Race, Riot Grrl, the Black Rock Movement, and Nirvana: The Teen Espirit Revisited Overflow

This all started with J*Davey.

The first sunny morning I experienced in San Francisco, right before I went to hang with the Wikipedians, I checked my email and was treated to a free download of Jack and Brook’s cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit“.

Little did I know that later in the year I would get a chance to try to contextualize the impact of Nevermind, and Nirvana, and I would do it in the pages of Spin thanks to my awesome editor Charles Aaron. (The magazine is on newsstands now, page 45, and in digital form.)

My pitch for a piece exploring the 90s, and cultural angst was accepted, and the opening paragraph of my pitch was so well received it ended up as the opening for the article. But when I sat down to research, I realized I was making some assumptions about writing on culture that weren’t going to bear out. And after interviewing J*Davey, Jeff Chang, Laina Dawes, Allison Wolfe, Simon Tam, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Frannie Kelley, and Felix Contreras, I realized I had an 8,000 word draft that had to fit into a 2,000 word space. So a lot of really amazing thoughts – especially thoughts that veered a bit too far from the angst theme we eventually settled on – ended up on the cutting room floor. What’s the deal with Generation X? What did NWA and Nirvana have in common? How did corporatization impact the grunge movement? Did the grunge movement push out black rockers? I could have written a dozen other articles based on the stories people told me, but alas, print has space limits.

Still, I wanted to share with you all a bit of the overflow. Fun quotes and discussions after the jump.

Jeff Chang is consistently amazing as an interview subject. Every time I’ve interviewed him, he’s just given me a solid 30 minutes of amazing quotes, which always makes me want to die when I have to edit them down. He’s in the final version of the piece, talking about the mood of so-termed Generation X (a designation he called “bullshit”) and and movements. But here’s what he said about Nirvana and NWA:

Nirvana and NWA, to me, are both sides of the same coin. So it wasn’t ever surprising to me that you have Nirvana fans listening to NWA and NWA fans listening to Nirvana. I am also not surprised that both came out of the West Coast, both movements kind of being ignored by the East Coast establishment. These movements came out and said “here’s who the fuck we are” so in a strange way they were kind of parallel.

Chang also talked about the moment he discovered Nirvana:

My Nevermind moment came before Nevermind. I saw Sonic Youth at the Cress Theater or something in Seattle.And this guy comes on stage with long hair, just trashing it out, and I was like “Who are these guys?” They were primal, really primal. They must have gone through all of Bleach. They played “Love Buzz” and it was one of those moments when you weren’t listening, you were inside the song. I didn’t see Kurt’s face the entire time – just his hair. But the emotional pull was so powerful, it was almost like you could feel inside Kurt’s pores – you were just there. And I still get that feeling now. Even when I listen to his music now, I get that feeling.

With Hendrix, you admire his virtuosity. But you never feel like you can be him. With Janis, you could never be her. With Jim, you never wanted to be him. They were all martyrs for the rock and roll cause, but they still felt distant. But when Kurt died, it was like we all died. You just wanted to protect him because you could have been him. His work was always rich because it was within reach, it was always accessible, emotionally accessible. He didn’t feel like a distant rock god or goddess. Kurt was ours.

A lot of people probably feel the same way about Kurt that they do about Tupac. Kurt was the person you could be, but Tupac was the kid down the street that you loved. Maybe it’s the same thing.

I also got to speak to Jack Davey and Brook D’leau of J*Davey, via Skype, which is always cool. Jack made it in, but I had to cut Brook, even though he had some interesting insights on our changing culture.

Brook D’Leau:

Page 1 of 5 | Next page