Eating the Dinosaur

by Chuck Klosterman

  This record came out three months before Nirvana began recording In Utero. This is not a coincidence.

  5 How good was Nirvana? Generally, we accept that they were the best commercial rock band from a specific era of rock … but were they great? In 1998, VH1 surveyed a shit-load of unnamed musicians and industry insiders and asked them to rank the one hundred greatest rock artists of all time. The top five were the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, Zeppelin, and Dylan. Nirvana placed forty-second, but they were the only “modern” band on the entire list (“modern” meaning that their entire body of work was produced within the same decade as the poll). If this same poll were conducted today, I suspect Nirvana would still hang in the top fifty, but they would certainly not rank any better and might even drop a few spots. The release of the 2004 Nirvana box set With the Lights Out somewhat validated the criticism Nirvana skeptics had been levying for years—the group simply did not produce enough material to warrant canonization.

  This, however, seems wrong to me. I look at canonized rock bands the same way I look at canonized U.S. presidents. Even if America lasts ten thousand years, the list of our greatest presidents will never change; it will always include Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson.2 They created the specific criteria for how we classify “greatness” in a president. To say a president is “great” is to argue that he (or she) is exhibiting leadership and judgment that’s reminiscent of George Washington, which means that no new president can ever be as great as the person he (or she) is rewarded for emulating. Franklin Roosevelt is now included on the list of canonized presidents, but he cannot be on the same level as Lincoln; his greatness emerged from showing Lincolnian resolve during a period of twentieth-century crisis.

  In the same way, the canon of rock ’n’ roll is already set in concrete. Nirvana can’t be as great as the Beatles or the Stones, and neither can anyone else; the greatness of any modern act is measured against what the Beatles and the Stones have come to represent as entities. But the reason I still think Nirvana warrants inclusion among the greatest bands of all time is because they established a new kind of band. They were the first rock group of the media age that was (a) regularly defined as the biggest band in the free world, while (b) using their espoused hatred of that designation as the principal means for their on-going success. Every band that becomes megasuccessful ultimately feels trapped by that adulation; the sensation of self-hatred is common among artists. What made Nirvana different was how that overt self-hatred defined the totality of their being. It was their principal aesthetic. They always seemed like a group that was producing popular culture against their will. This notion is something they invented accidentally, so all future bands that mine this worldview can only hope to replicate what Nirvana already popularized. As such, they are in the canon (on the JV team, but still).

  2A In Utero opens with Dave Grohl tapping his sticks together three times before the rest of the band strikes a dissonant, awkward chord, which—now, and maybe even then—seems like a band taunting all the people who wanted to like this record for nonmusical reasons. And there were a lot of people like that; regardless of Cobain’s alleged obsession with the pop world thinking his album would be terrible, just about everyone who bought it immediately liked it (or at least claimed that they did). The mainstream reviews were positive: four stars in Rolling Stone, eight out of ten in NME, an “A” from Robert Christgau at The Village Voice, and a ranking of third in Spin’s 1993 albums of the year list (behind Liz Phair and Dr. Dre). It was platinum by Thanksgiving. More interestingly, the prerelease rumors about how difficult In Utero was supposedly going to sound had the opposite impact—people felt smart for enjoying a “difficult” record and were reticent to complain about its abrasive nature. A similar thing happened to Radiohead when they put out Kid A in 2000: The album’s prerelease coverage so vociferously insisted that anti-intellectual audiences would not understand Kid A that people were terrified to admit being bored by any of it.

  Within the critical circles I inhabit (and certainly within the critical circles I do not), it has become common to hear people argue that In Utero is superior to Nevermind and that the pop-metal sheen on songs like “On a Plain” and “Lithium” made the earlier effort seem craven and clinical. Nevermind was cool to kids who were not. This is a pretty ridiculous criticism, but—some-what sadly—that ridiculous critic was the straw man Cobain was most concerned about. And that concern is not sad because of how it affected the album, because the album still turned out pretty good. It’s sad because it illustrates Cobain’s darkest, most depressing artistic weakness: He could not stop himself from caring about people who would only appreciate his work if he were a mainstream failure, just like they were. And that was never going to happen, because true genius is commercially uncontainable.

  By and large, Nevermind and In Utero are not as different as Cobain had hoped: The songwriting is pretty similar (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Rape Me” are essentially identical, both sounding like Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”). The meaningful difference is that on Nevermind, the talent is top loaded and assertively present (the “talent” in this case being the melody and the drumming). On In Utero, the talent is still there, but it’s buried under three meters of abstract credibility. All things considered, Albini actually did a wonderful job3 of keeping the song structures as dynamic as they deserved, especially since (a) he always takes his cues from whatever the band claims to want, and (b) the band actively wanted to make a record that sounded awful to their preexisting fan base, or at least to anyone who thought the drums on Dr. Feelgood sounded boss. The recording process took six days. (In an interview with Perfecting Sound Forever author Greg Milner, Albini asserted, “If your record takes more than five or six days to make, it’s bound to suck.”) Compared to the theoretical rawness Cobain claimed to desire, In Utero merely sounds less reassuring and less immediate than any musical product that’s ever sold five million copies. Still, Albini became the fall guy for why In Utero seemed so self-absorbed with its own coolness, probably because—unlike 99 percent of record producers—he was actually famous enough to publicly criticize. Gold Mountain Entertainment, the group that managed Nirvana, tried to blame Albini entirely.

  “He is God, and he knows what’s good,” Danny Goldberg said sarcastically during the prerelease melee. Goldberg was the founder of Gold Mountain. “And if the artist doesn’t like it, he is somehow selling out because they don’t agree with his personal vision. Steve Albini takes the position that anything he thinks is good is good. He’s David Koresh.”

  3A It is difficult for me to write objectively about Koresh. It’s difficult because I cannot see any framework where he and his followers were not murdered by the U.S. government (or—in the absolute best-case scenario—driven to commit mass suicide). In 2000, I (along with two other Akron Beacon Journal reporters) spent a month rein-vestigating the 1970 national guard shootings on the campus of Kent State University, a chapter in American history that is universally seen as a political tragedy. And it was. But I must admit that what happened at Waco seems worse. Kent State is tragic because four innocent people died while peacefully protesting an unpopular war. It was the result of underprepared national guardsmen responding extemporaneously (and poorly) in a situation where they felt physically threatened. May 4, 1970, was the single worst day of a mostly horrible era. But what happened on April 19, 1993, was bigger. It wasn’t four people who died—it was seventy-six. And those seventy-six were hiding in a bunker, cut off from the media, and threatening no one. There was nothing spontaneous about it; the federal government had been thinking about this for over a month. The Branch Davidians were essentially executed for being weirdos.

  I realize Koresh was fucking crazy. I’m not denying it. He was fucking crazy. Though the child-molestation stuff has never been verified, I don’t doubt it. The fact that he believed he had to sire twenty-four kids so that they could rule the world seems like a creative way for a psycho to meet girls. Anyon
e who reads every line of the Bible as non-metaphoric text has limited credibility. So I realize he was fucking crazy. But our government does not typically kill people for being crazy. In fact, the reason they killed Koresh was because a minority of the population in Waco thought he was sane. And I know I probably shouldn’t write “They killed Koresh,” because no one will ever know who started the fires inside the Waco compound (academic Kenneth Newport has written extensively about how he believes the fires were set by the Davidians themselves, since this behavior falls in line with their belief system). That will always be the central question to this debate, and it’s significantly more than a minor detail. But in ways that are more meaningful, it almost doesn’t matter at all.

  The U.S. Treasury Department reviewed the Waco disaster in 1999. One of the reviewers was Henry Ruth Jr., who had served as a prosecutor in the Watergate trial. “At least part of the ATF’s motivation,” said Ruth, “even if it never rose to the surface of discussion, was to enforce the morals of our society. To enforce the psyche of right thinking by retaliating against these odd people.” That, ultimately, was the crime committed by the Branch Davidians: oddness. And they weren’t even that odd: One of the Davidians was Wayne Martin, one of the first African-Americans to graduate from Harvard Law School. A common misconception about the Davidians was that they were all separatist Texans, probably because the only voice ever associated with the cult is Koresh’s drawl; the community was, in fact, remarkably international. Moreover, their unifying element does not strike me as unreasonable: They thought the world was ending. Which is not necessarily a ludicrous thing to believe—at some point, the world is going to end. I’m not sure why someone would assume that’s going to happen sooner than later, but I also have no fucking idea why the government would care if a hundred Texans were betting short. The ATF claimed the Davidians were stockpiling guns, a claim that is both true and absurd; the reason the Davidians stockpiled weapons was because they made money by buying and selling them at gun shows, one of the few ways they could make money without holding jobs in the outside world. The idea that these self-interested Bible scholars were hoarding weapons in order to attack the rest of America only proves that no one in the government (or the media) tried to understand those people at all. Granted, some of the weapons were illegal. That’s true. They did have some AK-47s in the mix. But perhaps they thought they needed a few assault rifles, because perhaps they thought the FBI would drive tanks into their homes and fire tear gas at their children while broadcasting the phrase “This is not an assault” over an intercom. Maybe they thought the government would shoot at them from helicopters and burn them alive. They were, after all, insane.

  I’m not going to attempt to prove that the FBI actively ignited the fires at Waco or consciously vented the compound to accelerate the speed of the blaze. Those arguments can be better understood by watching the William Gazecki documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement, the best resource for what (probably) happened that day. I’m actually going to go the other way on this; for the sake of argument, I will accept Joseph Biden’s take on the Waco holocaust: “David Koresh and the Branch Davidians set fire to themselves and committed suicide. The government did not do that.” This is quite possibly false, but I will accept it. And I will accept it because if it is true, it changes nothing. If he destroyed himself and his followers, he did so because life convinced him that he was right about everything (and that this event was supposed to happen). He was being the person he had to be. And while that’s a doomed perspective for anyone to embrace, it’s certainly not uncommon: Koresh merely picked the wrong myths to believe unconditionally.

  1A A lot of my favorite bands habitually wrecked their shit. Paul Stanley smashed a guitar at the end of every Kiss concert (they were specifically modified to self-destruct on impact). Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe always smashed his bass, whipping it by the strap like a Jamaican farmer flogging a goat. When Guns N’ Roses went on Head-bangers Ball, they ended their segment by destroying the entire MTV set. This kind of thing was not uncommon and never unexpected. And because it happened during the 1980s, the meaning of such behavior was specific: It proved that your band was successful. Metal bands did not smash guitars as an extension of chaos or rebellion—they smashed them to prove they could easily buy more. It wasn’t a punk move. It was an antipunk move. That’s why I liked it.

  The Clash smashed their instruments for political freedom, but also because it made for excellent photo opportunities. For years, the indie art rockers in … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead destroyed their equipment at the conclusion of every single show, mostly to make people wonder how in the hell they were able to afford doing so without selling any records. When Nirvana was new, audiences were shocked when they destroyed their stuff—that was pretty much the only stuff they had. By the time they were touring in support of In Utero, people were equally shocked if they walked off the stage without Kurt diving into the drum kit like Walter Payton on third and goal. Near the end, it was widely known (or at least universally suspected) that Sub Pop founder Jonathan Poneman was mailing Cobain innumerable pawnshop guitars that he could break at his convenience, supposedly because Kurt was really attached to the Fender Mustang he had used during the recording of In Utero. He was still breaking things for the benefit of other people, but only things he did not want or need.

  On a human-emptiness scale of one to ten (one being “emotionally complete,” ten being “metaphysically devoid of feeling”), this is a fourteen.

  2B “So many people would be expecting me to be writing about the last two years—about our experiences with drugs and having a new child and all the press coming down on us and the stuff like that. But I decided to just use experiences from books and other stories, without even dealing with my life.” Cobain said these words in February of 1994, on a boat, smoking a cigarette. “There are little bits of my life [on In Utero]. Personal things. But for the most part, it’s very unpersonal. Impersonal.”

  This is how it always goes: An artist gambles against society, using his own life as currency. He writes (in this case, songs) about his own experience, but in a manner that is malleable enough to be appreciated by the collective whole. When this is successful, the artist is validated. But if the artist grows too successful, the gears start grinding in reverse; people begin to see absolutely everything the artist says or does as a kind of public art that’s open to interpretation. This makes the artist paranoid and creatively paralyzed. As a result, the artist decides to ignore his own experience completely, insisting that he’s no longer the center of whatever he creates; instead, he will write about dead actresses who were sent to sanitariums or German novels about the olfactory sensation. His material will be “unpersonal.” But this never works. The artist cannot stop himself from injecting his own experience into these subjects, because that is who the artist is—either you always write about yourself or you never do. It’s not a process you select. So now the artist is trying not to write about himself (but doing so anyway), which means other people’s interpretations of the work will now be extra inaccurate, because the artist has surrendered his agency. Any time you try to tell people what your work isn’t supposed to mean, you only make things worse.

  The lyrics from In Utero everyone recognized as consequential were the first two lines: “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old.” This was pretty straightforward and expository, and it was funny in the way Kurt was often funny (i.e., funny in a way that wouldn’t make anyone laugh aloud). To me, the most compelling lines on the album are the ones that seem profound because they’re inherently meaningless. On “Serve the Servants,” Cobain moans, “I tried hard to have a father / But instead I had a dad.” That complaint would seem just as valid if it were exactly reversed.4 The album’s closing lines—off “All Apologies,” a song many uncreative critics would come to classify as “the real suicide note”—are the repetition of the phrase “All in all is all we are.” Here again, it’s hard to
see much difference if the sentiment is juxtaposed. It’s kind of like how Vince Lombardi is famous for supposedly saying, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” It feels insightful, but only because of what we know about the speaker—the words themselves are completely interchangeable. Sometimes I wonder if Cobain’s transcendent depression was ultimately due to the combination of (a) having so many people caring about his words, despite the fact that (b) he really didn’t have that much to say.

  “There’s nothing that hurts me more than being called a cult leader. If I’m wrong, people like me don’t deserve to live.” This is not Cobain speaking. This is David Koresh again, talking to ATF negotiator Jim Cavanaugh from inside the Waco compound. However, I think Kurt would have understood Koresh completely. “Look: I’m just an instrument, okay? I show them, out of a book, what God teaches. Then it’s for them to decide.”

  But how do we tell the difference between an instrument and its sound? And—more importantly—what if we’re uninterested in accepting that distinction?

  6 I was down in Australia when the Waco debacle happened, and the Australians had a big contingency at the Branch Davidian compound, and I’m from Texas. So they were very curious. They were always asking me all about it: “Oh, this guy is so weird. This Koresh is so weird.” And I was thinking: “Well, wait a minute: A frustrated rock musician with a messianic complex, armed to the teeth, and trying to fuck everything that moves. I don’t know how to tell you this, but he sounds like every one of my friends from Austin.”

  —Bill Hicks, 1993

  7 It is unfair to compare In Utero to Waco. It is unfair to compare Cobain to Koresh. I know that. They are not the same; just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re connected. Babe Ruth’s first home run and the premiere of Birth of a Nation both happened in 1915, but that doesn’t dictate a relationship. If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists. So, sure, comparing Cobain and Koresh is a little unfair.