Here we are now, entertain us

Everyone seems to be dragging their old Nirvana cds out--or dropping the $61.46 for the 4-lp deluxe edition of Nevermind now available as a pre-order online. (Nirvana's Nevermind 20th Anniversary Celebrated with Deluxe Reissue Box Set) I must admit I'm tempted. As a cultural phenomenon, Nirvana made its precipitous rise and drug- and fame-addled implosion during a moment of what was essentially the co-optation and mass-marketing of underground rock culture. Not a new trend in the early '90s, surely, but one that had rarely reached the same pitch, at least for a generation or so. For those of us who remember it (which puts us over 30), it's simply too tempting to capitulate to this moment of nostalgia. Forget about the marketing of "grunge" (whatever that was). Forget about the 14 year-olds in Nirvana t-shirts who couldn't possibly remember "the year punk broke" and its cultural aftermath. Listening to these songs at a distance of twenty years makes me blush as I remember how formative this culture was for me at a certain very impressionable age. It also makes me realize, as someone who still cares about rock and roll, how good this music actually was--for what it was, peculiarly good pop culture.

With time to kill in London, I recently wandered into the Nirvana exhibition in Brick Lane. (Nirvana exhibition). The exhibition displayed the usual memorabilia--photos, album cover artwork, Kurt Cobain's hoodie (there actually could have been more material, if anything). Gravitating toward the audiovisual setup at the back of the exhibition space, I found myself spending more time before the screen watching live footage of the band than I'd anticipated I would--genuinely enjoying the music, and not only from a nostalgic standpoint. Ok, I thought, this is an important moment to re-examine.

I recently picked up Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing about, which had been on my reading list for some time. 

The book is at times deeply interesting, and at others annoyingly insistent about the cultural and historical value of ephemeral mass culture, a problem often encountered by cultural studies. While virtually anyone would agree that pop music registers, accounts for, and sometimes conditions social change, 1989 takes its wager one step further to read retrospectively onto messy and incoherent pop cultural trends the stable ideologies of fully forged cultural formations. The chapter on gangsta, in which "the criminalization of rap returns as the rap of criminalization," and the one on grunge are surely the book's smartest. (These also treat the music that has held up the best aesthetically: who cares about Jesus Jones, The Scorpions, or George Michael?)

The chapter on grunge--which borrows its title from Nirvana's excellent early song "Negative Creep"--suffers acutely from the same tendency to over-read as the rest of the book: Clover assumes grunge was a stable ideological construct, rather than a series of feints by over-exposed twentysomethings, or worse, a sequence of suggessful marketing gestures coalescing around certain subcultural styles. (Did anyone actually embrace the label "grunge"?)  Yet for all its faults, the chapter scores some excellent points in the ongoing cultural reexamination of punk's uneven cultural intervention. In particular, I think, Clover is correct in seeing punk's musical ham-fistedness ("here are three chords, now start a band") as a sort of rejection of bourgeois proficiency and the professionalization of culture. The logic of the amateur converts consumers into producers, virtually any suburban kid into a potential rock star. Clover is also correct in seeing Nirvana's contribution to this lineage as an inversion of punk's critique, as "punk rock turned outside in, not anti-social but a-social," a kind of self-loathing angst aimed back at society. Yet to talk about "grunge"--and Nirvana in particular--seriously may well be to take too seriously Cobain's lyrics, smart as they may sometimes be, and to read into them a politics that simply isn't there. One other fault one could find with Clover's work is his conversion of early '90s rock subculture to a sort of boys-only club: he invokes and dismisses Riot Grrl--one of the era's most coherent moments, not to mention one of its most interesting politically and aesthetically, in a single paragraph.

Perhaps, though, my real complaint is that the work of Clover and other cultural critics like him misses a point that is both mundane and entirely relevant: this is music I liked, and do like.