Issue 33: Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By Medulla Vesuvius

On Nirvana, The Greatest Albums of All Time, and the Goals of Art

My friends, there are a multitude of things in this great wide world that I don’t know. To use Donald Rumsfeld’s famous categories of “knowns” and “unknowns,” today I want to tell you about a personal known unknown- namely: what the hell the fascination is with Nirvana.

I recently got a hold of the Rolling Stone List of 100 Greatest Albums and I have endeavored, over the next several months to utilize my local library and give a listen to the 75% of the listed albums I don’t own and have never heard as a unified musical work.

I’ve just gotten started. Joni Mitchell’s Blue was the first and most recent one before this weeks’ discovery: Nirvana’s Nevermind and Unplugged.

I don’t know why I thought things would be different this time. “Maybe there’s something vaguely magical about these albums. Why else would they be included with the best of all time,” I justified to myself before taking on this project. I mean, I knew of most of the albums on the list just through the critics’ hype machines. I could probably identify 80% of them just by the cover art alone.

Now, I can’t say I was disappointed with the Nirvana material. I was never all that interested in the stuff I had heard in passing over the years. But many times in listening to this music, in particular, the Unplugged album, I was genuinely fascinated with how such pedestrian musicianship could come to “change the world,” “define a generation,” and (insert whatever superlative praise heaped onto the head of Kurt Cobain you believed when you were in high school in the early 90s.) When I say “pedestrian musicianship,” I mean I heard guys in my high school that could have passed off these same tunes with the same kind of humorless detachment and boring angst.

So…How?

How did it happen that this formulaic mid-tempo, dirge-fest of a musical aesthetic could collect so much hype?

I’m afraid of the obvious answer, (which I read in just about every description of Nirvana), that this music captured the zeitgeist of the early 90s. It was reactionary against hair-metal and the resultant posturing, blah, blah, blah, etc.

The problem with that defense is it only provides a very contextual appreciation of the sounds contained therein. In theory, then, this music is only as important, relevant, or “great” as it is culturally reactionary. I personally need more than that to hang my hat on as a listener. In fact, if Nirvana is important only because they were “anti-rock-stars” they really didn’t even need to bother to record a bar of music, for that kind of historical appreciation doesn’t even require that we hear the sounds themselves.

I’m sure it’s clear by now that Nirvana’s music resonates with me not at all, even though after a couple of listens I came to tolerate Nevermind, (not as a classic, “best-of-all-time”- type album, but as a generally cogent artistic statement.) For one thing, there’s not a lot of variety on Unplugged, for example- you hear a lot of repetitive anti-riffs, the aforementioned same-ish tempos and any sort of grand depth or enlightenment in the lyrics, (Polly wants a cracker/Think I should get off her first/I think she wants some water/To put out the blow torch—are you kidding me?), would surely have to be foisted onto them by a listener with a propensity to do just that–namely, ninth grade kids who weren’t cheerleaders and music critics tired of hearing about how all Poison wanted was nothing but a good time.

Chuck Klosterman has said that the best thing musical artists can do to secure their popularity is die. I think Cobain’s suicide is another one of those extra-musical elements that has aided us in forgiving Nirvana for their sloppy music. My personal theory on why Kurt Cobain killed himself was the guilt he felt for being hoisted onto the shoulders of American music listeners for the sole accomplishment of creating mediocre-at-best music requiring no fixed measure of talent. Which, if you really think about it, would really start to play on your nervous system as an artist, supposedly so averse to artificiality as represented by Kip Winger, for instance.

Overall, in the case of Nirvana, I am left with a big question of art appreciation. And I would phrase that question something like this: what is the artist’s supreme goal in creating? Is it “timelessness,” (creating work that speaks to the experiences of all future generations equally and steadfastly), or merely creating works that are a reflection of the times in which they are created? There is a school of thought that says that art doth have intrinsic power to elevate mere humanity, all the while expressing the general ecstasies and agonies we all share and have shared since time immemorial. This would be the type of person who speaks of the “timelessness” or “classic”-ness of art. Another view of art might be closer to journalism or history, a message in a bottle for future generations. While I question the possibility of art’s being truly “timeless,” (a discussion for another day), and while I use the term “artist” very lightly when speaking of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, I hope for their sake the true purpose of art is the latter, since in the humble opinion of this writer, their output has not aged well.

To summarize- Nirvana is apparently important because they were the anti-“Cherry Pie” video by Warrant. Ten to fifteen years removed from Warrant’s day in the sun, however, the argument of “gloss vs. genuine” doesn’t seem to imbue the sounds with the same transcendence that it did when Cobain was still alive and Nirvana was the word on every critic’s lips.