An Easy Friend
Another band dear to my heart, and a sadly short musical journey, is Nirvana. They only have three studio albums, some compilations and a few live albums.
As I write, I’ve got Nirvana’s Live at Reading cued up on YouTube.
Nirvana. Where to begin with Nirvana? They are one of those bands that grips you at a certain time, and when you get hooked, you can’t listen to anything else.
I was born the year Kurt Cobain died, so I was naturally late to the party. Though grunge was a whole generation before me, I always felt that Nirvana was still a big part of my own generational culture. All the punk kids in high school liked them.
When I think about how I got into certain bands, it’s always strange. It almost feels like fate, or as if something beyond my control reached out and gripped me.
When I got into Nirvana, I was a Sophomore in college. I was having a bit of a bad bout of depression (like everybody who gets into them), and for some reason, I felt an overwhelming urge to listen to the song Lithium, one of the few songs I knew off the top of my head (I think in part because of Guitar Hero World Tour).
For the next few months, Nirvana was the ONLY thing I could listen to. I went into a trance, eating up Nirvana like it was food, the music carrying me, surrounding me, and pulling me into its strange, defeated, and dreary world of frustration, rage and explosive, existential energy.
I’ve heard a similar story from other fans. When you’re in certain place where your mind’s fogged up and life seems a tiring and endless slog, there really is nothing like Nirvana to speak to you. In fact, it can be the only voice that makes sense.
Musically, Nirvana is something of a wonderful disaster. It is a disorganized mix of violent, introspective anger and angst vomited into audio. But even amidst the mess and muck of it, where you might be tempted to write it off as so much empty sound and fury, there are lines that strike through. There are some real throat punching, hard hitting lyrics that can cripple you. I think the best way to put Kurt Cobain’s song writing is that it was unleashed, disorganized and unedited poetry from a brilliant, creative and troubled mind.
Here are some of my favorite lines:
“My heart is broke,
But I have some glue
Help me inhale,
Mend it with you.
We’ll float around,
Hang out on clouds,
Then we’ll come down
And have a hangover” (Dumb, Nirvana).
This one is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the ultimate downer song. It kinda hurts.
“Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back” (Heart-Shaped Box, Nirvana).
I’ve always found this to be a very disturbing, but amazing bit of writing. I’ve always taken it to mean the desire to be reborn, but life itself feels like a trap.
“Sunday morning is everyday for all I care,
Light my candles in a daze cause I’ve found God” (Lithium, Nirvana).
This last one I thought was brilliant. Lithium is a drug prescribed for Bipolar patients (https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/guide/bipolar-disorder-lithium). The wide-ranging moods of this condition are perfectly described here. On one hand, Sunday, a traditionally religious day, means nothing, but by the next line, it means everything.
There are few bands who can hit the nerves that Nirvana can. It’s not always cohesive what it makes you feel. It takes you to a strange and dark place. It conjures up images of rain, cracked pavement, cheap motels, washed out bums hanging around a dumpster, broken glass, shaggy clothes, and vacant eyes staring out a window through the smoke of a cigarette. Every dirty, dark and desperate thing you can think of, it’s there. It’s an end of the road type feeling.
I know this sounds purely negative. And a walk-through of Nirvana’s discography leaves you feeling drained in some sense, but it also gives you permission to feel. The music allows you to let it all wash over you, the frustrations, the disappointments and sadnesses of whatever’s got you, and to let it explode through you. It lets you just be, it lets you come as you are, if you will.
I’ll tell you, there are few bands apart from Nirvana that make me want to just grab my guitar and crank out a song. More than that, listening to them, and listening to Kurt Cobain’s sloppy guitar work, carelessly hammering away like a drunk ape (and I say that lovingly) makes me think “hey I could do that!”. They are like a creative junkyard where you can always find the right tool to fit what you’re feeling and thinking.
You’ll have to take the journey yourself to get what I mean. I’d recommend listening through the studio albums, but more significantly, I would listen / watch through some live performances. Live at Reading, Live & Loud, Live at the Paramount, and of course MTV unplugged are all great live albums. Those capture the true spirit of the band, if you ask me.
Here’s a link to About a Girl, one of my favorite songs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YleoyKFfHaY
This is one of those simplistic beauties, poppy and catchy, but still a little nasty. I love that E minor to G progression and those hanging chords. It’s nothing really that special, and yet, that’s precisely what makes it so delightful. It’s the wonderful paradox of their entire sound, and it gets me every time. If I need just a small dose of Nirvana here and there, I frequently go back to this.
The real beauty of Nirvana is three parts. First, it hits that depressive nerve when I’m down that no other artist quite does. Second, it isn’t fancy, it’s imperfect, it’s as broken and defeated as I feel when I’m in that place. Third, it provides the energy to push you into that creative mindset; it serves as a muse that pushes you to work through the haze and heaviness of the moment and put something to the page, regardless of the result. So, to you artists, grab a pen and a guitar (or your instrument of choice) and get cracking. Is it sloppy, flawed, and unfinished? Good. That’s the point.
Thanks for reading. Keep following for some future posts, if this has been enjoyable to you.
Here are some links to the songs that I mentioned throughout:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peclQi67KS8
