I went to hear Mike Dumovich perform tonight at the Royal Room in Columbia City. To my chagrin, I didn’t make it in time to hear Diminished Men opening, but I arrived just in time to catch Mike’s set from beginning to standing ovation end. It was a gorgeous hour of music. Backed by an accomplished array of musicians, Mike conjured twilight worlds and a host of glimmering figures that move within them. It was a delight to find a number of old friends in the audience afterward, many of them mainstays in Seattle’s music scene, and to know that it was Mike that had brought them all together. It was this feeling of genuine community, and a long conversation I had with Tiffany Mikes (impresario for years of Dearborn House shows) that prompts this posting of my essay from the first print edition of the Monarch Review.        

It was twenty years ago this last fall that Geffen Records released Nirvana’s Nevermind. The record went Diamond, eventually selling over thirty million copies worldwide. No rock and roll record since has attained its level of cultural significance. Radiohead’s OK Computer, Beck’s Mellow Gold, The Strokes’ Is This It all marked their place in rock history, but none could be argued (sensibly) to have come anywhere near the epochal event that was Nevermind. Nevermind distilled and beatified the disillusionment, angst, anger and sorrow of a generation that otherwise had nothing much for consolation. It was art, and it still is.

I received the cassette tape for my thirteenth birthday, and I can still recall the distinct feeling the music evoked. It was the same feeling I later experienced when reading Catcher in the Rye in high school and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in college. The feeling was: “That’s me! That’s me inside the music! That’s exactly how I am!” And it seems everybody else felt that way too, or at least thirty million of them. I didn’t at the time have any intellectual capacity to make sense of the record in any cultural or historical or socio-political context, but I did recognize the non-sense of the lyrics, and they somehow did make sense to me. I was only thirteen, but already the disfiguring effects of adolescence were taking hold. My self was strange and muddled, and so were the words, and the music was loud and raw and gorgeous. (Odd, now, to listen to those songs and hear how polished and produced they sound. At the time, I’d heard nothing so primal in my life.)

The album’s title reads as an answer to the question of civilization. “We’ve come thousands and thousands of years, what do we do now?” “Nevermind.”  On the cover of the record, a baby swims after a dollar bill on a fishing hook. What could be a plainer, more sarcastic statement? Go for the money, kids.

Listening back now, and thinking about the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the words aren’t nonsense at all: “I feel stupid, and contagious. Here we are now, entertain us.” What a perfectly honest expression of what it is to be a young citizen in our consumer society. An overwhelming (and ubiquitous) confusion about our place and purpose in the world will be alleviated by entertainment. Let the cause of my problems be my cure. As John Ashbery once noted: “We need all the escapism we can get, and even that’s not going to be enough.”

“Oh well, whatever, nevermind” sums up perfectly the lazy cynicism of a generation that had none of the quixotic illusions the rock and roll boomers reveled in thirty years earlier. In fact, one could argue that it was the sixties generation, aided and abetted by opportunistic record labels and all-too-willing artists, that created this notion of improving the world through music in the first place. My mentor, the late poet William Dunlop, claimed that rock and roll was Capitalism’s greatest triumph, and I tend to agree. Nowhere else can one cite so glaring an example of the cries for freedom, justice and equality being so neatly packaged and sold back to the people. They wanted peace, and what they got was entertainment pacification.

The rock and roll of the sixties paradoxically inoculated the pop music culture of any real power to protest and put to action certain humanist ideals. Punk said fuck it. Glam said freak it. Butt rock said more coke. Huey Lewis, bard of the eighties, put it simply: “It’s hip to be square”. It became aesthetically impossible to address directly socio-political problems, even if you could get a clear idea of their complex nature. Hence: nevermind.

By the time Nirvana’s In Utero came out in September of 1993, Kurt was singing “Rape Me, my friend”. By April of the following year he was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

It’s not too terribly hard to read into the lyrics of that song, and guess the rapist. It’s the adoring fans, it’s the adoring critics, it’s the happy labels selling millions of records, it’s you and me. Kierkagaard sums up Kurt Cobain’s predicament when he writes, “A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music… and people crowd around the poet and say to him: ‘Sing for us soon again;’ that is as much as to say. ‘May new sufferings torment your soul.’”[i]

For a number of years, labels poured gobs of money in advances to underground “grunge” bands hoping to strike it rich again. But it was over. They would have to change their tactics. Boy bands and Britney Spears were on their way. And though the entertainment industrial complex would juice these new pop acts for all they were worth, it seems that because none had the talent or the art, they had nothing to die for, no final integrity to defend, no guilt to absolve. They just ended up with shaved heads or in rehab.

And then there’s Amy Winehouse, the best, pure pop singer in decades. We all danced and sang along as she sang with sultry conviction her dark indulgence and utter defiance. When she wound up dead at that superstitious age of 27, everyone was saddened. But were any of us surprised? There we’d been, cheering her on as she sang and drank and drugged her life away, and for what?

“Pitchfork and indie rock are currently run by people who behave as though the endless effort to perfect the habits of cultural consumption is the whole experience of life. We should leave these things behind, and instead pursue and invent a musical culture more worth our time.”[ii]

Thus Richard Beck concludes his thorough examination of indie rock culture, a culture that responded “to the Iraq war by dancing” and whose “general mood was a mostly benign form of cultural decadence”. “Effective management of the hype cycle” allowed indie rock to entertain, and get paid, without suffering the fates of their overexposed predecessors. The stakes have been lowered but the game is the same: make money.

What would a music culture more worth our time look like? Can we imagine a music culture that not only addresses the most difficult conversations of our time, but also embodies (as the Ghandi bumpersticker suggests) the change we want to see in the world?

We won’t see the answer on the cover of Rolling Stone. We won’t see the answer headlining at Coachella. We won’t see the answer given a 10.0 review on Pitchfork.  A music culture more worth our time will not be an entertainment of our dreams and hopes for humanity repackaged and sold back to us in high-def and glossy print. We will not be able to buy it.

Popular music culture has always depended on the lie that the song was ultimately about me—millions of me. In the end it was never about me. It was about our collective gullibility to a falsified notion of individual freedoms and expressions. Ultimately, it was about money.

Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project is currently exhibiting Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses. The cultural scab has been picked and the wound has been reopened. It turns out there was still money inside. Disgust and disaffection are now a nostalgia market!

Music is like bread and wine, it’s been around for millennia, and everywhere you go there are a thousand kinds of it.  Music itself is not the issue. Walt Whitman said: “To have great poets there must be great audiences too.” And to have great audiences, we need great critics—moreover, we must ourselves become great critics. Tony Tost, writing about Johnny Cash, makes this fine observation: “Perhaps the song even reveals where Cash believed the reckoning between God and America finally takes place: within the emotional, psychological and spiritual interiors of the republic’s citizens, the truly apocalyptic battleground.”[iii]

The lifting of the veil, the revelation, happens within the individual, within you and me.  That moment cannot be bought or sold.