Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Use Once And Destroy.

Every generation has to have a defining image. For better or worse, individual memories never seem to represent a time as well as a communally shared experience - and if that experience can be aural or visual, it always becomes far more potent. Where would we be in remembering the sixties if we didn't have The Beatles on the roof of Apple, or the muddy swamps of Woodstock? Would the 70's be remembered as vividly without Travolta's finger points over a raging floor of disco lights? Would the 80's truly BE the 80's without the joy of watching each and every member of The Brat Pack self-destructing?

The early 1990's were kind of a wasteland. Sure, we had the clownishly masculine buffonery of Guns'n'Roses, and the iconographic idiocy of M.C Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Hair metal was starting to grate. Punk was a distant memory - the Pistols were ancient history, and the foul spawn of electronica was only just beginning to make inroads as the New Disco - except that it was a hundred times more horrible. What was a sensitive young bohemian to do for heroes? What could he do when name dropping Kevin Sheilds and Black Francis failed to garner attention from the young, perky goths that he so deeply desired? And what of the kids? The massed throngs of sneering, spitting, self-loathing kids, in their ripped jeans and dyed hair? What were THEY to do for a spokesman? Who was representing their tireless attention-seeking infantilism in popular culture?

Enter Kurt Cobain. Or Kurdt Kobain. Or Khurt Cobain. His name seems to metamorphose from album to album. I'll stick with the more conservative spelling - 'Kurt' - for the purposes of this piece. The frontman for the first truly internationally successful megaband of the 1990's - Nirvana - Cobain's infamous end at the barrel of a shotgun sent seisimic waves throughout both the music industry and the culture of western society. Of course, for those who had been paying attention, the idea that the brains behind 'Milk It', 'All Apologies', and 'Dumb' could meet his demise through his own hand wasn't exactly a new one. Assuming that Kurt wasn't killed by his shrew of a wife, the concept of Generation X's self-loathing spokesman becoming a celebrity suicide was one which seemed to dovetail perfectly with the nascent culture of empty self-destruction that was about to engulf the kids of the western world.

I remember hearing about Cobain's suicide. It was announced on RRR FM, here in Melbourne, by a teary announcer. Because he wasn't a member of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and his last name wasn't 'Bowie', I didn't particularly give a shit. Nirvana? They were those oafish punks who polluted my suburb with the endless merchandising of their album covers. For a while there in the years '91-'94, one simply couldn't move without bumping into a baby in a swimming pool, or a winged Visible Woman. Nirvana's ubiqitous public profile, and the repulsive idiocy of their fans led me to savagely mock Cobain's death. My immaturity soared high, as I let my enemies at school know just how pleased I was that their Buddah's brain matter was currently being soaked into the dusty woodwork of his greenhouse walls. I laughed uproariously, detailing the glee that I felt as Cobain descended into drug addiction, feeling that I had been given a second chance to be rid of the skinny fool once and for all, after the mouth-watering carrot of his overdose in Rome in early 1994. I danced merrily through the hallways of my prisonlike suburban high school, pirouetting with unabashed joy as visions of Cobain's shattered cranium and smoking Remington filled my days with a happiness that seemed to find form as an exhilarating sense of release. Never again would I have to listen to the nauseating 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', nor the ludicrous 'Sliver' and 'Come As You Are'. I rubbed my hands together, and smiled darkly: Cobain was gone. All that was left was to find a way to knock off Axl Rose and Billy Corgan, and maybe I'd sleep well at night.

But, with the passage of time, I can admit that I may have been a little hasty in my outright dismissal of the Cobain ouvre'. I'm big enough to do that. I discovered Nirvana, long after they had been forgotten by the fans that only a few years ago, held candles on the roof of the old Flinders Street flatlands, swaying rhythmically in time to their Manson Family-esque renditions of 'Heart Shaped Box' and 'Something In The Way'. My introduction wasn't, as expected, with their grotesquly overrated 'Nevermind' - but rather, with the follow up 'In Utero'. For a young lad who was, for all intents and purposes, a music snob - Nirvana's guitar attack was a jolt to the system. I was only just adjusting to Queen, who seemed a little raucous to me - the grinding assault of 'Scentless Apprentice' was something which was darkly seductive, even at the same time as I considered it artistically repellent. Nirvana was manifestly beneath me, and their fans - their loathsome, insectlike fans - were the very bane of my existence. I had written them off as a joke - a drunken caterwauling which was custom-made for jocks to psyche themselves up to before the Big Game. With my short hair and coke-bottle glasses, I watched Nirvana's music being embraced by the worst kinds of self-indulgent, adolescent swine.

But, I was wrong. Nirvana wasn't a band who pumped out rewritten versions of 'The Boys Are Back In Town'. Nor was their lead singer deserving of death. As I started to go through the band's discography, I found that their albums, when taken back to back, were a deeply troubling cross-section of a mind in disarray. Cobain's seething fury was tempered by an obsession with birth imagery, and an obsessive need to find some kind of mother figure - the absence of which resulted in an emotional catatonia. Cobain's lyrics, while oblique, are an incredibly detailed vision of an individual who has lost control of his body and heart - and as 'In Utero' drags onto a sighing close, seems to suggest that even his guitar, the instrument of his success and his eventual demise, was something that he was incapable of relating to. These are not rock songs - they are exposed nerves, leading directly to Cobain's core. And, for better or worse, he was honest. 'In Utero' is not a rock album in the conventional sense - it is a eulogy for someone who isn't dead yet, written and performed by the corpse. And, in light of Cobain's later suicide, it takes on a painfully resonant quality, despite the schizophrenic dichotomy of the words and music; it is fragile and aggressive, thunderously loud and whisper-quiet, mysterious and obvious, fractured and cohesive.

'In Utero' contains Kurt Cobain's greatest sonic achievement - a largely forgotten track in the album's second movement called 'Milk It'. Those of you who have heard it are probably staring at the screen right now, and smirking derisively. Am I insane? Isn't 'Milk It' just a load of screaming and detuned guitars?

Well, yes. It is. But it is also as brutal and confronting an article on a state of psychosis as we have seen since the final days of Syd Barrett. Over an army of Albini-processed guitars, Cobain rails and thrashes out his scatological and medical-themed lyrics, snarling about his status us '(his) own parasite.. I don't need a host to live..' We are given a snapshot of those final, crazy days in Aberdeen during what remains of the chorus, as Cobain implores us to 'look on the bright side - suicide.' The medical theme of 'In Utero's cover is continued, with lyrics that name check 'ectoplasmic' and 'ectoskeletal'. Cobain mentions his 'obituary birthday', before the track explodes like a supernova into a frenzy of atonal guitar runs with Cobain's unhinged yowling of 'Your scent is still here in my place of recovery', and the song simply cuts off.

Self-indulgent? I don't think so. 'Milk It' is probably as honest as Cobain ever got - and the track is so honest that it leaves any concept of 'entertainment' or 'rock' in its stomping, muscular wake, instead simply flooding the listener with a power to disturb that is almost unheard of in the entire canon of popular music. 'Milk It' is a song with the power to unsettle dreams - and somewhere inside the labyrinthine guitar tracks and deeply allegorical/personal lyrics is a key to unlocking the confused, paranoid, self-destructing soul of its author.

Maybe the greatest tragedy regarding Nirvana is that their fans rarely saw any of these qualities in their work. After all, they rocked - right? That damn riff from 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is gnarly! Don't you want to bang your head to Lithium? Pass that roach, man - the 'Come As You Are' clip is TOTALLY about to be played on MTV! Because of Nirvana's astronomical fame, and the overtly accessible elements of their Nevermind/Incesticide-era material, the very idea of Nirvana became one which eclipsed the music. Generation X needed a spokesman, and by default a weedy, nervous, chain-smoking drug-addict from the backwaters of America was pushed into the role. It was, as we all now know, a role that he was never comfortable with - let alone even remotely equipped to fulfill. So, instead of a voice - he became a martyr. An exploited martyr. Who could have ever dreamed that one shotgun cartridge could generate so much money? After Cobain's death, the world was inundated with an avalanche of memorabilia - from t-shirts, to cheaply written biographies, to magazine spreads, television specials, and a seemingly endless industry of photos and visual memorabilia. To watch the spectacle was quite sickening, as the buzzards picked Cobain's corpse clean - and it took on newly ominous and sinister angles when one considered the nature of his death.

Why would a 27 year old millionare rock star stick both barrels of a gun in his mouth and blow his head off? Why couldn't he be happy? I guess we'll never really know - we can only speculate, but I think I can take a fairly good guess.

Cobain's woe seems to be twofold: His fans, and his partipation in the rock industry. I don't want to suggest that he was yet another brooding 'I Hate My Fans' style rock star - but I think that it drove him to despair to see his meticulously crafted songs being mistreated and misrepresented by his mainstream fanbase. Maybe the first shot in the war for Cobain's sanity was fired by the two animals who gang-raped a young girl in 1991 while singing Nevermind's 'Polly' to her. 'Polly' is an account of a victim of sexual abuse and physical torture - and, as Cobain wrote in the liner notes to 'Incesticide', the incident made him reconsider being a musician at all. This is an extreme example, of course, but the theory remains the same - how could an artist of Cobain's ability and passion stomach the sight of a seething, thrashing mosh-pit of violent, testosterone-filled teenagers mindlessly destroying one another to the soundtrack of a confessional piece like 'Lithium' or 'Rape Me'? Don't you think it would have driven him crazy with despair to see the same jocks who would beat and torture him in high school deriving pleasure from his work, and reducing his output to the level of a drunken joke by a bunch of ignorant, pig-headed morons? Could his pride have stood by and suffered that final indignity, after a lifetime of psychic wreckage?

And could he ever forgive himself for 'selling out the underground'? Cobain's dislike for the 'grunge' phenomenon was no secret - he saw the genre as, basically, an artifact of the marketing machine which he had inadvertently become fused with. A tireless champion of unsigned or underappreciated local artists, Cobain seemed uncomfortable with what he perceived as his undeserved celebrity status, and the financial rewards that it was bringing, and he sought to allow as much of his success to trickle down to those he respected as he could. But, it was never enough. 'In Utero' was a blatant attempt to derail Nirvana's career, by presenting an album so dark, difficult, and sonically tortured that The Kids would never lap it up - and he could cash in his chips and happily return to obscurity. Instead, 'In Utero' cemented Cobain's status as one of the most important artists of the modern era - and just as 'Nevermind' created Nirvana's status as a commercially viable entity, 'In Utero' legitimized them academically and artistically. He was, at this point, so high on the cultural ladder that there seemed to be no way down, except to leap off to his doom. And, that's what he did.

In the years since, the music industry has collapsed. I blame Kurt. I really do. When he pulled that shotgun trigger, he destroyed market forecasts, publicity schemes, and the bureacracy of the record industry that was surrounding Nirvana - and the corporate music world responded by doing what we expected that they'd do a long time ago. They decided that they simply weren't interested in real people as acts. They didn't want artists. Artists fuck up. They are too temperamental and unpredictable. They get drug addictions, they have illegitimate children, they become alcoholics, and they record music which is 'not up to standard'. In short, they were nowhere near as good as robots - why bother nurturing genuine talent when you can make MORE money QUCKER by creating the Spice Girls and N'Sync? Why risk another Cobain? What's in it for them?

Today is the 10th anniversary of Kurt's suicide. I listened to my Nirvana albums for the first time in a long time. It was a weird experience. I felt desperately sad for a time that is long gone - a time when it seemed that the mainstream really could produce something worthwhile. But, at the same time, I felt unnerved. If Kurt was alive to see the music of today, what do you think he'd say? He'd probably be glad that he shot himself.

So, I was wrong about Nirvana. I hope I never make that mistake again.

Posted by David at April 6, 2004 03:07 AM | TrackBack