On Nirvana, rage, Rage and Lost

Appropriately enough, considering my current Jack Shepard beard, I found myself driving home the other day while listening to Nirvana's “Scentless Apprentice,” similar to how Jack is driving in a season finale of Lost. Well, minus the being loaded on booze and Oxycontin part.

You might note that this is not normally a tune you hear on the radio, and if you've been in my car or seen the interior of my lovely white 1998 Corolla, you might note that I only have a tape deck. This is correct – One of the few tapes I have and have kept is Nirvana's From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah.

This was released about two years after Cobain's death, and it isn't considered one of the band's stronger works. It is an odd mismash of live performances, and included tracks from Bleach to In Utero. While it is not as artistically strong as Nevermind or In Utero, as emotionally raw as Unplugged in New York or as rough and scratchy as Bleach, it is a nice sort of sampler platter of everything Nirvana has to offer. It is also the only "official" live, non-acoustic album they have, excluding the "new" Live at Reading, which was just released in November.

While I was re-listening to the album, I was struck by how aggressive and emotional Nirvana still sounds, while still having an ounce of harmony. In recent years, there has been a bit of a backlash against them for not being refined musicians. This kind of obscures the fact that Nirvana was never really about musicianship – It was all about aggression and emotion.

I think this is why they still hold up more to me than, say, Rage Against The Machine. In a previous post, I talked about how Nirvana wasn't really a band of my generation, and about how most of my friends didn't listen to Nirvana. I know this because I loved Nirvana, and outside of my friend Eric, my friends didn't. By this time, people had moved on to the far past (The Clash, The Pixies), the fringe (Fugazi, obscure local punk and hardcore bands that no longer exist), the classics (Skynard, Zeppelin, The Band) and the more alternative mainstream (Oasis). I was 7 when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Nevermind came out and 10 when Cobain died.

I loved Nirvana, and still do, because it personally resonates with me. I was a bit of a surly kid as I graduated from middle to high school, which my grades reflect – I stopped caring a lot, and stopped doing a lot of classwork. I was lucky in the sense that I'm sharp enough to still do well on or pass tests despite not studying. I straightened up in college, finishing it with a 3.2 GPA, but I'd estimate my high school GPA as about a full-point lower, in the low-2s. I never really dressed the punk part, although I might have made an inadvertent attempt because we were too poor at times for brand new clothes each school year.

I never got that "Nirvana" feeling from a kind-of-similar band, Rage Against The Machine. Both were about alienation, but Rage's political activism turned me off a bit. I honestly did not give an S about most of their causes; I just cared about the music. Nirvana didn't require thinking - It required yelling and screaming along. There is something cathartic about that.

Rage still had some great songs that I liked, primarily almost all of Evil Empire. That's still an album I love. However, I'd rather listen to any of the major Nirvana releases over it. Cobain was howling about pain on an individual level, which always strikes me as more personal than Rage's societal list of grievances.

Oh, and just wait for my future post, teasingly titled: The world's last Limp Bizkit fan.