July 26, 2009
the pictures have all been washed in black (chapter three excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
In the real public world, the tension between the genre’s ethos and its inconceivable economic and cultural success had already doomed grunge by 1991. This Malthusian authenticity trap threatens any art that launches its appeals or critiques from the margins of the excluded, the reviled. The sense of vindication with which grunge “broke” punk from the confines of subculturality into the core of popular culture was short-lived, and had been irresolvably contradictory from the start; the genre’s continuity with punk, incomplete as it was, still sufficed to render success as failure. The inward turn could no more coexist with Marc Jacobs’ grunge couture show in the Fall of 1992 than could the Mekons' bracing kapitalkritik. The difficult knowledge that Nirvana and company had ambivalently solicited such success only sharpened the trap’s silver jaws.
Cobain’s 1994 suicide was punctuation; the band’s 1993 In Utero, desperately abrasive and monstrous in tandem with a hermetic surrealism, made apparent by its popularity that grunge had forfeited the capacity either to repel or retreat. The album’s title, with its pathos-laden wish image of primal interiority, was clear enough; lead single “Heart Shaped Box” pressed the ambivalent fascination with supernal enclosure clearer still, while linking itself to the initial success-disaster of “Teen Spirit” by taking that song’s signal bent guitar note as the vocal device that begins the chorus of “Box.” But there was no way out, including going further in. The grimly beautiful ballad “All Apologies” admits this with its title, while the lyric itself becomes a catalog of Cobain’s tropes: “Married, buried” he repeats. Focusing the song’s messianic beam, he offers “I’ll take all the blame,” before returning to his original keyword, now rendered cinematic and dreamy: “aqua seafoam shame.” Inescapably, the shame now included the genre’s fate, and having wanted it. Released four weeks later, Pearl Jam’s album Vs. set a single week record for a disc of any kind, selling just shy of one million copies.
Forever T.S. Eliot to Nirvana’s Ezra Pound, Pearl Jam was burdened with the unannounced (and surely unintended) task of opening grunge to a still-broader audience — an effect achieved through the subtraction of bodily disgust and explicit sexual violence, as well as a smoothing of the guitar attack (in a way oddly redolent of classic rock and even the glam metal that grunge had overthrown).