The Album: Nevermind Nirvana
The Story: My senior year of high school, I was editor of the school newspaper. In my new crop of students was a kid named Jennifer. She was weird, smart, and opinionated. I really liked that about her.
She says I was nice to her, but I'll be honest, what I remember of my senior year was me being fairly much a haughty asshole to a lot of people. I'd found what I thought was piety and the more pious I got, the worse of a human being I became. Rimbaud once wrote that we have faith in poison. In my case, I'd let my faith become poison.
I guess Jen caught me on my good days or politely ignored my bs because we soon became friends. We'd talk about art and music. I introduced her to some of the bands I liked. She did the same. She's the person who made me really listen to Nirvana.
They were starting to play "Spells like Teen Spirit" on the radio but I wasn't paying attention to it. It didn't connect with me, maybe because I just assumed it wasn't my kind of music.
Sometimes, you have to really hear songs in context of the whole album before you understand. "Teen Spirit" wasn't just a single, it was the intro to the album, the door opening to show you the new things. True things. And as much as I'd liked my truth segregated away from my fun, in the back of my mind, I knew that could only take me so far.
Nevermind is a glorious album, but it isn't a pretty album. It isn't an easy album. There is a song from the perspective of a man holding a 14 yr old girl so he can do horrible things to her and her successful attempt to get him to let his guard down so she could escape.
There are songs that talk about how much easier it would be not to feel, not to exist, ugliness, darkness. There is one of my favorite lines of all time 'the finest day that I ever had was when I learned to cry on command.'
The music is not polished. Cobain had this one guitar (he said he bought it for like 20 bucks) that was being held together with duct tape. I love this image because, in a lot of ways, that's how many of us felt at that time, just some damaged thing being held together with duct tape.
Frayed. Broken. Hurting. Imperfect. Ugly. I often lose patience with people these days because they seem to be demanding this kind of pollyanna perfection from what people create. That isn't life works and it isn't how art happens. There are some artists out there who are looking for the ideals, but others are there to record, comment on and document everything that fails to reach those ideals.
Thank you to: Jennifer Phillips, the person who brought me to Nirvana.
The Lesson Learned: I'd survived childhood and I'd reasonably functioned through most of my teen years. I thought the rest would be a cakewalk but ooooh, bitch was I wrong. The people just a few years older than me were already starting to realize this themselves and were struggling to come up with some reasonable way to accept it.
As a collective, the kids raised with chaos, screwed up parents, dashed hopes, and space shuttles exploding in the sky were old enough to start coming to terms with all of this. The zeitgeist was changing again.
Unfortunately, I wasn't going to be in the position to really think about that for a while.
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