Any band who stretches beyond the borders of weird, strange, and just plain different to structured outlandishness will eventually and inevitably be compared to Queen. Any time a band, or musician, attempts to redefine genres, engage in genre-breaking material, or corrupts and disrupts traditional structures in music, the Queen comparisons are inevitable. Queen might not be the weirdest band of all time, and they might not have been the first outlandish band, but they set a standard by which we compare all unconventional acts.

Comparisons are a way of life in any artistic endeavor. Every artist, and aspiring artist, should prepare for real, perceived, or imagined comparisons. They should prepare for the terms copied, derivative, or an unfair characterization of them as a poor man’s (list artist’s name here). The worst thing an artist can do is subtly diminish and outright bash the other artist. Doing so should be left to Bigfoot enthusiasts, UFO experts, and other conspiracy-theory minded milieus.

If you’re ever so bored, and you can’t find anything else to watch, the shorts on these subjects can be mildly entertaining at times. It’s almost inevitable, in these shows, that an interviewer will ask one of the experts in their field to augment or refute the theories of another expert. This second expert will inevitably attempt to establish his bona fides by diminishing the first expert and any others who claim expertise in their field. Those of us who know nothing of these fields know that we are supposed to pick one of these experts to follow. I am a bad example, because I don’t believe any of them, and I never will until they provide unquestionable and clear video, a dead body, or something else that I would be a stubborn fool not to consider a fact. The only thing I hear from the second expert is some jealousy that the interviewer would dare to lend some credibility to the first. I only hear the second expert attempt to gain some credibility on the back of the first. I also don’t hear anything the second one says after bashing the first. In this universe, where I have no knowledge, I end up dismissing everyone, and no one wins.

The Mael brothers did not take the occasion of the Sparks Brothers documentary to bash Queen, as I wrote. The brothers didn’t say anything about Queen, one way or another, but I have to assume that they had some say on the final cut. If that’s true, they allowed a no-name producer to diminish Queen.

“If I was producing that song,” the producer said in reference to a Sparks’ song, “I’d like put a beat on it or something, and be like oh my God, this is amazing. Everyone’s going to feel so sad about this, and we’re going to sneak it into them, and then Sparks would’ve be like, let Queen do that.” The idea that the Sparks’ Mael brothers didn’t say this might make it okay to some, but they allowed the director to keep it in, thus breaking a cardinal rule of weird art.

Outside of creating the best piece of art they possibly can, the goal of every artist is to make some sort of connection relative to the artist. Queen, David Bowie, and many others proved that this can be accomplished in unconventional ways that align with their interpretation and personality. We can assume that this producer wanted to add a beat to make a better connection to a wider audience. I understand the whole “sell-out” complaint, but some of the best weird bands learned how to walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. I also understand that the artist doesn’t want to compromise on their artistic vision, but to suggest that Queen was more open to compromising themselves than Sparks tells me that they wanted this quote left in to help Sparks explain why Queen proved more popular than them. It doesn’t. It does nothing but slam on Queen, and it accomplishes nothing for Sparks in my humble opinion.

My advice for anyone being compared to a seminal artist who made an impact that is difficult to defeat is to embrace the comparison. As I wrote, thank the interviewer for the comparison and attempt to distance yourself at the same time. If, however, you find the comparisons exhausting, you say something along the lines of, “Any time an artist attempts to do something out of the ordinary they are compared to Queen. If you listen to our music and Queen’s, you won’t find any comparisons, other than we’re both unconventional. Queen did their thing, and we did ours. All the power to them, but I don’t honestly see the comparison.” Doing otherwise makes you come off sounding like an insecure UFO or Bigfoot expert who knows facts are hard to come by in their field, and the only thing left are competing theories. Those experts slam on each other all the time about intangibles such as findings and theories, and they attempt to establish their bona fides by saying none of the other experts know what they’re talking about except them. In my opinion, it’s a no-win situation.

If I never heard of Queen, and I didn’t establish my own connection to them, I might’ve dismissed them as a result of this producer’s shot, but I wouldn’t have tilted that vat of credibility back on Sparks. My question, if I were in the Sparks’ camp editing this film, is what are you hoping to accomplish by leaving this in? I would’ve dismissed them as petty, jealous types who want to taint Queen’s credibility to bolster theirs. I know Sparks music, and I know Queen’s, and I judge them to be separate and distinct entities. If I didn’t, neither parties would receive more acclaim, clicks, or anything else from me as a result of one party bashing the other.