Hello Darling Ones,

I have some weird, vague beef with Dave Grohl of rock & roll superstar mega fame. If you don’t know who that is, I’m not going to explain it you can skip this one. The information will not be on the final.

Why do I have weird, vague beef with Dave Grohl? I don’t know. It’s something I cannot elucidate. His universal belovedness is, as the youth say, sus to me. Because I am curious I dove into the his memoir The Storyteller yesterday.

I admit I have a huge bias against memoirs written by male musicians because the ones I’ve read are frequently really, really boring (see: Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, and Bob Mould). However, I super loved both Willie Nelson & Jeff Tweedy’s memoirs, so why not give ol’ Grohl a shot?

Darling Ones, it was really charming and funny right up to the point where it pissed me off.

Surprisingly, I was only merely annoyed over the lack of female musicians mentioned. I come to expect this from men because men do not value art made by women. I’m at the point in the book where Kurt Cobain has died and thus far Grohl has mentioned (by my count) seven female musicians/bands with women in them.

Seven.

And of the seven female musicians he mentions one is Whitney Houston and he uses her in a shitty joke about how Kurt Cobain’s pre-Nevermind apartment was so derelict it was like, “Whitney Houston’s bathroom turned upside down.”

Fuck you, Dave Grohl. That is not funny. It’s too soon. It will always be too soon to make that kind of fucking insensitive, rude, purposeless unfunny joke. You’d think a guy whose bandmate died from his addictions would be a little more sensitive. The book didn’t need this joke. These was the third comparison of things Cobain’s cruddy apartment was like. How easy would it have been to leave it out?

Frankly, I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard more about this “joke.” I told myself I was being too sensitive, that my love for Whitney Houston won’t allow me to see this clearly. I thought maybe I was hangry or tired. I ate a cookie and tried to take a nap, but I was too pissed off to sleep.

This is a shitty joke that perfectly illustrates the casual cruelty of men. Of course I am furious.

This is the exact reason why when men point out they have daughters and therefore are feminists, actual feminists everywhere roll there eyes and clench their fists. Grohl has three daughters. He opens the book about how the music is in their DNA and he still can’t be assed to mention more than seven women thus far in his book. I cannot even count how many dudes/bands he mentions, but off the top of my head without looking: Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bad Brains, Black Flag, The Stooges, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Neil Young, Deep Purple, Naked Raygun, MC5, Nine Inch Nails, Bruce Springsteen.

Excuse me while I rage barf for 100 years.

Angrily yours,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

Last night The Youths came over for dinner. We ate pizza and watched the Stevie Nicks’ episode of VH1 Storytellers from 1998.* For the record, both of my viewing companions were born after this episode aired on VH1. In fact, I don’t even think either of them even knew what VH1 was. They for sure didn’t know what Storytellers was, because I told them.

Of The Youth’s many charms their love of Stevie Nicks is probably on the Top 10 list. They sat enthralled through the entire episode listening to Stevie Nicks talk about Prince and writing Landslide and Rhiannon during the same trip to Aspen.

After the show we sat and talked about music and Maxwell tattled on Sonya.

“She doesn’t like Pearl Jam,” he said.
I winced because that’s sacrilegious in our family.
“I don’t really like grunge,” she admitted.
“Her favorite grunge band is Babes in Toyland,” he said.
“THAT’S NOT GRUNGE!” Sonya and I shouted in unison.

The grunge discussion led us to watching Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York.

As the show started up I said to them, “I was your age when this came out.”

Both of their heads snapped to the right to look at me and as they stared at me with no small amount of horror my hair turned to mildew and my bones to dust.

“Wow,” Maxwell said. “I keep forgetting how long ago the 90s really were.”
“Yeah,” Sonya said. “They were like thirty years ago.”
“So the 70s were like fifty years ago?” Maxwell asked.
Sonya shook her head yes.

I would have said something by lips had curled into my toothless mouth as my skin wrinkled and turned grey right before my eyes.

Anciently yours,
Jodi

P.S. The song “All Apologies” always reminds me of my college newspaper days where we would constantly change the line “I wish I was like you easily amused” to be a kind of burn on whomever was in the room. It was nerdy and fun.

P.P.S I was inadvertently super social the last few days and today I’m paying the price in sheer exhaustion and foggy-headedness.

P.P.P.S. I also got super obsessed with finishing BFK’s magic lantern blanket and thus ended up watching a lot of TV and writing zero things.

 
*Thanks to the Great Socialist Streaming Revolt of June 2020, I now have all the things. Like all of them and one of them has a bunch of episodes of Unplugged & Storytellers and when I tell you it’s the best thing to happen to me since GSSRJ20, I am not kidding.

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Ten years ago I wrote about his death and a young man named Crazy Tony. Ten years ago I was more sentimental than I am now.

Even though today marks the day of Cobain’s actual death, it’s April 8, 1994 that is forever etched in my memory. That’s the day we found out. That’s the cloudy, grey day in Eau Claire, WI when The Spectator phone rang off the hook, everyone wanting to be sure the Arts & Entertainment editor for the campus newspaper heard the news.

Like so much of Cobain’s life it’s only in retrospect that the day has significance. At the time it was a shocking celebrity death. It didn’t have any weight or depth. It would take twenty-years of history, piles and piles of nostalgia to shape it into the generation-defining moment it is now.

Twenty years on I chafe and struggle under that definition. I don’t want it. It feels false, phony, something GenX would never stand for. After all, we’re the generation searching for something genuine, something real and true. Just look at our teen movies — Reality Bites, Empire Records. To me the eighties were about being accepted, often under the guise of popularity and the aughts were about connecting.

And yet here we are now forced into revering a false prophet whose work gains ever more significance the longer he is dead. One can’t help but wonder how Nirvana would fare in history had we experienced twenty years of them rather than a small handful.

I recently read Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross (who helped write my much beloved Heart memoir). I sought the book out not only because the author had done so well with Heart, but because I was curious. I was seeking something that could explain why the legend of Cobain and Nirvana endures, while so many of their cohorts have been relegated to a 90s timepiece sort of how Duran Duran will forever be the 80s, nothing more, nothing less.

You won’t find that in this book. Instead you’ll find an author needing people to bear witness to the fact that he was there, that he experienced this moment first hand, that people told him things (throughout he uses the revealing “So and so told me” rather than “So and so said.”), and you’ll find someone laying each of the 90s pop cultural signifiers at the feet of Kurt Cobain, regardless if they belong there or not.

At one point the book says, “On half dozen occasions [Kurt] wore dresses in concert, again playing off expected gender roles.” It’s this sentence that exemplifies how significance has been put on Cobain after his death. Since society, the media, whomever has decided that Cobain is a symbol, a voice of a generation, we will imbue all his acts with meaning and intent.

I roll my eyes at this whole gender role bullshit because Cobain is hardly the first rock and roller to wear dresses on stage. When Bob Stinson, another rocker who died before his time, wore dresses on stage a decade earlier it was chalked up to drunken buffonery. Kurt does the same thing and it’s a statement on feminism and gender roles? Are you kidding me?

According to the book, Kurt was also responsible for every mid-nineties fashion trend — Chuck Taylor’s, Doc Martens, flannel shirts, ripped jeans — not someone who wore the fashion of the times, but the person responsible for the look. Feel free to barf.

Perhaps the most damning, and why I chafe so much at the sainting of Kurt Cobain is when Cross discusses how “Nevermind” continues to gain in popularity even though the initial response to the album was enthusiastic but hardly orgasmic. He writes:

Those jumps — from being a three-star album upon release, to the third best of 1991, to four-star album online by the late nineties, to the best of the decade by 1999, before vaulting to the seventh-best album of all time a dozen years after it was first released — are absolute proof of Kurt Cobain’s enduring legacy.

Maybe this critical ladder climbing is proof. Or maybe it only proves that critics are easily swayed by popular opinion. Or maybe it says that we have a sort of rose-colored nostalgia for the artifacts of our youth. Maybe I’m a curmudgeon who enjoyed Nirvana on a casual basis who wants history to accurately reflect my very own feelings and memories of that time.

I suspect all these things are partially true. You know what else is true? I will continue to chafe at the idea of a beautiful, young blonde man forever defining a generation that has long outgrown him.

The post Voice of My Generation: 20 Years in the Shadow of Kurt Cobain’s Death appeared first on I Will Dare.

Lorde, for those of you who live under rocks different than the ones I live under, is a teen pop music sensation from New Zealand. Her song “Royals” topped the Alternative Music charts awhile back, a thing that a solo female artist hadn’t done since months before Lorde was actually born. The last song by a woman to hit #1 on that chart? “Mother, Mother” by Tracy Bonham.

I am going to put aside the ridiculously sexist bullshit fact that only two women have topped the alternative music charts in sixteen years, because I want to, instead, talk about the NPR article that made quite a splash in my Twitter stream yesterday before Nelson Mandela died.

Before I begin to explain how very much Lorde is not the “Nirvana of now” I want to say three things. First, she probably is the “sound of teen spirit” as the headline proclaims. That’s quite different from being the Nirvana of now.

Second, a few weeks ago at Family Dinner, Sister #2 gave a scathing, frothing, and hilarious diatribe about how she was so sick of people touting Lorde as some sort of class warrior that she was going to blow a gasket. This diatribe involved lyric quoting, song playing, and many utterance of the word bullshit. Also, crap.

Shortly after that diatribe, Barb Abney a DJ at The Current made a rather droll comment after playing “Team” about Lorde being over getting told to throw her hands in the air. Barb’s comment was something to the effect of, listen honey, I’ve been told to throw my hands up in the air for a bajillion years and that shit never gets old, because it is fun. So there (I may have exaggerated some that).

It’s hard to know where to start with Ann Powers’ mess of an argument for Lorde being Nirvana of now.

Before you get to the Nirvana argument you have to get past the sexist language. Powers tosses around words like ing?nue and compares Lorde and her popstar compatriots to various Barbie Dolls. Gross. Then there’s just the illogical nonsense blah that attempts to sound intellectual but means nothing. “Textbook bohemian nonconformity” being one of them.

Then she tries to draw parallels between Nirvana and Lorde, those being that both acts are, geographically, far from “pop’s power centers.” Both had had guidance from seasoned music producers. And, they both displaced more popular popstars on the charts. Nirvana with Michael Jackson, and Lorde with, I guess, Miley Cyrus, though really how can you even begin to compare Miley with Michael? Unseating the King of Pop is quite different than unseating the Momentary Queen of Pop Culture. That right there, kind of shoots her argument in the foot, don’t you think?

At this point, Powers tries to argue that “Royals” suggests pop can have deeper layers while Nirvana changed the face of Rock & Roll.

I’m not a Nirvana person. I’ve made that claim a million times. I’m Team Pearl Jam forever, not that you can’t be both, but back in 1993 it didn’t seem like that. However, personal feelings aside, you can’t deny that Nirvana changed things. They changed things in a big way, not just musically, but culturally. Grunge was more than a new subsection of rock & roll, it was the sound of sea change in our culture and how we viewed the world. It infected everything — fashion, music, movies. Even if you hated the music the zeitgeist it soundtracked was inescapable.

Is Lorde having that same moment? Is she disrupting all that came before? Doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t feel like things are changing. It doesn’t feel as if we’re on the cusp of a whole new way of seeing things, hearing a voice that is saying something new in a whole new way.

And it seems as though even Powers’ doesn’t wholly believe her own argument. She uses phrases like “she has potential to make more complex statements;” “a self-possessed poise that feels game-changing;” “A little time will tell. . .”

And that right there is the difference and why Lorde is not the Nirvana of now. Nirvana changed things. They did it. It’s in the past. Lorde might change things. She has the potential. Time will tell. But until she does, she’s the Lorde of now and nothing else. Which is, as far as I can tell, an okay thing to be.

P.S. I didn’t touch any of the cultural appropriation and racism issues that make up roughly 1/2 of Powers’ article. She has some smart, thought-provoking things to say about that. However, I don’t think the Nirvana claim and the appropriation stuff hang together well. It’s like she jammed two separate pieces into one sort of messy article.

The post Lorde Might Smell Like Teen Spirit, but that Doesn’t Make Her Nirvana of Now appeared first on I Will Dare.

whenever i think of nirvana, i think of that song, the one kurt cobain didn’t even write. for me that’s nirvana. and when i hear that song, i see crazy tony in the middle of the living room floor sitting on one foot, his forehead resting on one bent knee, one hand on the back of his head, and he’s rocking slowly back and forth — singing that song. i sat on a chair not three feet from him, drunk and high. i couldn’t take my eyes off crazy tony, it was a car wreck and i just had to rubberneck. he sounded like a wounded animal, it was mesmerizing.

a lot of people were afraid of crazy tony. he had that loose cannon air about him. he had lots of tattoos, spiderwebs on his elbows and such. he had done some time, perhaps in juvvie, i can’t quite remember this was 1995 after all. he was tall and thin, and wore a blue hooded sweatshirt back before hoodies were the ubiquitous wardrobe choice of emo kids everywhere. he had short black hair that stood up all over the place. crazy tony had those broken eyes, those eyes that aren’t quite connected right like charles manson and perry farrell.

crazy tony was nothing but nice to me. i met him through amy skal, my gravelly-throated beautiful roommate at the time.

that night, after a rousing evening at the local watering holes, we went back to our place to get some pizza. andy, amy’s boyfriend, put in the nirvana cd– the mtv unplugged one, and crazy tony immediately, vehemently and actively demanded that he play the “in the pines” song. i watched from my spot in the corner has tony curled in on himself, sinking to the floor. i listened as he moaned out the song, his voice filled with the kind of pain i had never experienced. it was the most moving, mesmerizing vocal performance i had ever been privvy to. once the song ended, tony popped up from the floor as if nothing had happened, and asked if the pizza was here yet. it was like he was waking from a trance.

so today, on the 10th anniversary of kurt cobain’s death that’s what i’m thinking about. i’m thinking of that magical boy with so much pain i called crazy tony. remembering that night and my wonder at all the life inside of tony is much more fun than remembering the sad death of the man whose music was supposed to help define my generation.

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