You Know You're Right

At my beloved gym, the staff has thankfully changed the radio station from the Top-40 iPod-like station to a '90s and contemporary rock station. While this means lots of middling chaff that permeated my teenage years (the Web site says it's "Puddle of Mudd week"?!), there are plenty of appreciated nuggets, most especially the Nirvana songs that are played about once an hour.

I only own "In Utero" and "From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah," and frankly, missed much of my Nirvana's titanic impact by a few years -- I was 10 years old when Kurt Cobain killed himself (though this doesn't seem to stop from most people exactly my age from placing themselves in the "Generation X/Transformed by Cobain Circa 1992" category). Nonetheless, it's hard to miss his and the band's brilliance, taking, albeit briefly, culture for a hard left turn. I've always loved their performance (and story behind it, described in the band's above Wikipedia link) at the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards, where Cobain opened with a few bars of "Rape Me," to the executives' shock, before heading into the single and ending with Krist Novoselic bleeding when his bass crashed into his head, Cobain destroying all the equipment and drummer Dave Grohl calling out Axl Rose. Here's the video:



Nirvana's original label, Sub Pop, celebrated its 20th anniversary last month, which is remarkably impressive for an independent music label. The label makes its money these days from a roster far more eclectic than the Seattle grunge that catapulted it to fame, but Nirvana's "Bleach" is still, by far, the best-selling record. Perhaps it's allowed Sub Pop to create a long-term financial plan and contemplate existing in perpetuity; a friend told me the label even makes small charitable donations. Good for them.

Really, what I think Nirvana's success proves is that people are not afraid of art that challenges them and there is a broad, broad swath of the public at large who knows that art is not an easily consumed product, pristine, compact and easily resolved, because life is not that way either. Since Cobain's death, popular music took a few weird turns, mostly to a destination of overproduced, overly packaged songs that rely on style rather than substance, and has now landed in a hybridized, ultra-niche world where there's lots and lots of good music (perhaps even too much of it flooding the market), but also fewer people listening to it and in a much more compartmentalized way so there's very little semblance of a common denominator of great culture that brings people together, which is thoroughly disappointing. But someday, some great band (multiple bands?) will unify it again because people will want to be unified over something enlightening, intriguing, compelling and complex.