That Cobain Pussy

There's a scene in Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" where Mickey Rourke and Marissa Tomei are on an impromptu date--sitting in a dark bar in the middle of the day, both looking pretty beaten down by life. Suddenly Ratt's "Round and Round" comes on the bar's jukebox and Mickey Rourke decides to live in the moment:



It would be better if that clip wasn't in overdubbed Italian, but here's what they say after they stop laughing:

Randy 'The Ram' Robinson: Goddamn they don't make em' like they used to.
Cassidy: Fuckin' 80's man, best shit ever !
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson: Bet'chr ass man, Guns N' Roses! Rules.
Cassidy: Crue!
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson: Yeah!
Cassidy: Def Lep!
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson: Then that Cobain pussy had to come around & ruin it all.
Cassidy: Like theres something wrong with just wanting to have a good time?
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson: I'll tell you somethin', I hate the fuckin' 90's.
Cassidy: Fuckin' 90's sucked.
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson: Fuckin' 90's sucked.

That scene always cracks me up, because it highlights an important aspect of history--perspective. For me and so many people my age, Nirvana represented something pretty significant in the cultural landscape. But where did it leave the displaced? Relegated to the position of butt-of-jokes, involving hairspray and leather pants. No longer an angsty teen (well, maybe still angsty, but definitely not a teen), it's strange to think about how my personal music revolution came along and destroyed what had been established before it.

--

I wasn't old enough to ever fully appreciate Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had killed himself almost two years prior to my discovering his band's music, but I quickly made up for lost time. I read every book that was out there, memorized all of the stories, bought all the t-shirts I could find, hung up the posters, and bought all the music. It all spoke to me on a level like nothing had before. Nirvana's music had the kind of hold on me that the preachers and parents of yesteryear warned against when hand-wringing over the effects of rock 'n' roll.

And remember--this was pre-Internet. No iTunes. No torrents. No Amazon. No eBay. It was so long ago that I actually had to get "From The Muddy Banks of The Wishkah" on cassette because Sam Goody had already sold out of the CD and I didn't know when the next chance would come around to buy it.

--

Eventually, I moved on from Nirvana. Sure, I still remember all of the lyrics, still have my worn copy of the Michael Azerrad book "Come As You Are," but the fascination is no longer there. I didn't even bother to buy "With The Lights Out" when it came out, didn't bother to buy Frances Cobain-approved "Sliver: The Best of the Box". I downloaded the Greatest Hits CD, though, if only for "You Know You're Right," a song that will always give me goosebumps, no matter how many times I hear it, as it will always be a chilling reminder of what could have been.

It's funny--maybe two years ago, I even sat down and read Everett True's massive biography of Nirvana. British music journalism is unlike anything, anywhere, and while the book was good, something strange happened:

I wound up wondering what I had seen in Kurt Cobain ten years ago.

It hurt, but I didn't like Kurt anymore. I found his gripes to be petty and put forth in a inarticulate and narcissistic way. He didn't seem to be nearly as smart anymore. He seemed downright--immature.

I remember laying awake one night, wondering if he would have approved of my putting sports, music, and technology on equal footing in terms of personal devotion, and then getting mad at myself for even thinking about it in the first place.

--

I've been thinking about all of this because of an article by Seth Colter Walls in Newsweek:

Nirvana Heaven, And Hell

Walls talks about two new just-in-time-for-the-holidays Nirvana releases--a reissue of "Bleach" and a CD/DVD of their '92 performance at the Reading festival. He talks about the editing of the CD version of the Reading performance compared to the DVD. On the CD, some of the on-stage banter and posturing is left out in order to stick to the 80 minute CD time limits, and he feels that it changes the emotional weight of the performance as a whole.

Regarding the reissue of their first album, he sarcastically quips how their tiny budget ($600) forced them to record over their outtakes, which left nothing in the vaults to include inside the 2009 reissue--a remastering of a show that took place at the time would have to suffice.

Walls also talks about recent battles by the Cobain camp to keep Activision from including a Cobain avatar in the next Guitar Hero--a move that I swiftly applauded.

At first.

But now, I'm having trouble.

I'm having trouble deciding what makes the Guitar Hero avatar all that different from any of the other stuff that's been released--the books and the bios and the journal reproductions and the box sets--shit, look at the picture that leads this post. That's one of two Nirvana-tribute shoes designed by Converse, intentionally made to look like Kurt's beat up Chucks.

I didn't know Kurt Cobain, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that he would not have signed off on a signature shoe.

It's fun to think that preserving the legacy of someone involves keeping true to their ethics and their beliefs, but how realistic is it? If it is the music that will live on--and it will--and Guitar Hero is just another medium in a long line of innovations that gives impressionable kids a chance to blow the doors off of their boundaries, how can it be wrong?

--

So where will I be in twenty years?

Will I be in a bar like Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," putting "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle," on the jukebox, reminiscing about life before music sucked?

And what level of Nirvana reissues will we have reached by then?

Will there be theme park rides? Oliver Stone movies? Virtual Reality tours of his Olympia, WA home?

I don't know--even in Walls's seemingly indignant article, he writes about how the Reading CD is, "a Nirvana live show you could listen to while working out at the gym."

Ten years ago, that statement would have drawn every ounce of my ire.

Twenty years from now--will I agree?


More soon.

JS