Nirvana's In Utero (2006)

Gillian Gaar's contribution to the 33-1/3 shelf is a fast and fun read, one of the better I've seen of the more straightforward volumes in the series. This is because there are interesting sideline stories about this album and because Gaar has the skill to chase down the details and make it a good story altogether—which it should be, given that it's Kurt Cobain's last studio project. He gave us a great live set in the Unplugged show and that was it. Full disclosure: I know Gillian, and I can still be nostalgic for those days of 1993. One notorious storyline of In Utero was Steve Albini's participation as producer/engineer, which was a moiling cloud of media confusion at the time. Gaar spoke to Albini years later and his sober perspective is one of the best parts of this book. She spares us as much of the drama as she can regarding Courney Love, Frances Bean, Axl Rose, Cobain's fraught relations with reporters, etc., but inevitably some of that is here. We are also spared a good deal of Cobain's angst, but that is just as inevitably here too, including the stomachaches and plagues of insecurity. Mostly she shows us a group of professionals intent on getting things done. They largely produced about half of a great album, with some of his best songs alternating with noise squalls that somehow sound a lot better than I remembered. In the track-by-track rundown section (also inevitable in most of these books), Gaar does a good job of sorting out and analyzing these squalls and accords them the punk-rock respect Cobain sought in them. She never stack-ranks the Nirvana albums, but makes an interesting point that listening to Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero together makes the development of the band clear. As always you have to wonder how far it might have gone. Dave Grohl has reinvented himself as a rock star as surely as New Order rose from the ashes of Joy Division. I will say I don't hate him the way some do. Gaar, writing in 2006, doesn't have much to say about Grohl or Krist Novoselic either, apart from their contributions to In Utero, which of course were significant.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Harrison Bergeron" (1961)

Read story by Kurt Vonnegut online.

The premise of Kurt Vonnegut's story is a type of Devastating Wry Dystopic Satire that feels typical to me of its New Frontier times. It riffs on a straw man, an argument I don't think anyone is making or has ever made. Setting that aside, it's a great example of what a sharp and chiseled writer Vonnegut could be. In the future of this story people have gone mad for equality. Society has evolved a counterbalancing system wherein the most gifted are formally handicapped. Strong people are burdened with extra weight. Smart people are fixed with buzzers that sound off in their ears every 20 seconds to interrupt concentration. And so forth. As a view of coming attractions I do think it's unlikely. As a joke, however, Vonnegut has a few good ways to work it. It's a very short story with lots of dialogue, which enables it to establish rhythms that start to work almost musically and can be funny. It's also comical to see such mediocrity as the accepted norm. In this world excellence is an affront of arrogance. George and Hazel Bergeronn are parents of the anti-equality revolutionary Harrison, a Nietzschean superman if ever there was one. George and Hazel are watching a ballet performance on TV. But the dancers are not very good. George and two of the ballerinas have ear buzzers, which are synchronized. George and Hazel have an absent-minded conversation. One of George's best recurring lines is "Um." So the comedy is pretty rich and it's fun to read. But put it down a second and think about it and it starts to be annoying. Perhaps it's the mood I'm in at the moment, but it's hitting me as another privileged indictment of "identity politics." The year this was published the Civil Rights movement was on the rise, and a renewal of feminism just over the horizon. "Harrison Bergeron" can too easily be read as mocking such movements by willfully misunderstanding them. No one who wants to protect civil rights is trying to take anything but unfair opportunity away from anybody. The issue is equality of opportunity and fair treatment, not literal equality. This was originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Make of that what you will. It's still fun to read. Set a timer on a buzzer so you don't have to think about it too long.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle (1963)

It had actually been awhile since I read this, widely considered Kurt Vonnegut's best or close to it. I couldn't help realizing that when I came across a scene that reminded me of 9/11 and then, less than 10 pages later, another that reminded me of Jonestown. Cat's Cradle was published decades before either event so I don't know how anyone can get too far from the idea of and the word "prescience." But there's more: it's extremely short, some 191 pages in my ancient mass-market edition, addresses itself to the end of the world, and gleefully riffs off Moby-Dick every chance it gets. First sentence: "Call me Jonah." No chapter any longer than three pages (thus, 127 chapters in a compact 191-page book). And cetacean imagery and language everywhere he can make it fit, and a few places where he can't. It's also really funny. It's true I generally have a taste for things that go under the label "black comedy," which fits here fine, but it's not often I find myself actually laughing very hard at some of this stuff. There's a lot of plot here, which gets a bit tiresome. It's much more fun when it dwells on its invented religion, Bokononism, and even more when the narrator (Jonah, which name, by the way, you never encounter again after the first page) enters into high moral dudgeons, with the rest of the players—and there are a lot of them here—standing around blinking and wondering what he's all of a sudden going on about. Those Bokononist terms and concepts—wampeter, foma, granfalloons, and all of it—would come to permeate Vonnegut's work time and again until they veered close to rancid from overuse. But this is not nearly as cutesy and Peanutsy as Vonnegut would wander off into with commercial success (compare Charles Schulz). With The Sirens of Titan, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this is where you find Vonnegut working as if everything mattered and rarely indulging himself. Everything that's funny here, such as the capital punishment in the banana republic where the action concludes and the way that people talk about it, is equally terrifying. Nothing is intuitive. It's all by design. And deserves the label "prescient" a hundred times over.

In case it's not at the library.

29. Nirvana, "Sliver" (1990)

(listen)

On some level I can understand the reluctance to embrace Nirvana, who stood so obviously on the shoulders of those who had gone before. Never mind that Kurt Cobain himself was all too painfully aware of that. That said, I don't know how anyone denies this pure blast of kid pain and joy, which seems to me to go to the heart of who Cobain was, what he wanted and what he was capable of. It's only a little longer than two minutes but it's pretty much got everything we've come to associate with Nirvana: raw vocals, the exaggerated soft/noisy dynamics, squealing feedback, surprising flashes of melodics, and a certain amount of self-consciousness in the lyrics, which are more straightforward than usual. In fact, it's the lyrics that make it, a story of a kid's night with his grandparents babysitting him while his parents are out on a date. The details are just right: "I kicked and screamed, said please, oh no" and "Had to eat my dinner there / Mashed potatoes and stuff like that / Couldn't chew my meat too good" and "I fell asleep, and watched TV / Woke up in my mother's arms" and, maybe best of all, "Grandma take me home X19." He completely inhabits the world of a seven-year-old, the constant bewildering onrush of overwhelming crises and banal routines disrupted, bicycles and and roast beef, the rapid insensible switch back and forth between terror and fun and peace, all the familiarities that define the boundaries we push against, that hold us in place. In Cobain's case, of course—in many, many cases—the boundaries ultimately gave way, a defining tragedy, or trauma anyway, and in that sense "Sliver" also represents a critical piece in understanding Cobain and Nirvana, and ourselves.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

I read this book back in the day, though I'm pretty sure only the once, when I was so entirely in thrall to Vonnegut, toward the end of my high school career. I'm pretty sure I never understood the enormity at the center of it, the February 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden, the way he intended, only approximately. By the numbers (135,000 dead and the images he gives us of the destruction, comparing the Dresden landscape to the moon) it was worse than the March 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo (81,000 dead), which was worse than August 1945 Hiroshima A-bomb attack (71,000 dead). It was very bad, and 25 years after the fact Vonnegut is still gnawing away at it here, still quite evidently shattered by it, which is reflected in the strange way that his slender volume proceeds, with its Tralfamadorian aliens that kidnap the protagonist, its use of "so it goes" to punctuate every death (whether any mention of the thousands in Dresden or various life-forms), and the mystifying use of time travel, the coming "unstuck" in time that Billy Pilgrim experiences. It's something more than intense memory, but not by much. Then there is the very calculated and self-conscious way that Vonnegut injects himself. It's a novel, but there's Vonnegut using Chapter One the way others might use a preface or foreword, where he talks about how he begins the novel, which actually starts with Chapter Two. Just weird, but also convincingly reflective of a soul in extremity. It was a lot easier for me this second time through to set aside Vonnegut's variously annoying and beguiling tricks and focus on what he tells us about Dresden and to imagine what it must have been like to experience that and understand the horror. It's no wonder he spent the rest of his life opposed to war. It also raises questions about our conduct in and prosecution of the "good war." Both Dresden and Tokyo (and of course Nagasaki, and there's a case for Hiroshima too) appear to stand as acts of state-sponsored rage, a kind of terrorism, justified or no nevertheless coming from impulses that sensible people have always known must be set aside for the sake of civilization and humanity and other quaint ideas. It's cause for despair that these atrocities have mostly been covered up by history—which, I know, the victors write and all that. That's the despair that uniquely haunts this very strange little novel, and the reason it belongs in libraries until the end of time.

In case it's not at the library.

82. Nirvana, "Heart-Shaped Box" (1993)

(listen)

For the brief sliver of time in which Nirvana ruled—it wasn't long, they were effectively supplanted by Pearl Jam even with this, in commercial terms anyway—I had a fan's adoration of them nearly every step of the way. I hung on every piece of news. I was intrigued, for example, that the new album was to be produced by Steve Albini. I was insulted by Axl Rose's behavior, and I worried that the press was treating them fairly. I thought they deserved their privacy. In retrospect it's silly, as these things usually are, made tragically so when Kurt Cobain demonstrated the dimensions of what was at stake. But I remember the excitement when the local commercial alternative radio station announced they had this first single from the new album and the time they would be first playing it. Phone calls from friends came to let me know, and I was tuned in to hear at the appointed hour. There are always artists and albums and first singles that are going to produce the effect, but not every one works for everyone. Somehow this became one of mine. "Heart-Shaped Box" isn't the most representative song on In Utero—that would be either "All Apologies" or maybe "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter"—but it's a good way in, a mid-tempo word salad with the usual thrilling dynamics and memorable, provocative, even signature turns of phrase floating out of the chaos, viz., "I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black" and "Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back." We know now there wasn't much time left when this came out, but the possibilities seemed to stretch well beyond all visible horizons. This was a kind of rest stop in the desert, where unknowing a nice picnic was enjoyed shortly before the accident that changed everything.

Welcome to the Monkey House (1950-1968)

Kurt Vonnegut's first and likely best collection of short pieces—most are stories, but a few other things are scattered in as well—is where I started with him, back in the misty climes of the past. It's not a bad place to start, though I think a few of his novels are probably better (notably The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, or Slaughterhouse-Five). What surprises me about this collection is how many of the stories amount to little more than badly dated women's fare, in tone as well as subject matter; three were published originally in "Cosmopolitan" and three others in "Ladies' Home Journal." They are the kind of sentimental tripe that only a cynic of the highest order could produce, with titles such as "Long Walk to Forever" and "Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son." Read them as closely as you can and you find only the barest hints, if that, of the dark comic sensibility behind them—which is interesting in itself. The science fiction exercises, perhaps a third of the selections, mask that sensibility nearly equally as well behind another set of commercial priorities, albeit one that allows more latitude for the wry or offbeat. In "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," for example (published originally in 1950 in "Collier's"), his antiwar priorities are already plainly in place as a scientist develops and taps into psychic powers, taking them underground to begin systematically destroying the most dangerous weapons systems of belligerent states. This makes him a menace, of course. "The Euphio Question" (also from "Collier's," this time from 1951) imagines a specific band of radio waves emanating from somewhere out there as dangerous narcotic, with comic results. Some of these stories, such as "Harrison Bergeron" (from "Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine" in 1961), which conceives a world in which human equality of every imaginable kind is bizarrely and elaborately mandated via reduction to lowest common denominator, have stuck with me all my life as frames or explanations of the vicissitudes of my own experience. Since that is arguably the point of literature and art in the first place, one would have to call this at least in part a resounding success. It is otherwise almost always interesting, often amusing, and, as usual with Vonnegut, compulsively readable once begun.

In case it's not at the library.

"Come as You Are" (1992)

47. Nirvana, "Come as You Are" (April 18, 1992, #32)

Yeah, yeah, R.I.P., Kurt Cobain, 1967-1994. Get that out of the way. No, this is not the song that tore down the wall and liberated a generation. That was "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which you can remember by its vastly more iconic title. But I think that this, the second go at the top 40 and also from the Nevermind album, is probably the better song. It has the gloomy moodiness Cobain is famous for, much of it compressed into the canny, lilting melody he has concocted, which enables just the bass and a simple drum pattern and his voice to carry a lot of it, certainly all the way to the chorus, where things are suitably filled out with escalating tensions and big guitar chords and hard hit drums and so forth. What is he going on about? Something about a gun? Memory? "Memoria"? There are many syllables in the verses, almost chanted—"Come As you are As you were As I want you to be As a friend As a friend As on old enemy"—but it's also kind of hard to make out the words as he's singing. It is the point with so many Nirvana songs, the voice straining against the notes straining against the words and the tension obscured and resulting frisson, followed by release. This is one of the finest they ever did. It just soars, floats off like a hot-air balloon and twirls in kodachrome daylight, and it's so beautiful for a moment it's almost overwhelming. It was fun watching that horse get out of the barn, but gosh dang, the songs were always there too, and there are now far too few of them. If I may register that tiny and perhaps insensitive note of complaint on the matter.

The Sirens of Titan (1959)

One of the things about Kurt Vonnegut that I think too often gets lost in the overweening attention paid to his dark humor, liberal politics, and/or various silly conceits is what a fine writer he could be. Just simple and plain as that. He knew how to construct sentences and choose words with an art and craft that he brought with equal force to putting together his best work, among which you would have to include his second novel, The Sirens of Titan. In fact, subsequent visits to this absurdist tract only underline the point. He may have grown a bit lazy further along in his career, too often reaching for familiar (and annoying) repetitive tics such as "So it goes," but he was also capable of this kind of deceptively simple, rollicking novel, which relentlessly builds on itself, starting out with all the self-conscious trappings of science fiction and a story about one Malachi Constant, richest man in the 22nd century, on a journey from Earth to Mars to further his holdings in anticipation of a coming interplanetary war with "the Martians." From there it telescopes outward, embracing wider and wider themes, ultimately introducing religion itself, first as an element of the absurd and then, through some trick of sleight of hand, of the profound, grappling with the grand meaning of historical human events and ultimately the significance of life itself—and managing it all within the confines of a continuing space opera. As overblown as the action becomes, the events and characters remain resolutely straightforward, as concrete and plainspoken as anything you might encounter in the work of Mark Twain, which only means it is sly and funny and careful always about what it is up to. Vonnegut, at the time, was among a relatively tiny minority to recognize the powerful subversive potential of science fiction. That's not to overlook the work of the titans of the field at the time—notably Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke—but only to mention that Vonnegut here found a way to uncover and point to vast levels that the genre held still unexplored. This is a very funny book, the first of his greatest work, and one that even warrants the term "mind-blowing."

In case it's not at the library.

In Utero (1993)

 

If Kurt Cobain is John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain's oppressive punk-rock superego is Yoko Ono, then this is his Double Fantasy. When the superior pop instincts get to hold sway, as on approximately half the tracks here, I think this is about as good as it ever got for Nirvana. When, on the other half, his internal punk-rock taskmaster takes over and runs the show—talking now about the guy who hired Steve Albini to produce in the first place—the going gets a little tougher. (The poor guy, with fans and critics grumbling about degrees of purity and his lack thereof, with a harpy shrieking away non-stop in the background of his life, and on top of everything with a wicked drug habit that wouldn't let go. How was he ever supposed to concentrate?) Also as with Double Fantasy (following which I will immediately cease the comparison and never bring it up again, and that's a promise), it's not easy to separate this final missive from the events that followed in its more or less inadvertent wake. My advice is to just get picky about it. If you like that noisy stuff, and despise the tuneful work as craven selling out, stay focused on that. Turn it up even. If, like me, you like the pop tunes, remember that CDs and most music players are programmable and you really don't have to bother that often with "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" and its ilk. Above all, I say, keep in mind that anyone who could write things as transcendent as "Heart-Shaped Box," or "Pennyroyal Tea," or "All Apologies" (which you may believe, and perhaps you are right, that you have heard enough in your lifetime by now), or "Dumb," or "Rape Me"—well, that's someone eminently worth remembering and honoring and loving. God knows he could have used it when he was still breathing.

Incesticide (1992)

 

"Sliver" At the time this came out, I admit I was a little offended by the gratuitous nature of following up the mega-nova explosion of Nevermind with this slapped-together package of b-sides, covers, demos, alternative versions, and the like. But when I got a chance to hear it I had to take that back. It's a pretty decent album. What's more, in "Sliver" it has the one song, clocking in at all of 2:17, that I think best captures Kurt Cobain in his glorious contradictions, overwhelming pain and innocence and goofy little unself-concious kiddishness. Because that's what I think he really was about when it's all said and done, and for sure that's the thing I miss the most. Pardon the indulgence: "Mom and Dad went to a show / Dropped me off at grandpa Joe's / I kicked and screamed, said please, oh no" and "Had to eat my dinner there / Mashed potatoes and stuff like that / Couldn't chew my meat too good" and "After dinner, I had ice cream / I fell asleep, and watched TV / Woke up in my Mother's arms" and finally "Grandma take me home (19x)."

 

Nevermind (1991)

 

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" It was clear from first encounter how good this album was—I will say by way of explanation that I was onto it early enough that I ended up with one of the pressings that inadvertently left off the hidden track "Endless, Nameless" (which btw has been A-OK with me anyway). But I, for one, never foresaw or even imagined the full dimensions of the greatest major label sell-out of all time. Ten million unit sales, nearly 20 years, and a generational earthquake later, it still sounds fine, though the debt to the Pixies is clear enough, in terms of its quiet-loud-quiet dynamic, opaque titling strategies, patent damage to vocal cords in process, occasional surprisingly clumsy resorts to cliché, and the overweening air of general disaffection. On the other hand, that singer/songwriter from Bleach, Kurdt Kobain, suddenly demonstrated not only that he could match Black Francis scream for scream and better him right down the line, but that he could write pop music circles around practically anyone within a 25,000-mile radius. Or, as he put it, "I think we sound like the Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath." Honestly, for all the debts that could be listed (all of the above plus Sonic Youth, Flipper, Husker Du, Saccharine Trust, Scratch Acid, yes of course Iggy, and we're just getting started), I think very few of them actually match Kurt Cobain's songwriting acumen, though I would also argue that the very best of it is not necessarily here. That's no criticism of anything on this album—it's an expression of how big a talent is behind it. (Wait a minute. "In Bloom." "Come As You Are." "Lithium." What am I saying?) Those still new to the various classic stylings of grunge, here's your starting point.

"Bleach" (1989)

 

"Negative Creep" At the time, for sure, this had its partisans, but I recall the big Sub Pop PR machine tending to lumber more significantly behind Mudhoney's eminently worthy self-titled first album. After Soundgarden, Mudhoney was the band that cognoscenti pegged, ironically or otherwise, as most likely to succeed and deliver them to limousines and the finest crystal (and note: ironic it all turned out to be, just not in the ways intended). As for me, I was busy getting all het up about Tad's God's Balls, which seemed to me then (and now) the ideal shotgun wedding of punk and metal, with no small degree of lovely ecclesiastical white-trash detritus cluttering up the proceedings (hey, head honcho Tad Doyle is from Idaho, after all). All of these albums came out at about the same time, along with product from more or less forgotten entities such as the Fluid, in a shotgun blast of Sub Pop discharge. But of course Bleach is the one that ultimately brands you prescient if you championed it ardently enough and have the documentation to back yourself up when the time comes to apportion credit for foresight. It's good, make no mistake—damn fine sludge all around, in fact. No one I know is arguing against the fact that Sub Pop knew exactly what they were doing in matters of selecting the right bands to record and promote.