Channel-hopping a couple of Saturdays ago, I came across the documentary Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind (2005) on BTV, the excellent local Barcelona TV channel (you may see the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lu48P8dZTk&list=RD2lu48P8dZTk). BTV is, as far as I know, the only public channel I have access to which bothers to broadcast a weekly series on popular music, simply called Música Moderna. Amazing how music has disappeared from public TV in Spain… I think back to all the variety I could get as a young girl and I’m truly mystified (thank you, by the way, Paloma Chamorro, wherever you are, for La edad de oro!). Anyway, I digress (or not, as you’ll see). The documentary stirred in me plenty of feelings, memories and impressions I had almost forgotten and I’m trying to make sense of them here.
Two years ago I attended the ‘16th International Culture & Power Conference’ at the Universidad de Murcia and I had the great pleasure of listening to my colleague Rubén Valdés (U. Oviedo) deliver a paper on Joy Division. Finally!, I told everyone present, we start dealing with the aspects of anglophone culture that matter so much but that we dare not acknowledged in our academic work. After the ensuing exciting conversation, I came up with an idea for an article on the role of popular music in the awakening of English Studies scholarly vocations in Spain, thinking in particular of my generation, the ones born in the 1960s for whom Joy Division’s music had been an undeniable inspiration. I even drafted a questionnaire which Juan Antonio Suárez kindly reviewed for me but I haven’t been able to find the right moment to get down to work. Maybe after this post… My thesis, as you can see, is that popular music played a major role in leading many young aspiring scholars in the 1980s to choose ‘Filología Inglesa’, in combination with Literature and cinema (also TV). Many of us learned about Britain and the United States through their popular music: translating lyrics from English was, I’m sure, a favourite activity, as was attending concerts both in Spain and, with luck, in the UK and the US. We knew that this would never be the subject of our ‘proper’ research but the music never stopped playing.
Or did it? In my own case ageing has brought an increasing intolerance of background sound, which means that I have progressively lost the ability to work as I listen to music–now I need total silence. My otolaryngologist has given me very strict instructions not to use earphones and to attend very loud pop and rock concerts only sparingly… And so I have little by little disconnected from that indie avant-garde I used to know all about, also because now I easily lose my way in the endless lists of new bands, emerging one day and gone the following week. Students have also changed. Years ago I could rely on their suggestions but the last time I used music in my classes (‘Literatura anglesa del s. XX’, 2012-13), I found that they didn’t know who Kasabian are… Now I myself don’t know what Kasabian are up to, if they’re still together at all.
Back in, I think, 1999 I visited Professor Simon Frith in Glasgow, no doubt the main anglophone academic specialist in pop and rock (http://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/reid-school-of-music/simon-frith). My students have heard about this visit countless times… I asked him how he had managed to develop his amazing career in this field and he gave me a golden recipe: use an impeccable scholarly methodology and nobody will be able to object. I soon wrote a piece on US 1990s Goth star Marilyn Manson (http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/sites/gent.uab.cat.saramartinalegre/files/Marilyn%20Manson%20Limits%20Challenge%20Sara%20Mart%C3%ADn.pdf), and I have subsequently written on gender in music videos (http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/sites/gent.uab.cat.saramartinalegre/files/Sara%20Mart%C3%ADn%20El_Cuerpo_en_el_Videoclip_Musical.pdf), Scottish female singers (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/112359), Linkin Park (http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/sites/gent.uab.cat.saramartinalegre/files/Linkin%20Park%20AEDEAN%202010%20Sara%20Mart%C3%ADn.pdf) and, my favourite piece, on Kylie Minogue (with Gerardo Rodríguez, http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/sites/gent.uab.cat.saramartinalegre/files/Forget%20Madonna%20Rodriguez%20Mart%C3%ADn%20AEDEAN%20Cadiz.pdf).
Year in, year out I promise myself that I will teach an elective on pop and rock but I don’t seem to find the moment, feeling a bit hampered too by not being sure about which methodology to use in order to assess students. Like many other teachers, I assume, I have used lyrics in introductory survey courses to complement poetry. I used to ask students to choose their own lyrics and it was funny to see how they offered quite conservative proposals thinking they would please me (Bon Jovi???). There was a girl absolutely surprised that I chose Linkin Park’s “Somewhere I belong” for class analysis… but that was so long ago. One of my fondest memories is a really hilarious first-year session in which we tried to make sense of Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit”–just give it a try, worse than The Waste Land…
The other fond memory connected with Nirvana –also a bitter-sweet one–belongs to 6th April 1994, the day after Kurt Cobain (b. 1967) shot himself dead. I was 28, still a doctoral student, and teaching somebody else’s syllabus for ‘Literatura Anglesa Moderna i Contemporània II’, the 19th century. I had to teach Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), a novel for which I have not yet managed to feel any enthusiasm. When I heard on the radio first thing in the morning that Cobain was dead this brought me back to the day when Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s singer, killed himself (18th May 1980). I told myself, ‘If that day was crucial for my generation, then today is crucial for my students’ generation’ and, so, I spent the whole 90 minutes talking about all the iconic pop and rock figures that had died too early and how this connected with the Romantic idea of suicide (poor things, my students!!). No mention of Waverley… except to say ‘Who can care about Scott today? Not me…’
I did not intend then and do not intend now to support the idiotic cult around early suicide (or youth suicidal lifestyles). I soon became a New Order fan, which I remain to this day, and I can only say that I have a great deal of admiration for how the members of Joy Division decided to move on and become a new band, full of energy and preaching a radiant, hedonistic pleasure in life. The same applies to Dave Grohl’s career after Nirvana. Courtney Love, Cobain’s widow, called him many names, none of them nice, during the funeral; unlike her, I believe that suicides deserve compassion but I’d rather not turn them into cult figures. What the documentary on Nirvana’s hit album Nevermind brought back (and perhaps Amy, this year’s Oscar winner, also does that for the late Amy Winehouse) was the explosion of talent before the regrettable early death. Cobain’s case is crystal clear: he simply could not cope with the sudden, massive success of his band. I know that there is a deep contradiction in choosing a career as a rock musician and not thinking of the consequences of success but if you read, as I have done, Bernard Sumner’s recent memoirs Chapter and Verse: New Order, Joy Division and Me, you will see that this is a quite common contradiction.
Back to Nevermind (1991), what I most appreciated about the documentary was the insight into how inexplicable creativity of this very high quality is. The focus of the film is producer Butch Vig’s narration of how the album was made, accompanied by interviews with Nirvana band members Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic. Vig gives many technical details about how he came up with the now classic Nirvana sound (the double voice tracks, and so on) and recalls beautiful accidents; the final version of “Lithium”, a song that gave band and producer countless problems, came from Cobain singing softly to Vig to demonstrate what he was after. Yet nothing and nobody can explain how everything cohered into the making of that landmark in rock history.
I love the album with a fan’s irrational passion and completely lack the musicological training to explain in scholarly terms why it is so potent–I can go on and on about male voices that transmit Romantic intensity (Curtis, Cobain, Chester Bennington…) but this is still an impressionistic approach based on a very personal preference. One thing the documentary seemed to highlight is that, as Michael Forsythe comments in the YouTube segment for the documentary, “The music scene today could sure use another Nirvana. I know there will never be another Nirvana but something to regenerate rock again and take it by storm before it dies”.
This might be basic generational nostalgia though I think I’m not alone in feeling, like this person, that in the last 25 years since Nevermind no other main event has changed the course of pop and rock with the same power. New high-impact artists have emerged (think Beyoncé) but they seem to be more about image-packaging than about the music. Kurt Cobain’s dishevelled, grungy look couldn’t be further from that… I could joke in very bad taste that if he started his career today, Cobain would anyway end up shooting himself rather than submit to the image manipulation that music artists routinely accept today. I have never seen a man with such a beautiful face make himself so ugly as a way to protect his music.
I’m thinking of the equivalent of BTV’s Música Moderna in 25 years’ time and wondering which classic albums will be revisited… By the way: has any PhD dissertation on popular music been submitted yet within English Studies in Spain? I had one in my hands but, you know what it’s like these days, the author had a full time job, a family life… and abandoned it rather than, as he said,’lose coherence’. You don’t know how sorry I am…
Now enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vabnZ9-ex7o
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