September 06, 2009
i don't wanna, i don't think so (chapter three excerpt)
sugarhigh! has been posting excerpts from this book for the last several months, and is completing one final cycle through the chapters, ending in late September
[....] This shift in self-awareness is captured by Sonic Youth, the film’s transitional figure (appropriately enough, as they’re a musicologically transitional figure between punk and grunge as well, in parallel to their progressive synthesis of free and out jazz, avant-garde minimalism and other more high-brow and experimental tendencies). Tied to New York’s knowing downtown intelligentsia, they’re a band in which the social antagonisms of punk are preserved and ironized at once. Their most successful single, 1990’s “Kool Thing,” dates from the moment in which grunge is at once consolidating punk’s furies while shifting their vector. Over a buzzy guitar that straddles the two genres, Kim Gordon exits the minimal melody for a spoken interlude reminiscent of Patti Smith. “Kool thing,” she wonders with her affected lack of affect, “...what are you gonna do for me? I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” Public Enemy’s Chuck D, rejoining us from Chapter One, exhorts her, “Tell it like it is. Yeah.”
This droll residue of “Left discourse” and its imbricated political others is what grunge will finally abandon. Not every punk-inspired idiom of the era took this same turn. Tobi Vail, who passed the fated slogan [Learn not to play your instrument] on to Kurt, would take part in the refashioning and revitalizing of punk’s oppositional politics which happened in bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and other groups under the banner of “riot grrrl” — a phrase sometimes credited to Vail. The movement’s motto was REVOLUTION GIRL STYLE NOW. But this is exactly why riot grrrl was not grunge, but something else (and, arguably, why it couldn’t achieve similar levels of success even if it wished to). Grunge constituted itself by doing a very specific thing with punk’s will to confrontation: turning it inward.
Another way to pose this issue is to note that the most basic difference between the language of “NOW FORM A BAND” and “Learn not to play your instrument” will turn out to be the most decisive. If both demands are in the second person, one is addressed plurally, and the other singularly. Even more suggestively, it’s clear enough that the former is projected outward, an urgent and even confrontational challenge to anyone who might encounter it. Even the seemingly reversed position of Richard Hell’s famous t-shirt with a painted target labeled “Please Kill Me” (this is a world made entirely of imperatives) is scarcely introspective. “People had some wild ideas back then,” recounts Bob Gruen, “but for somebody to walk the streets of New York with a target on his chest, with an invitation to be killed — that’s quite a statement.” It doesn’t waver from punk’s confrontations; it simply reverses the telescope, which inevitably turns out to be a gun sight.
“Learn how to NOT play your instrument,” in Cobain’s notebook, has the force of an admonition to the mirror. It becomes immediately part of his ulcerous self-doubt, dovetailing with Mudhoney’s hyperbolic self-loathing in sound and sensibility. The motion from one of these stances to the other is central to, and inextricable from, grunge’s way of being. Among many modes, this inward turn is the mode.