Here We Are Now

by Charles R. Cross

  At The Rocket, we too did an All Time Greatest Albums list in 1995. Nevermind topped that poll as well. I wrote the little piece that talked about the impact of that album back then, just a few years after it had come out. I wrote, “Though we’ve only had this in our lives for four short years, it has aged well. I can’t imagine a time when this pure vision won’t rock.”

  We set the article in the same font as Nirvana’s logo, and, of course, it came from the same typesetting machine. Only a graphic designer with a good eye would have noticed, or cared.

  The critical standing of any piece of artistic creation rarely remains static, and Kurt’s rise over the past two decades has several factors. One is the sad truth that he is dead, so no more Nirvana music is forthcoming. I’ve heard a lot of what is in the vaults, though not all of it. There are a few little gems here and there, and some interesting Kurt solo jams, but there is no fully conceived masterpiece I’m privy to. The rehearsal tapes are fascinating, though, and I’m sure one day there will be an album just of those recordings. Kurt’s songs usually came together in little snippets, with a lyric yelled over a rehearsal, or a melody worked out in a rehearsal jam. But that work in process didn’t always yield a finished, finely honed song. “You Know You’re Right,” which came out on the Nirvana album in 2002, is the only posthumous band song I heard in the vaults that I’d rank as great. The 2013 In Utero box had a dozen outtakes and rehearsals, but the quality of that material didn’t rank with Kurt’s best work, at least to my ears. There are Kurt solo songs in the vaults, and some of that will also one day probably appear on an album, but there is no full-band Nirvana Holy Grail recording waiting to be released that I know of.

  Without the possibility of another “lost album,” the albums that exist now become more important. The Nirvana catalog is also permanently frozen at three studio albums during Kurt’s lifetime. The compact nature of that shelf magnifies the importance of what the shelf contains. It makes Nevermind a much more significant album than if Kurt had lived as long as Neil Young has, for example, and had produced dozens of albums. Geffen Records, Neil Young’s (and Nirvana’s) label, ended up suing Neil over his Trans album because they felt it was intentionally bad (their legal filing said Neil was “unrepresentative of himself”). Kurt never got the chance to have a midlife musical crisis, which many would argue is what was happening with Neil Young in the mid-eighties. That would surely have been interesting to watch, but the upside is that the three albums he supervised and crafted are what will forever be used to judge his musical legacy. And they are gems.

  Kurt’s premature death meant the end of Nirvana; the band never considered re-forming with a different singer. It was grief that the fans were left with, and grief that afflicted the band members, too, who felt they had more to say. Dave Grohl told Mojo recently, about In Utero, “overall it kinda breaks my heart that [it] was the last album we made, because I think there were more [albums] in us.” I think Nirvana had more albums in them as well, but we lost those when we lost Kurt.

  Critics, music buyers, and musicians don’t operate in a vacuum. Success begets success, and some of Nevermind’s rise in reputation comes from what neurobiologists call “the winner effect,” which is the reward that comes from making a selection you already think will satisfy you, or that your friends have said satisfied them. Nevermind built upon itself with record buyers. At the end of the calendar year 1991, Nevermind had sold several hundred thousand copies, but by the end of 1992 it had sold several million. It would keep selling millions over the next several years. The album stayed on the Billboard charts for a full five years.

  Kurt had no idea that Nevermind would sell as well as it did, but he did understand the concept that if you reached a certain level of saturation with press, radio, and video, a monster hit could be had. His original title for Nevermind was Sheep, a term he was sarcastically applying to the American consumer. Would so many “sheep” have bought the album if it were titled Sheep? Probably not, but one element of Nevermind’s success was both its catchy title and striking cover. The nude baby provoked just enough controversy to get the album stickered in some uptight chains, but not enough to get it banned. Nirvana’s label mates on Sub Pop, Tad, also had several controversial album cover choices, but their career was damaged by three different record sleeves that had issues that affected their distribution (controversy is one thing, but if your album is completely unavailable for a time, it dampens sales). Kurt thought about doing something as outrageous as doctoring Pepsi’s logo (as Tad had done), but he was far too practical to put his future at risk.

  “The winner effect” doesn’t usually apply with rock critics, who pride themselves on their contrarian views in print and online. Critical thought usually moves counter to commercial sales. Nevermind was not initially an album championed by the press the way, say, the works of Arcade Fire have been; the album’s critical weight grew over time. Often when an album rises to the top of the charts without being selected first by critics, the critics will try to take its reputation down because they can’t claim ownership of that success. But Nirvana never suffered a significant critical backlash. The band’s standing with critics today is near perfect. The catalog is considered nearly flawless.

  None of this discourse even brings up the point that Nevermind, the seventh-greatest album of all time according to Rolling Stone, isn’t even Nirvana’s best, in my opinion: In Utero is. That’s what both Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl also told me over the years, and it’s what Kurt said in interviews. But success in the commercial marketplace also plays a role in how an album is remembered, and In Utero sold a tenth the number of copies as Nevermind. As Nirvana’s breakthrough and most successful album, Nevermind is always going to be their classic. Still, if I could take only one Nirvana album to a desert island, it would be In Utero. Kurt’s songwriting had improved, his lyric focus was razor sharp (“Teenage angst has paid off well”), and most of the songs were about his own internal process, which made them deep. I would rank “Heart-Shaped Box,” “All Apologies,” “Serve the Servants,” and “Rape Me” as some of Kurt’s most significant lyrics. The music was equally dazzling. His hooks in the choruses were brilliantly conceived. Still, even the remastered In Utero in 2013 failed to gain the same critical attention, or sales, as the Nevermind reissue.

  There is one other explanation for the enduring status of Nevermind with critics and fans. This final theory fits neatly into Occam’s razor, which is the scientific principle that the simplest answer to any question is most likely the correct one.

  Applying Occam’s razor to Nevermind’s place in history would work like this: Nevermind is consistently ranked among the greatest albums of all time because it is.

  Nirvana remains an influence on all subsections of rock, from alternative to metal, but Kurt Cobain, bizarrely, also shows up frequently in modern hip-hop. It is one of the oddest elements of his legacy, but one that also shows how wide his cultural swath has been in arenas outside the genre of music he worked in. In the summer of 2013, Jay-Z sampled some of “Teen Spirit” for his hit song “Holy Grail.” The first verse ends with Jay-Z rapping, “I know nobody to blame, Kurt Cobain, I did it to myself.” The chorus, sung by superstar Justin Timberlake, also includes lyrics adapted from “Teen Spirit”: “We’re stupid and contagious, and we all just entertainers.”

  It was interesting to see two of the biggest stars of music in the 2000s, Jay-Z and Timberlake, sing about Kurt, but the social-media response showed another aspect of Kurt’s impact. All over the Internet, the idea of Jay-Z summoning Kurt was called “sacrilegious” and “beyond triple corny,” as one Twitter commentator wrote. Those types of remarks come up often whenever Kurt’s name or likeness is used outside of Nirvana’s music. It suggests that with many people Kurt has more sanctity, or punk authenticity, than other musicians.

  “Holy Grail” also caused some observers to revisit the themes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” all these years later, and whether Kurt sho
uld be co-opted. Jay-Z “got the sentiment entirely backwards,” LA Weekly and Village Voice hip-hop critic Chaz Kangas wrote. “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ decried—or at the very least mocked—corporate intrusions into youth culture, and to make it part of an album released as a promotional tie-in for a phone company (strictly for the artist’s profit) is dopey at best.” Samsung had purchased a million copies of Jay-Z’s Holy Grail album and gave them away with phones, meaning, in a roundabout way, that the lyric to “Teen Spirit,” as sung by Justin Timberlake, became part of the premium for buying a new phone.

  But Kangas pointed out to me that Jay-Z’s song is just one of at least a dozen times “Teen Spirit” has shown up in hip-hop or dance music, used by well-known bands (the Prodigy; Tony! Toni! Toné; Timbaland), and obscure ones (Texas MC Trae tha Truth, DJ Balloon, Credit to the Nation). Kangas says it was a full decade after Kurt’s death before he became “the archetype” that hip-hop acts turned to when they wanted to reference rock or a white rock star. One example was when rapper David Banner had a meltdown during a New York showcase and ripped down his own posters around the stage as “Teen Spirit” was played. Banner made devil horns with his fingers and screamed “Rock.” The hip-hop-loving crowd went crazy. “I think his message was that major labels make so much money off hip-hop, but you have to channel a rock artist to get their respect,” Kangas says. “But the fact that he chose to go with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as his way of making an ‘anti-marketing’ effort says much about that song’s stature.”

  Banner played the song frequently during his 2008 tour. When he performed it at a concert at Seattle’s Showbox Theater, the crowd went bananas. I think it wasn’t simply “Teen Spirit”—which is played regularly at sports events to rile up the crowd—that made the Seattle hip-hop audience go nuts, but instead its contextualization: the very idea that Seattle’s most famous song had a place at a hip-hop show.

  And if Kurt Cobain is cool within the confines of hip-hop, then the mostly white crowd knew they were cool, too.

  It isn’t just “Teen Spirit” that hip-hop has embraced; many songs in Nirvana’s catalog show up in hip-hop as musical riffs and samples, or as lyrical nods. Some of the best Nirvana samples include Kurt’s guitar riff from “Heart-Shaped Box” (3MG), the chorus of “Lithium” (Slug), and even a sample of Kurt’s guitar in a cover of the Meat Puppets’ “Plateau” (Plan B). The obscure Nirvana track “Moist Vagina” was sampled by Yelawolf, one of Eminem’s protégés. The website Whosampled.com lists fifty-five different songs by hip-hop acts that have sampled Nirvana. Flavorwire recently ran a story titled “Why is Hip-Hop (and the Rest of Pop Culture) Still So Obsessed with Kurt Cobain?” The answer, writer Tom Hawking suggested, was in part that Kurt died young and is seen as a martyr in the hip-hop community. In a culture where premature, violent death is a dominant theme, Kurt fits in thematically.

  Kurt, as a historical figure, also often appears in hip-hop lyrics. His name is evoked to reference suicide or violence. The Game sang “take me away, like a bullet from Kurt Cobain.” In 1994, 2Pac rapped about a choice to “blow my brains out like Kurt Cobain.” Xzibit rapped, “I lent my shotgun to Kurt Cobain, and the motherfucker never brought it back.” DJ Kay Slay rapped, “They want my name next to Kurt Cobain, but I don’t sniff cocaine.” There are dozens more examples of this motif, including the enduring image Vinnie Paz rapped in “When You Need Me”: “My death wish is to die on the Soul Plane, next to Chuck D., Coltrane, and Cobain.”

  Hip-hop is a music form that makes use of real-life headlines, so Kurt’s appearance isn’t surprising, even if its frequency is. Some of Kurt’s continuing appeal comes from demographics: hip-hop acts skew young, with most artists under forty. Kurt was a major historical figure in these musicians’ childhoods, even if Nirvana’s music has little externally to do with hip-hop. (Kurt did own Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, his only hip-hop record but a cornerstone of the genre.) Yet Kurt remains an influence on young hip-hop singers. Kangas points out that the pivotal year wasn’t as much 1991 as it was 1999: “There were so many recap shows on music television counting down the ‘best of the nineties,’ and Nirvana topped all those lists, and hip-hop acts saw that, and Kurt became so ubiquitous you can’t help but know him.” Once everyone knew Kurt’s name, his insertion into the music of the moment, which happened to be hip-hop, was inevitable.

  There is at least one great truth here that many young hip-hop artists, children in 1991, will miss. But it is a fact not lost on forty-four-year-old Jay-Z. Hip-hop’s first foray into the mainstream sales charts began in the eighties, just prior to Nirvana’s ascension, and Kurt, for a moment, overshadowed every other music form. “It was weird because hip-hop was becoming this force, then Grunge music stopped it for one second, ya know?” Jay-Z told Pharrell Williams in his 2012 book Pharrell: Places and Spaces I’ve Been. “Those ‘hair bands’ were too easy for us to take out; when Kurt Cobain came with that statement it was like, ‘We gotta wait awhile.’”

  TWO

  LAMESTAIN ON MY WACK SLACKS

  Grunge & Culture

  As 1992 started, Nevermind became the best-selling album in the United States, knocking Michael Jackson out of the No. 1 slot on the Billboard charts. But during much of 1992, as the album continued to sell, Kurt essentially went missing. Courtney was pregnant (she had Frances that August), and Kurt was descending into drug addiction at exactly the same moment he was becoming the biggest star in the world. Nirvana played only a few tour dates during 1992, their biggest commercial year in terms of album sales.

  But even Kurt’s disappearing act couldn’t stop the cultural shift Nevermind had wrought. As the Seattle music scene continued to gain worldwide attention and other Seattle bands followed Nirvana to the top of the charts, 1992 became the Year of Grunge. Grunge was a media-created label that had both everything to do with Kurt—it wouldn’t have existed without him, or without Nevermind’s success—and at the same time almost nothing to do with him.

  If the image of Kurt in the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video clip, with hair in his face and a striped T-shirt on, had been the indelible vision of 1991 on MTV, 1992 looked like a rocker in cutoff jean shorts, a flannel shirt, and a pair of Doc Martens. This is exactly the outfit that actor Matt Dillon wears in Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles, which came out in 1992. The film was a worldwide success, spawned a hit soundtrack album, and forever wedded Seattle to Grunge.

  Singles detailed the lives of a handful of Seattle twentysomethings as they found romance, started bands, and generally walked about the rainy city making pithy observations. The film had been completed in 1991, but the studio sat on it for a while. When Nevermind became a hit, it was quickly released, and wisely marketed as if it were a new Seattle band. And in a way it was: former music journalist Crowe had the prescience to include cameos by a handful of musicians—including Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. By the time the movie came out, they had become major stars. In one scene in the film, a group of these musicians sit around reading a copy of The Rocket. At the request of the filmmakers, we had mocked up a fake copy for the film, and the fake band (Eddie Vedder, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, and actor Matt Dillon) sat around doing what they did in real life, reading The Rocket to see their reviews. After reading the fake review, Eddie Vedder tells Matt Dillon, “A compliment for us is a compliment for you.” This was not acting.

  It was odd seeing a copy of my magazine in a film, but it was even odder to watch how much impact Singles had on how outsiders perceived Seattle. The cutoff-jeans outfit that Matt Dillon wore in the film became what many thought of as the de facto uniform of Seattle music. These were not Kurt Cobain’s clothes, or his look, but Kurt got stuck with the image nonetheless. One of the oddest things about Singles is that Nirvana isn’t on the soundtrack, or in the movie, and yet Nirvana, and Kurt, are forever linked to it in public perception. In 1992, a Montreal television reporter asked the three members o
f Nirvana why they didn’t appear in Singles. “Are you part of it at all?” the reporter asked. “Definitely not,” Kurt said emphatically. Later in that same interview, Krist Novoselic said they weren’t asked to participate, but Kurt corrected him, saying they were solicited but he wanted no part of Singles. “I said ‘no,’ before even asking you guys,” Kurt told his bandmates. “That’s because I’m the leader of the band.”

  By 1992, Kurt, the leader of Nirvana, could say “no,” but he and his band were still going to be part of Singles in the public’s perception, whether they were in the film or not. The phenomenon of Grunge had become a monster that overtook everything in its path, including Kurt Cobain. It could not be corralled.

  The word “grunge” first appeared in The Rocket in the late eighties as an adjective to describe a certain sonic musical style, a raw and unpolished sound, with distortion, but usually without any other added studio audio effects. Grunge, pre-capitalization, was almost always applied to a Sub Pop band, and almost always applied to a band produced by Jack Endino. In that context, it meant a mix of garage rock and slowed-down punk. Sub Pop did most of their albums at a low-rent studio named Reciprocal. That studio’s acoustics, combined with Endino’s production aesthetics, created true capital-G Grunge albums by bands like Mudhoney, Tad, Blood Circus, and a dozen other groups who have now been lost to history.

  While I’d classify some of Nirvana’s early tracks as Grunge, their music always had more pop elements than, say, the output of Mudhoney, who were absolutely a band that played Grunge. In my music-critic hair-splitting, the term didn’t really fit most of Nirvana’s music, or Kurt’s Beatles-influenced melodies. Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic also doesn’t believe that Grunge, adjective or noun, fits much of Nirvana: he once told me that “School,” off Bleach, was their Grunge moment. “Kurt bought that riff in,” Novoselic told me, “and I said, Oh my God, that is the most Seattle fucking riff I’d heard in my life . . . That was the quintessential Grunge song.”