June 14, 2009
i don't belong here (chapter three excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
Cobain’s self-doubt, even self-contempt, is everywhere inescapable; it lodges in his clotted howl whether he’s forming words or not, and even when he assays a love song. But the sensation is not just in the sound: “I need an easy friend,” begins the band’s first great tune, as if he’s already abandoned any standards and hates himself for it. This is the indelible “About A Girl”; its sweet nothings only get worse from there. “I’ll take advantage while you hang me out to dry,” he announces, not particularly surprised at either party’s failings. No outside world intrudes on the song’s resentful, obsessive romance; it’s not a room with a view. Even in this catchy, inviting melody (reputedly written after a day of listening to the Beatles), the scene is stained. It spreads across the entire 1989 debut Bleach, and Cobain knows it. “Is there another reason for your stain?” begins the chorus of the opener, “Blew.” This stain is not remarkably ambiguous; the chorus ends “Here is another word that rhymes with shaaaamme!” The refrain of “Floyd the Barber,” one of multiple songs to dabble in disgust about the body, is nothing but “I’m ashamed” (or “I was ashamed”) repeated thrice, the final vowel drawn out again.
Doubt, fixation, resentful need, self-loathing, shame. This is the elixir: profoundly angry introspection. One of the Nirvana’s triumphs is to find a sound for this, unsettling, immiserated, but at the same time immensely agitated. It’s punk rock turned outside in, not anti-social but a-social. For punk’s antagonistics, an agonized self; for outward confrontation, immiserated retreat. For negation, sheer negativity. The surrealistically morphing image sequences which will become a lyrical mainspring also convey the deformations of an interior landscape: “And the car, twist, mouth, fear, yeaaah!” yells Cobain in the metal sludge of “Paper Cuts.” Later: “My whole existence is for your fears.” It’s a wonder there can be a you at all; it is no one outside his head.
For a moment of disgusted litany in “Downer,” the dissatisfaction with social engagement becomes explicit: “Sickening pessimists, picketing masses, separated communists, apocalyptic bastards.” Farewell to all of that. Cobain was unhesitating about the music’s psychologized nature: “The early songs were really angry. But as time goes on the songs are getting poppier and poppier as I get happier and happier. The songs are now about conflicts in relationships, emotional things with other human beings.” To which he added, “Sometimes I try to make things harder for myself, just to try to make myself a little more angry.” One trusts his claims about happiness are driven in part by a guilty need to explain the band’s popularity along some other axis than that of commercial accommodation. Regardless, this location of the source of grunge’s furies – entirely attuned to the personal rather than social – is telling enough. In the album’s most traditionally punk-styled track, “Negative Creep,” a brief flicker of social rage immediately makes the inward turn: “I’m a negative creep!” whines Cobain upward of a dozen times. At first this is followed by “…and I’m stoned”; shortly this is replaced with a wordless moan.
If “shame” is the keyword that won’t dissolve in Bleach, “creep” is the keyword that survives grunge’s duration. “Negative Creep” stands between Mudhoney’s 1988 “I’m a creep yeah I’m a jerk” and, in the last days of grunge, Stone Temple Pilots’ “Creep” and Radiohead’s first hit, also called “Creep.” That Radiohead didn’t turn out to be a grunge act at all only proves the point. Later, Thom Yorke would direct his spectral falsetto toward more aestheticized abstractions better conjoined with the band’s longueurs, most famously in the dystopian fantasia of OK Computer. But in 1993, Radiohead was compelled to fit itself into grunge’s mold, enough so that they would be derided as “Nirvana-lite.” And it was clear how this could be done: “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo,” sang Yorke, echoing Mark Arm almost exactly.
This then is Bleach’s position: at the corner of creep and shame. The coordination of these two is the first brute truth of grunge as an achieved structure of feeling: the unceasing and unstable encounter with one’s own undesirability, one’s own failings, one’s unsuccessfully hidden or managed aberrations. This may be grunge’s last truth as well — that which, once lost, leaves nothing behind it.