a grammar

on nirvana, the 1990s, irony, and how david foster wallace predicted rivers cuomo’s decline, all at great length

As a kid, in the early 90s, I didn’t listen to a ton of Nirvana — already too caught up in mopey, romantic British stuff, your Smiths and Cures and whatnot. Soon enough Cobain was gone and alt-rock had shot off in new directions anyway; the band felt more like background and bedrock, the starting gun for “alternative” as a newly commercial thing — settled news among fresh battles. This is probably why I haven’t been able to resist picking through this new Live at Reading release: it’s honestly one of the first times I’ve listened closely to Nirvana in hindsight, with adult ears and new perspective. (That, after all, is the whole utility of these packages, these attempts to milk new product out of acts that don’t exist any more — we get to re-hear the music, outside our frozen reactions to recordings we already know too well.)

The things that keep grabbing me, of course, are all the reflections of that time itself, all the stuff that leaps out as of-the-moment. I’d never noticed, for instance, that the interlude in “Drain You” is basically a Sonic Youth tribute, right down to the way Cobain rakes over his guitar’s strings on the far side of the bridge — one of those Ranaldo/Moore signature Jaguar/Jazzmaster tricks.

And then there’s just a little thing at the beginning of “Sliver” that seems to have volumes wrapped up in it. Listening to a different live version, it seems like Cobain’s usual trick was to push through the first half of this song in his lower register — the one that sounds human — and then shoot up, like a key change, into that high windy scream he’s known for. (Note that this was exactly how Cobain’s contemporary Evan Dando — a guy he allegedly died thinking had an affair with his wife — sang three quarters of everything he wrote.) But at the beginning of this run through the song, his difficult lower voice swings off the notes, and he laughs into the mic over it, and then sings the next line — “kicked and screamed, said please, don’t go” — in a different way. An interesting way. Part of it is just acting out the fit the lyrics describe, drifting into this clipped, bratty bleat, kicking and screaming.

But part of it is also a form of looseness or casualness or self-mockery — fucking up the tune of the previous line and then shrugging and plowing onward in an ironic who-cares yelp. In other words: it reminds me of Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. A lot. And he continues it throughout the song, swinging heedlessly in each line from the higher register to the lower one, with that same early-90s attitude we tend to associate with Malkmus: that thrillingly shruggy who-cares deflation of rock singing. Who knows: maybe his voice was strained, maybe he just needed a drink of water, couldn’t stretch up to the higher notes and had to swerve down to get through it. But the attitude comes off similar — comes off as tied to that moment. You can hear it in just about every aspect of his singing, here and elsewhere: the way he flattens and stretches his vowels in a mocking, bratty way, or the way he’s louder at the ends of syllables than the beginnings, like an annoyed kid. (“Dropme aaaahf at Graaaaaanpa Joes.”)

It’s worth saying again, of course, that this brattiness comes in a song that’s itself about brattiness — about abandonment, yeah, but also about weird 1970s childhood and throwing helpless fits. His parents go out and leave him at his grandparents’ house, where the meat is tough and he stubs his toe and just wants to leave. The chorus mostly just repeats one bratty line: “Grandma, take me home!” If you asked me why Nirvana so often gets held up as the last big legendary thing to happen to rock music, I’d skip right over the stuff about audience and sales or history and accessibility and suggest this: that for a long time they were the most recent popular band to introduce — and act out — an emotional state that was new to the vocabulary of rock. Bratty, helpless, sullen, frustrated, surly, passive-aggressive, and sarcastic. (“If you want, if you need / I don’t even care.”) That melodic, Beatlesque sensibility they’re always commended for, the sing-song thing that supposedly made them accessible: there’s even a weird shade of mockery in that, as if they needed to encode pop into their music in order to act out their mixed feelings about it. Listen to the shruggy (and somewhat Malkmus-like) way Cobain does the beginning of “Drain You” — this bouncy, melodic, square opening that’s treated so slack, refreshed by not really caring about it. Compare with the “In Bloom” video, which actually dresses them up like squares and puts them in the environment they’re meant to be breaking everyone free of.

Because that’s the other thing: that “weird 1970s childhood” stuff is important, too, considering just how much the attitudes and iconography of the 1990s “alt” and “slacker” mentalities rest on it, refer to it, are inevitably “Gen X” manners. There’s a particular line on this you’d have heard, at the time, from any commentator on how this generation worked. Cobain: born 1967. Malkmus: born 1966. (I’ll bet you kinda conceived of Malkmus as younger, right?) At the time, you’d have been told that they were born during a “baby bust” — a massive drop-off in birth rates that ensured youth culture would be dominated by audiences several years older than them. You’d have been told they were squarely timed to grow up right in the heyday of the After-School Special and the last hurrahs of Breck hair, to grow into their teen years with The Love Boat on television — to be shaped by a still-centralized mainstream culture that was pretty sunny and glitzy and earnest, aspirational and escapist and unironic, a big pullback from 1960s tumult.

That’s the Gen-X line, anyway; and of course, you could say similar things, to a lesser extent, about the childhoods of people my age, more than a decade later. This, it’s said, is why some of us ate those guys up. Let’s be clear about something: the 1990s were nowhere near as ironic as people suspected at the time. (They seemed, as a young person, strikingly earnest and optimistic, especially around Earth Day.) But there’s a certain kind of inflectional irony in those singing voices. It’s an irony that seemed — in that moment, and weirdly — to express something earnest. This was the line at the time, and it’s a reasonably sound one: that people of that generation had grown up, largely ignored, amid a profound split between the pie-eyed glitter of the monoculture and the reality of economic pain and broken homes, and all that inflectional irony was an earnest and legitimate response to that. (See, again, that “In Bloom” video, actively playing the band off against a black-and-white monoculture.) In other words: you try watching hours and hours of after-school specials without deploying a special brand of sullen irony as a response.

You can’t, of course, because that attitude is now fully absorbed into the nation as a whole, common to nearly everyone, even successfully trucked into the irony-resistant world of political commentary. (Jon Stewart: born 1962, eleven months after Douglas Coupland.) Where Gen-X theorizing possibly goes wrong is trying to attach this development to some momentous grass-roots youth revolt, when it was pretty obviously more sly than that. David Foster Wallace (also born 1962), in “E Unibus Pluram,” traces it out in a much more top-down way — one in which the masters of the monoculture (e.g., advertisers) themselves spend much of the 1980s slipping into self-mockery and who-cares shruggery and self-consciousness to do their work.

Wallace was remarkably sensitive and ahead of the game on this front: this is a guy who talked in the 90s about loving The Simpsons but finding its ironic mien ultimately somehow soul-deadening, unwatchable in anything other than small doses. He also got how easily that irony could become non-earnest, not a reaction, and turn into a pointless, morbid game of references and sarcasm that never actually says anything. Which, oddly enough, predicts the entire career of Weezer and Rivers Cuomo (born 1970, amazingly): compare the squareness ironized in the “In Bloom” video with the happy referentiality of the “Buddy Holly” one, and then compare the “Buddy Holly” one with what Weezer does now — this is an object lesson in the slide from this stuff being earnest to being fun to just being stupid and soul-crushing.

Listening to the Nirvana obviously brings home a lot of this stuff, and a lot of the time period itself. And once again, it clarifies what the big argument was between alt-rock kids and everyone else who liked the band — not a fight between hipsters and Johnny-come-latelys, not just annoyance at jocks liking your favorite band, not a matter of underground versus mainstream. More a feeling that they were being received, in many corners, as raucous and masculine and powerful, despite their whole demeanor being practically craven — sullen, bratty, helplessly frustrated, meekly ironic. Courtney’s lucky that the skill with which they did that stuff — and the way it comes off somehow moving, somehow less than petulant — gets clearer as time goes by.