Klosterman’s The 90’s: A Book. A Word Salad.

February 17, 2022February 18, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“What’s historically distinctive about the [Generation] X era is the overwhelming equivocation toward its own marginalization,” Chuck Klosterman writes in his book The 90’s: A Book. We understand Klosterman’s point, but we would write it another way. We would write that the art of equivocation may have led to Generation X’s marginalization. As evidence of this, Klosterman then writes, “The things uninformed people said about who Gen Xers supposedly were often felt reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.”

No one in my inner circle said anything bold in the 90’s. There were exceptions of course. We called them the “say anything” crowd, because they’d say anything. The rest of us were either scared, or conditioned, to qualify, equivocate, or obfuscate the meaning of everything we said to try to jam our thoughts into every square hole before us. We edited our thoughts in real time, so that no one could accuse us of generalizing. I talked to other generations, and they didn’t worry about generalizing, stereotyping, or any other accusation our crowd could dream up. They said bold things, and they could back them up, some of the times. Some of their opinions were controversial, and some of them weren’t. Some of their opinions were wrong, and some of them weren’t. They didn’t care. They weren’t afraid to share. They’d say anything. How do they get away with that, we wondered.

Someone accused me of generalizing once, as if it were the ultimate condemnation of my assessment. By that time, we were all sick of the accusation. Being so careful became tedious after a while. I turned to my accuser and said, “I am generalizing, because I find this to be generally true.” She was shocked, presumably because no one ever fought back against her charge. Had she pressed me, I would’ve added, ‘When we generalize, we say things we believe are generally true. If something is true 50.0001% of the time, it is generally true, in general, and that is a generalization.’ “There are no absolutes,” the absolutes crowd say. We might try to argue that line, but the idea they loft is because something is not 100% true 100% of the time, then we should not discuss it until we qualify it to make considerations for the 49.9999% times it might not be true. How does anyone think, talk, or formulate conversation if they’re worried that some statement doesn’t account for the 23.1% of the population to which it doesn’t apply? You don’t. You sit back, in marginalized and intimidated corners to allow the unintimidated to continue unencumbered. The fear of condemnation leads us to say things like, “reductionist and flawed, but still worthy of examination and not entirely wrong.” We enjoyed saying such things initially, as it led to some level of “intellectual status”, but we eventually discovered how discombobulating and tedious it could become.

2) “The most compelling aspect of The Gen X Reader is not what the writers got right or wrong, but the intensity of their search for meaning,” Chuck Klosterman writes of Douglas Rushkoff’s compilation of essays Gen X Reader (an anthology devoted to dissecting Douglas Copeland’s book Generation X).

If all theory is autobiography, and all analysis is self-analysis, Klosterman reveals his raison d’etre in that sentence. If he did this to himself, in a public park, in the state of Alabama, they would probably ring him up on at least a half-dozen misdemeanors.

3) “[The book Gen X Reader is] a fossilized example of how understanding the present cannot be achieved until the present has become the past,” Klosterman further writes.

What?

He writes, “Times, change, because that’s what they do.”

In another space, on another subject, Klosterman asks, “Now … were these assessments accurate?” He answers: (Yes.) (No.) (Sometimes.)”

The first thing that comes to mind when reading these particular lines is, the only person who might be more exhausted in a conversation with Chuck Klosterman, other than the audience to his conversation, is Chuck Klosterman himself. Those unfamiliar with Klosterman’s style might think he is trying to add words to fluff his word count, or they might think he’s trying too hard to be inclusive or sound intelligent. Those of us who read his books, listen to his podcast, and/or watch interviews with him know this is Chuck Klosterman. It’s the way he writes, and it’s the way he talks.

I tried to come up with an assessment of these particular elements of Klosterman’s writing. “Word Salad,” I whispered. What’s a word salad? Wikipedia defines word salad thusly: “A word salad, or schizophasia, is a “confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases”, most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder.” This is not Chuck Klosterman in total. He is very intelligent and insightful, but he has moments.

I recommend just about every book he has authored. Klosterman’s writing is not a word salad in this sense, but some of his sentences contain iceberg lettuce. I love iceberg lettuce. I always have. I love it as much as I do Chuck Klosterman’s work. After decades of eating the leaves, I found out that iceberg lettuce has little nutritional value. It provides vitamin A and K, and some fiber, and it has a high-water count, but compared to other lettuce leaves it is very low in nutritional value.

Many Klosterman essays have living lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, and other leaves with nutrients, but he adds black olives. “You can never have too many black olives,” his writing says. Yes, we can. Then he adds far too much cheese, a half-pound of bacon bits, and everyone knows you don’t need that many cucumbers and croutons to make a salad, but Klosterman wants to make sure readers get value for their money.

4) One interesting insight Klosterman writes that aligns with thoughts I’ve explored is: “[Older generations] perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.”

For most of my life I wanted others to consider me weird, strange, or just plain different. Whatever I achieved in this regard, it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I wanted it all. I never realized what an enviable position this was, and I had no idea that it was an offshoot of my dad’s ability (financially and otherwise) that led me to a varying degree of certitude that I belong. My dad grew up in a location just south of the “other side” of the tracks. He grew up, and spent the entirety of his adulthood, trying to fit in. A portion of my desire to engage the minds of the weird, so that I might become one, could have been borne through rebellion to my dad’s obsessive desire to have others consider he and his son’s normal, but I now think he laid a foundation of norms at my feet by raising me in a normal climate that I desperately tried to escape.

5) Klosterman also has a unique gift for making seemingly irrelevant (to me anyway) events in history cultural touchstones that either influenced, changed, or revolutionized the culture. Klosterman writes that Nelson Mandela going from jail to the Nobel Peace Prize and then to the presidency of South Africa as “the most momentous global event of the nineties.” Klosterman lists the cultural influence as initiating the art of the conspiracy theory, as conspiracy theories suggested Mandela died in a prison cell. I don’t know if Klosterman ran around in different circles, or if he is attempting to rewrite his past and assign his thoughts greater significance, but I don’t know anyone, personally, who ever talked about Nelson Mandela in the 90’s.

6) Klosterman is a few years younger than me, and we share some similarities in our background, so when he writes what he considers the cultural touchstones of the last sixty years, I’m intimately familiar with almost everything he discusses save for one: Reality Bites. I was that Blockbuster guy we now see in retrospective videos of a guy who stood in their aisles far, FAR too often, in the 90’s, trying to find something unique and entertaining, but I never selected Reality Bites. To read Klosterman, the idea that someone who paid a ton of attention to the culture, through entertainment venues, the idea that a man my age never saw this movie is his equivalent of an American never hearing the name Babe Ruth. This isn’t the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last he writes of this movie, as he believes it either captured the narrative of the 90’s in America, better than any other movie, or drove it. I wouldn’t know, because I never saw it.

Regardless what I’ve said above, I respect Mr. Chuck Klosterman. I think he’s an excellent writer, and a challenging intellect. When one of his books come out, I’m one of the first in the intangible line to pick it up. If anyone thinks I’m too negative, or cynical, I am. Whenever my friends and I would walk out of a quality movie, we would dissect it, and we were always negative and cynical. We would criticize the acting, the plot, elements of the dialogue, and anything else we could think up. If the movie just sucked, we didn’t waste any more of our lives on it. We just said, “Well, that sucked!” The great ones were the ones we picked apart. Our conversations went something like this: “I hated it when he did that!” “Oh, I know it. What about that time he did this?” “Great movie though.” “Yeah, it was.”

The Sellout, Fraud, Fake, Phoniness of Keeping it Real

February 13, 2022February 21, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“You’re a sellout!” We would say when we wanted our fellow teens to cower. It’s what we did in the 1990’s. Back then, sellout, and its various derivatives, were the most powerful words in the English language. No one could pinpoint what those relative and arbitrary terms meant, but everyone could. Everyone knew how to move the couch to suit their situation, but no one knew where the grooves in the carpet were. We didn’t know what keeping it real meant either, but to paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice’s statement on porn, “We knew it when we saw it.” The only thing we knew for sure was that our favorite musicians, actors and writers were all about keeping it real.

The term sellout was not as ubiquitous in the halls of our high school, but its derivatives haunted us. Calling someone a suck ass, kiss ass or phony was as damaging to us as calling a punk rocker a sellout. We did everything we could to avoid someone dropping these terms on us. It was our equivalent to the cinematic portrayals of the red scare from the 1950’s in which everyone did everything they could to avoid being called red. We avoided superficial conversation, for example, fearing that someone somewhere might unload a derivative on us.

There were several shows and movies that taught us how to be real. We had iconic figures who could teach us how to be real, and the prototypes also lived among us. It was up to us to find our role models, but they were out there, keeping it real. If you haven’t spotted the flaws inherent in our system, we didn’t either. We were were scared, confused young people in the 90’s, and just like every kid of every other era, we sought some form of identity to escape that confusion that we hoped others might accept.

Jennie and I worked for an online company. She informed me that she had utter disdain for our boss. I found her screed funny, righteous, and all that. Then that boss (who was actually a nice fella, but he was the man) walked by our desk and dropped a polite, somewhat humorous anecdote on us. Jennie nearly fell out of her chair laughing. What a fraud, I thought. I maintain that she failed to act in a consistent manner, but who cares? Jennie was constantly getting in trouble for falling asleep at her desk. She probably feared losing her job, and she probably thought a little laughter would ingratiate her to the man, or she might have thought the polite, somewhat humorous joke was a lot funnier than I did. Who cares? To my mind Jennie was a sellout, a phony, and a fraud for sucking up to the man. Her laughter shaped what I thought of her forever after, because I thought she wasn’t being real. I thought her laughter was for sale, and she was commodity.

One of the job duties of my new job as a front desk employee at a hotel was to engage our guests in polite, superficial conversations. I was to make them laugh, feel comfortable, and make them feel at home. “I’m not going to talk to every guest,” I said, believing the boss was shredding my integrity.

“Well then, you’re fired,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s one of your job duties,” she said. “When a guest tells you a story, you are to respond in a way that makes them feel interesting. If they tell a joke, it’s the funniest damn thing you ever heard. If you’re not willing to make an effort in this regard, tell me now, and we’ll start looking for someone who is.”

It was difficult to shed the artistic personae I spent so much time manufacturing, but I learned to tap into the superficial side of my personality for eight hours a day, five days a week. No one was paying me for my artistic personae anyway, so why was I clinging to whatever arbitrary definition of what it means to be real? No one really cares either. No one dropped to a knee when they heard me pontificate the virtues of the real. They probably considered me a scared little kid who was looking for pointers on how to be a cool individual in an otherwise dark, unmapped location of my life. The breadth of that took me a while to fully appreciate. I thought they appreciated my ability to stay true to the Keeping it Real commandments. They didn’t. When we were sitting at a breakroom table of real people, and someone expressed real virtues, people yawned and moved the conversation forward. If we dared express a view that they might view as the fraudulent, phony view of a sellout, all conversation stopped. We could hear the clinking of glasses and the sizzle of a griddle in the wake of such comments, but no one knew why it was so important that a service employee at a restaurant keep it real during the Sunday breakfast rush.

I learned to start chit chatting up every hotel guest about every stupid thing I could dream up, and it wasn’t that hard. In some dark recesses of my mind, I would never reveal in closed locations, I actually enjoyed it. My high school buddies probably would’ve turned seven different shades of red if they witnessed it. They would’ve been embarrassed for me, and angry that I sold my soul for a buck, or they might not have noticed it at all. It’s possible that no one was paying half as much attention to me as I thought, and I dreamed up all these elements and definitions of those elements in my head.

I initially refused to take this newly manufactured ability to tap into the “chat chat, chit chat!” part of my personality out into the real world. My initial vow was to “keep ‘em separated”, until I saw my friends engage in superficial conversation with strangers who weren’t female. They just enjoyed superficial chit chat, talking about nonsense, and they appeared to be having a whale of a good time. “Wait a second!” I wanted to scream. “Didn’t you guys see that one movie, with that real, cool one who refused to chat nonsense? He said that Americans talk too much, and he said that we should all learn to shut up for a minute. Who cares?! What are you talking about? You are in violation my friend!”

That composite character of our movies, shows, and songs removed himself from pedantic concerns, and he was the quiet, cool prototype dragon we all chased. He effortlessly managed the center of attention by letting his supporting actors fill in the blanks for him and fluff his image. We wanted one person, somewhere, to confuse us with this archetype.

There was no specific actor, movie, or show we consciously mimicked, but if we built a pyramid, Matt Dillon’s role in The Outsiders might have sat somewhere near the top. It might have been the initial spark, but we didn’t consciously mimic him or any of the other actors who played similar roles. We absorbed these undefined, intangible qualities, however, movie and movie, show after show, song after song, and book after book, until we thought we created something others might buy. When no one did, we probably should’ve put together a different sales strategy, but what would Matt Dillon, Kurt Cobain, and Johnny Depp think? We were brooding shoegazers who didn’t care what anyone else thought, and we repeated that so often that we revealed ourselves as composite caricatures.

One of the most famous quotes of all time from the Old Testament of the Keeping it Real bible occurred in the movie The Wild One. In that John Paxton, Ben Maddow script, the Mildred character reads the line: “What are you rebelling against Johnny?”

The Johnny character reads the line: “Whaddya Got?”

In the real world Mildred would not say anything to preserve Johnny’s reply in a cool liquid that real worlders might want to bathe in. In the real-world Mildred says, “I’m sorry to say I got nothing Johnny.”

“If you got nothing, don’t say anything Mildred,” the real-world Johnny might say. “You saying something just killed my whole mystique. Imagine if you said nothing. Imagine how powerful that line would’ve been.”

“I’m sorry Johnny,” Mildred says, clearly shaken. “I’m just a bit actress in this scene.”

“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I coulda been real, instead of a service industry worker, which is what I am.”

Tag lines such as keeping it real, selling your soul to the highest bidder, and the more concise sellout are evergreen, of course, but those of us who were hit with them way back when now see the illustrative and inconsistent dichotomy of trying to become real.

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.