The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (19 page)

OLD YEAR’S END

TINYLUCKYGENIUS, December 2007

No year-end lists to contribute to for any publication this year. Budget constraints, art constraints, being freelance are most of the reasons. It’s perfectly fine, because “best” is disturbingly open-ended, and what difference does a year make when art is currently only truly divisible into pre- or post-9/11, pre- or post-Katrina, and—save for that effluvient noise coming from down the hall—it’s all popular music, and there is less meaning and more money than ever in anything you might be tempted to call underground. More people getting more rich on a myth is a terribly old story I’m not much interested in anyhow. It’s also perfectly fine because I’m not sure I can name a couple 2007 LPs that I listened to again ‘n’ again, all the way through, for pleasure, that brought me pleasure, that I felt like I understood, or could campaign behind.

Part of the reason behind that was simply, or maybe sadly(?), constraints of the job. This year, almost all of the money I made writing was in blurbs, charticles and show previews that are between 300 and 80 words instead of essays. I had to write way more stuff, but with not much space to extrapolate on big ideas (if the band even has them) or theories (if I even can conjure them), and what I write is more about the “good vs. bad,” interesting vs. not, and then make a joke or two. How I make money necessitated a change in what I listen to and how I listen to it in 2007. I ain’t complaining; I’m lucky to squeeze paychecks out of it. In the meanwhile, look for my byline on the inflight mag next time you fly from Duluth to Phoenix.

Nonetheless, I’m not bummed about the non-existence of a year-end list. Hierarchy is bunk. Plus, you already know that the M.I.A. record is serious business, though her live show made me feel like she’s a polemicized Dan Deacon for those who are down with
othering
and have the mp3 blog to prove it. I think PJ Harvey making a record from the POV of a Victorian-era ghost baby is really interesting. Best? As best as the zillion Lil Wayne songs that I downloaded this summer?
I have no idea
. Probably not. As best as Mika Miko doing “Attitude”? Defs not as best as how Mama Chancla stunk
after
singing “Attitude.” I do not know if Radiohead is best because I haven’t downloaded it because I can’t decide how much I want to pay for it. Not sure if Radiohead has as much fuck-the-man bestness as the mail order-only edition of 100 cassettes that Rjyan and Roby put out. Or the Landlord demo-cassette that the kid at the farmers’ market passed me. Is free, invisible, green, non-corpo action from a band that makes approx. a million dollars a show or free, hand-to-hand, traditional sharing of
the people’s medium
* (*pre-Internet version) more of a BEST remix of anti-capitalist ideal? You can’t really tie best. Another best is the differential between No Age on record and No Age on the stage which revealed that America’s favorite Angeleno cool dude dual/duel/duo is
making punk a threat again
. I am not sure how it’s “best” compared with when I went to see Watain and their corpse paint had so much realistic peeling skin that it made me gag a little and leave after a few songs because they were an actually-scary black metal band. Though were their costumes as best as the kid at Fiery Furnaces’ Halloween show dressed as a furnace on fire? What is best between scariest and charming effort? Watching Tim Kinsella turn over a new solo leaf, as a singer-singer songwriter, baring all and inspiring a very mortal tremble amongst the 22 or 34 people watching on a Free Monday at the Bottle, his married/buried allegories the most powerful take since “All Apologies”; I had to leave because it was so good. I couldn’t take it. Another song more and there’d be some unmooring of internal paradigm. There was also that backyard party Bird Names show which was a wretched best—I felt my age ruefully and deeply and then during the show, suddenly, an epoch lifted amongst the sweat and flashing xmas lights.

Yeasayer might of made the best of the TV on the Radio rip-off albums of 2007, but that dude’s got a fretless bass, so I might have to defer to Dragons of Zynth, who have one great song that out-TV-on-the-Radio’s TV on the Radio. Like most people, I also like the bands that sound like my favorite band. Generally, the last thing I want to admit—that I’ll settle for a cheap imitation. As a best, it was not as best as Rickie Lee Jones singing about the garden of Gethsemane, or the Michael Dracula album. Michael Dracula is a girl who sings like she is very high, cold and careful. Static doom and a certain intransigence is why I think people like, say, Wooden Shjips, but 10-minute songs are a lot to ask of people, and I’m still not feeling hippydroneshit as the new punxsound, so I go for Michael Dracula. I also thought that Lavender Diamond was going to be best, but I keep forgetting to listen to it a third time. Those first two? Wonderful. It’ll make you feel like a virgin again.

NEVERMIND ALREADY:
NIRVANA’S 20TH ANNIVERSARY BOXSET

Chicago Reader
, September 2011

Kurt Cobain died for somebody’s sins, but not mine. The anointed grunge Buddha is as big now as he’s ever been, which is to say nearly ubiquitous. When
Nevermind
hit number one, less than four months after its release, it was selling roughly 1.2 million copies a month. No one sells like that anymore and no one ever will again, but Nirvana is still popular—and Cobain even more so. Within the past five years he’s knocked Elvis out of the number one spot on
Forbes
’ list of top-earning dead celebrities; you can own him as a figurine or on a lunch box, or you can buy pre-ratty, Cobain-edition Converse and cultivate your own aura of junkie manqué.

It’s hard to believe that 20 years have gone by since
Nevermind
came along and changed everything. And it’s hard to imagine an album doing that now, even if we had a fully-functioning record industry. Nirvana’s supersize ghost lingers in our hearts, and every few years the corpo-coffers get to clangin’ hungrily for every last penny in the pockets of anyone that’s ever had a head-shop Cobain poster pinned to their bedroom wall.

Nirvana retrospectives and reissues to date include the live
From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah
(1996), a no-nonsense best-of simply called
Nirvana
(2002), the weighty, rarities set
With the Lights Out
(2004), a best-of culled from that set called
Sliver: The Best of the Box
(2005),
Live at Reading
(2009), and vinyl reissues over the past two years of
Bleach
,
Nevermind
,
In Utero
and
Unplugged
. Now, with ‘90s grunge nostalgia at high tide, Universal is releasing one of the bone-driest offerings yet. The “super deluxe” four-CD/one-DVD 20th-anniversary version of
Nevermind
, which comes out on Tuesday, is built around two different mixes of the album—as if anyone listening on earbuds on a city bus is going to be able to tell them apart, or cares to A/B them. Does anyone imagine that kids deafened by two decades of increasingly shitty mastering and overcompression will even be able to even hear the difference between the familiar Andy Wallace radio polish (most of disc one) and the initial Butch Vig mix (all of disc three), which still has some punk blood coursing through its bass rumble?

The Vig mix made the rounds as a bootleg not long after
Nevermind
hit big, as did the April 1990, pre-Grohl demos recorded at Smart Studios (part of disc two), and reveal nothing except that Chad Channing was the inferior drummer. There are eight boom-box tracks from the band’s rehearsal space (most of the rest of disc two), but their novelty is short-lived. Who wants to listen to any band’s scuzzed-up cassette-tape demos? Every track that wasn’t on the original release of
Nevermind
—the BBC sessions, the B sides—has already been well circulated as a bootleg or seen proper release in a better form. And what’s on disc four and the accompanying DVD? The reliable filler of live recordings.
Zzzzz
and good night.

Nevermind
is a great record, but lord, what a boring thing to offer fans. There’s not even any fresh meat for the obsessives who go for this sort of thing. Yet this bottom-of-the-barrel commemoration also carries wonderful news: there’s nothing left to scrape up. The lost tracks, alternate versions, outtakes, live sets, piss takes and demos have all been packaged and turned out. His former labels have had 17 years to weave those scraps into dollars—and they’re clearly diluting what few bits are left in order to make it last. Universal is stacking up the editions of
Nevermind
for a last hurrah, with not just the “super deluxe” set but also a two-disc “deluxe” version and a straight-up single-CD remastered reissue of the album. Oh, and you can buy the DVD by itself, too. This is the beginning of the end—though if you squint, you can see the “Heart-Shaped Box in an Actual Box Shaped Like a Heart 25th Anniversary Boxset” and “Nevermind in Mono” galloping this way on the horizon.

It’s funny, this latest
Nevermind
coming down the pike two weeks after
Winterland
, a five-CD/nine-LP box of live Jimi Hendrix recordings from 1968. Hendrix is, of course, the most repackaged and reissued artist we’ve got—a model provider for the dying major labels. Hardly a holiday shopping season has passed in recent memory when he wasn’t revivified in some slick, immodest box. Nirvana, as this pitiful set makes clear, doesn’t have such an infinitely expandable catalog. Cobain is not our Jimi—he’s our Jim. Nirvana, punk bona fides be damned, has become an analogue to The Doors for today’s misunderstood, stoned teenagers: a died-young druggie poet-totem.

Cobain’s nasty, sudden exit at the height of his fame ensures we will always wish for more. These endless reissues count on that. These boxes and anniversary editions prey upon the universal, inchoate wish to relive the singular moment of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That feeling of being possessed by its pure abandon, its stuttering pound, the implacable tension between verse and chorus, the feral grain of Cobain’s voice. There is not a one among us that cannot pinpoint where we were and what we were doing, what we felt hearing it for the first time. That wish is there in anyone who ever heard Nirvana and loved them. But you never get as high as the first time.

This is clearly understood by every company that owns a piece (labels, publishing houses), everyone with a claim to stake (Love, Grohl, Novoselic), and everybody with some marketable crumb to pimp out (Michael Azerrad, for instance, has made plenty of hay with his Cobain interview tapes). And Cobain, whose heart once beat heavy with Olympia-bred punk dogma, isn’t here to refuse any of it.
He’s dead—so fuck him
. In life he was a commodity, in death, even more so. As Everett True wrote in 2007’s
Nirvana: The Biography
, the intervention staged shortly before Cobain’s suicide focused as much on getting him into rehab as it did on cajoling him into headlining Lollapalooza. Now he’s no longer an impediment to anyone’s potential revenue stream.

It’s easy to speculate about what Cobain and Nirvana would have become had he lived. The band’s next album could’ve been a
Chinese Democracy
-like fiasco, especially embarrassing in light of Cobain’s original genius-flash. He could’ve gone Corgan and released music with steadily diminishing returns for a decade plus. He could’ve joined the Foo Fighters. He could’ve taken the Reznor path, “retiring” after a steady, respectable career. (Who knew then that Eddie Vedder would turn out to be the real punk among Cobain’s grunge-era “peers?”) Revisiting
Nevermind
is like flexing a phantom limb made up of Nirvana records that never were. That’s all it means now, all that’s left—fantasy. The tomb is empty; let the dead buy the dead.

PART SEVEN: STRICTLY BUSINESS

PUNK IS DEAD! LONG LIVE PUNK!:
A REPORT ON THE STATE OF TEEN SPIRIT FROM THE MOBILE SHOPPING MALL THAT IS THE VANS WARPED TOUR

Chicago Reader
, August 2004

Teenagers are the most powerful audience in America, and this summer the Vans Warped Tour—which began June 25 in Houston and ends today, August 20, in Boston—celebrated ten years of unwavering devotion to this principle. At each stop anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 teenagers converged on a parking lot, a stadium, or an amphitheater, wading deep into the froth of pop-cultural commerce that they drive with their fickle tastes. In exchange for the $18 to $30 that a Warped ticket cost, the sunburned throngs got eight hours and five dozen bands of accessible punk, hardcore and hip-hop.

Yet, no impartial observer could conclude that Warped is first and foremost about the music. It’s about teenagers and their disposable income. Punk in its primal form is, of course, an anti-commercial genre, but Warped has turned money into the medium of cultural affiliation here, as it already was everywhere else. What’s being sold is an entrée into punk, and most of the fans are too new to the music’s ideals to understand that they’re buying a version of fuck-all rebellion that’s been repackaged by businesspeople. Or maybe they do understand, and they come because they think it’s the only version left. Warped is a mammoth shopping and marketing experience, a towering conglomerated product of the Clear Channel Age, and though the music is the initial draw, purchases are the way the kids express themselves to themselves, to the bands, and to each other.