Sunday morning is every day for all I care

I didn’t start getting into Nirvana until a couple years ago. Pretty wild, right? Here I am, a grown man nursing an inveterate attachment to a 1997 Mexican Stratocaster (albeit one that I haven’t played in public for roughly 17 months), and my lifelong fixation with playing it as loudly as possible only involved, up to my mid-thirties, *maybe* playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” once in high school.

“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.” So goes the beginning of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. He’s writing about the 1890’s, the blissful decade before the Martian invasion (set in the “early twentieth century”), but by the lights of this thirtysomething Millennial, Wells could easily have been writing about the 1990’s . . . although in place of “men,” we’d probably have to say something like “neoliberals,” or “The NBC Thursday Night Lineup.”

In the midst of all that infinite complacency, all that Clintonite assurance of an empire over matter, Kurt Cobain’s reckless spirit unleashed its heat ray on those modem-dialing infusoria, careening from the nooks to the crannies of my childhood even after his demise. I have the vaguest memory of seeing, in the Vancouver Province some dreary morning in April 1994, the news about his suicide. I had no idea what his music sounded like, but the pictures of weeping teens in flannel told me that this Cobain was Very Important. By the time I was actually listening to contemporary music, though, grunge had given way to Oasis, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Third Eye Blind.

Even if no one sounded much like Nirvana, they still haunted the late nineties, whether via emulation or negation. Britpop, buttrock, block rockin’ beats: after grunge wrecked absolutely everything, music splintered into defiant rejection or defiant embrace of grunge, but a kind of distorted memory of it, one that stripped it of three dimensionality and rendered it in the crude pixels of a Geocities homepage. From the standpoint of the songs that soundtracked the turn of the century, grunge was either the aggression of a red Solo cup-toting Alpha Phi pledge or the sadness of that same pledge after getting kicked out of the sorority house. In response to that dude’s aggro emotions, late Nineties music generally took one of two options: either run from those feelings as far as possible or take it way too far. Hello, Limp Bizkit.

That’s probably why I didn’t start listening to Nirvana until my thirties, I think. Looking back, I associated that grunge-y affect with the overcompressed Top 40 roster dominating the airwaves in the Y2K era. To a Millennial who only knew Nirvana through hearing “You Know You’re Right” sandwiched between Nickelback and Staind, “grunge” was about feeling solipsistically whiny and self-involved and totally inward focused and bereft of self-awareness or irony (not to be confused with sarcasm). To be sure, there were occasions when feeling those things was all I wanted to do. So I listened to Evanescence and Three Doors Down and, yes, Creed. But because my tastes, probably like those of most adolescents, were basically incoherent, I also turned to the White Stripes and the Hives whenever that feeling embarrassed me.

Growing up in a music culture that was basically still traumatized by Kurt’s suicide and grunge’s abrupt dissolution, I found the garage rock revival, plus Radiohead (still a genre of their own) to be the most meaningful counterpoints to the late Nineties postgrunge hangover. They were fun or intellectually provocative, sometimes both at the same time; the emo-ish bands I just listed displayed neither of those qualities, but then, their lack of humor or provocation was exactly why I listened to them, when I was in the mood. Conversely, the lack of adolescent anger or sadness that I perceived in The Hives or The White Stripes or even Radiohead (I could write a separate article about this, but just go with it) was exactly why I listened to them when the occasion called for it.

The idea of combining sadness, anger, humor, and intellectual provocation in one song eluded me for years.

You can sort of see where I’m going with this. Who combined all of those qualities if not the band that literally wrote a song called “Lithium” whose lyrics include the phrase “I’m so ugly/That’s okay cause so are you”? Who capped off their performance on SNL with the original troll of homophobic Proud Boys, a kiss that was both a “u mad bro” and a totally sincere expression of affection? Who rolled themselves out to a huge festival in a wheelchair, then flung themselves into full-bodied rocknroll like a carnival preacher running the world’s loudest miracle grift?

I had to get to a place in life where I was acquainted with the unremitting shittiness of the world-system (accounting for the relative ease of my status as an academic professional) to appreciate the Nirvana way of life. In other words, I had to get to the Trump era to see what Kurt saw and hear what most of his contemporaries, ears muffled by the white noise of the Nineties “end of history,” couldn’t. To really live in the era of decline and fall (as opposed to merely existing) is to feel anger. But not just that; it’s to think about anger, to laugh about anger, to feel angry about one’s laughter; to feel sad about one’s angry laughter, to laugh about one’s angry sadness. It’s cycling through all these affective states that the big brainless feels of most mainstream pop and rock can’t quite capture.

I realize I’ve left hip hop out of this musical genealogy of the past twenty years, which is because I had to get to the Trump era to really appreciate the best of that genre, too. Like Nirvana, Public Enemy and NWA and Notorious BIG and Tupac mixed humor with anger as the only way of coping with a world that was always on the verge of irreversible collapse. In my Canadian suburban dreamworld, though, that particular configuration of emotional response was even less legible to me than Nirvana. I had to move to America and acquire some small measure of understanding of Black history to grasp that these artists had to adopt some combination of irony and rage to subsist in an industry that inevitably tried to turn them into minstrels.

Something about the particular contours of Kurt’s music and life, though, strikes me as an especially eerie representation of the way we live now. Lost in an unnavigable labyrinth of heroin, fame, and art disguised as commerce (or vice versa?), Kurt killed himself on April 8, 1994. He did so in the upper room of his and Courtney Love’s 8212-square-foot Victorian mansion. To the untutored eye, it was about as far as Kurt could have gotten from a childhood that was probably disfigured by sexual abuse. But for Kurt, that million dollar abode was fit only for the background of his final tableaux. Whether intentionally or not, even Kurt’s suicide foreshadowed the pointless spectacle of the wealthiest nation in the world failing to outrun its demons, imploding in such spectacular fashion that, desperate to complicate the obvious, witnesses and participants in the tragedy make up all kinds of absurd theories in response. QAnon is the “Courtney Killed Kurt” meme for fans hopelessly devoted to the ultimate doomed celebrity, America itself, whose operatic suicide is just too much to take in.

Maybe I’m thinking about Nirvana this week because I literally don’t know how to feel about anything these days. We finally no longer live under Trump’s thumb, but his successor has already deported thousands of people. Congress finally passed a stimulus bill, including less money than was originally promised for fewer people than received it under President Parasite. Vaccinations are finally under way, just as America marks 500,000+ deaths and new variants add an exciting plot twist to our endless emergency. I’m finally getting the hang of online teaching, but that’s only because I’ve been spending so much damn time on my computer and so little damn time playing guitar (read: none). Spring is here! And another nightmarish season of hurricanes, orange skies, smothering pollution, and tornadoes in random places is guaranteed to follow on its heels, just like last year, and the year before that, and the year before that . . .

Oh yes, and of course, let’s not forget the fact that people are finally realizing that anti-Asian racism exists, but only because elderly people are literally being killed in the streets. (Sign the open letter on sanctified Sinophobia if you haven’t already, folks.)

I don’t know. I don’t really have a thesis in this post, just vibes. Angry happy sad giddy vibes for a world that spins on and on, well past the end of history, into all the alternate endings that seem to be playing simultaneously, like multiple demo versions of a song you thought you knew by heart. Am I ending this post with a mashup of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” because the combination somehow seems to capture the best way to do the eschaton twist in 2021, more Nirvana than the actual Nirvana? Or am I ending this post with this mashup because it’s funny and kicks ass and also reminds me of my drummer, who introduced it to me and whom I haven’t seen face to face in a year and a half? God, and whatever name Kurt goes by now, only knows.