Posted By BillHeise on August 26, 2009

In 1991, Nirvana burst on to the music scene with their song “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The group’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain, was subsequently crowned “the spokesman for his generation.” This is the sort of thing that is a product of the 1960s, where people could plausibly speak for an entire generation. It was, after all, the “Pespi generation.” This generational spokesperson had carried forth by Michael Jackson, whose “We Are the World” had made Michael Jackson the spokesman for his generation. As is well known, Nirvana displaced Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, at the top of the Billboard charts. The torch had been passed.

But one of the things about Nirvana was that, unlike Michael Jackson, who pursued fame, Kurt Cobain was uncomfortable with the burden that had been placed upon him. And I think this is because the music of Kurt Cobain marked another point on the slippery slope away from the 1960s idealism. Modernism had been the watchword in the 1960s; but by 1991, postmodernism taken its place. And postmodernism was not compatible with the notion of Kurt Cobain (or indeed anyone else) becoming THE spokesman for a generation.

There are several reasons for this change. The world had gone from watching the monolithic news as a monolithic group (as a single generation) to Generation X, a group who believed that marketing was an attempt to co-opt their mind. They wanted maximum choice, and the world had been reconfigured to give them that choice. [I remember reading Business Week's cover article on the newly recognized phenomenon of Generation X. The authors of the article were simply mystified and complained that it was no longer possible to market products to an entire generation that once. Now marketers had to delve into niches.]

However, no one told MTV, which was still operating as a virtual monopoly on “what the kids were watching.” And so, when Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994, three years after achieving his enormous fame, the MTV crowd went into overdrive, attempting to convince “the kids” that suicide wasn’t the answer.

They missed the point.

The lyrics all of Smells Like Teen Spirit are filled with ideas that have not been represented in mainstream pop before.

Load up on guns
Bring your friends
Its fun to lose
And to pretend

The burden of the individual in the 1960s was that they had surpassed their father’s generation. But Cobain expresses his feeling that he’s “stupid.” What is more, he focuses, not on a higher level of being (see my discussion of Hare Krishna in Hair) but on his body. And his body feels “contagious.” And all he wants for his body for someone to come and “entertain us.” This was an extremely passive posture in regards to the 1960s.

And yet, in many ways, it was a rejection of the collectivist notions of “the Pepsi generation” in favor of a much more individual, and individually-created, form of personhood. Rather than becoming involved in a collective, Generation X wanted to individually create their identities. Of course, the fact that Kurt Cobain was such a hero to these young kids that MTV had to warn people that suicide was not a very good option upon his death in 1994 meant that there was, perhaps, a bit of philosophical contradiction at the heart of the postmodern movement, as I had been at the heart of the modern movement.

Graduate School

I was in graduate school in 1991, and like most people I was gradually becoming postmodern. I, too, wanted to create my own individuality, rather than simply joining a collective. However, like most people in 1991, I was not exactly sure what the boundaries were being postmodern. Over time, those boundaries have gotten much clearer.

First of all, the Modernist obsession with transcending language to the “word behind words” [See my exposition of Joseph Campbell] had given way to a focus on words themselves. Jacques Derrida was primarily responsible for this “linguistic turn” (although I would place it more squarely with Wittgenstein). Derrida believed that words attempted to be logocentric, but were burdened by the impossibility of achieving a firm logos in the logosphere (yes, it’s a word). Instead, we look up words in dictionary we find that words point only to other words in an infinitely referential chain.

Secondly, the loss of a firm of meaning to words meant that they slipped their references very easily. Cobain obliges us nicely, I think:

A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido

He slips his words again in his repetition of “Hello.” Things that were once supposed to give us a sense of belonging to a group that was bent on raising us above our father’s generation were now giving away to “How low.” It was another version of slipping down into what is lowest in us: the libido.

But the most important thing about Cobain’s postmodernism was the lack of a center for the individual. The notion of the death of the human had been given life by another postmodernist: Michel Foucault. The aesthetic principle traveled farther than the “merely” human, and if we were going to pursue the aesthetic principle we would have to distance ourselves from ourselves. This caused, in the critical community, a flight from the human towards the aesthetic principle. It was yet another damnation of the principles of Modernism. In individuals themselves were not part of the critical community, it fostered the dissolution of the individual. We were no longer carriers of our humanity, which we could ecstatically declare. We had only in ourselves the libido.

Michael Jackson, who had been raised in the 1960s was completely comfortable pursuing fame. [And on a side note, if you believe him, he was never very interested in his libido.] Kurt Cobain, who was born in 1967, was less certain of his ability to transcend his individuality. And this, I think, was what caused the rupture in his system. He no longer had them confidence in pursuit of “logocentrism”—or whatever you want to call those larger collective goals. All that was left to him was the libidinal pursuit of entertainment. With fame came money, with money came freedom. But neither money nor freedom could not answer the question of you should do with your freedom once you have obtained. And Kurt Cobain, being saddled with the mantle of spokesperson for his generation, could not handle the pressure.

I believe what happens to Kurt Cobain was a tragedy, but I believe that the major points of Cobain’s suicide was missed by “the media,” which was still trying to come to terms with the niche forces that that would ultimately overtake them. Cobain’s suicide marked the end of the era of the collective. And with it the modern hope that we can collectively solve the problems of humanity was dashed.

Postmodern Revival of the Postmodern Song

That’s not to say, however, that people didn’t try.

Nina Hagen, a leftover from the Modern age, attempted to “poetize” Cobain’s All Apologies” by inserting her lyrics:

Why do you treat me like a dog?
You should treat me like God.

Treat her like God? Those lyrics have nothing to do with Kurt Cobain’s intention, which has much more to do with his timidity in the public sphere, as he keeps repeating the superficial mantra “all apologies.” He doesn’t want to be god. These interpolations are, instead, attempts to come to terms with “the new” using the Modernist tools of old, which had promised to be able to incorporate all of life in its (supposedly) comprehensive view of the world. However, they tend to raise individuals beyond their individual status to a level of “gods.” But, with the “new artist” Cobain, the Modernist tools of old themselves were dying.

We can see this fact best, perhaps, in the work of Patti Smith, who also attempted to “rescue” Kurt Cobain’s lyrics from despair which an interpolation. In the middle of her repetion of Cobain’s lyrics, she adds:

The empty hand of hand of innocence,
Transfusing street of the sorrows
And children of the wood hounded,
Shredding all bales, unwinding
All sheets of the dead world,
[Drumming?], ov’rturning tables
Laden with silver sacrificial birds,
Beating goatskin drums,
Advancing with hands outstretched;
And we keep filling them with mercury,
Nitrate, asbestos
Baby bombs, blasting blue
Scavengers, picking through the ashes,
Children of the mills,
Children of the junkyards
Sleepy, little fuzzy little rats, haunted,
Paint-sniffing, stoned out of their shaved heads,
Forgotten, foraging,
Mystical children, foul-mouthed,
Glassy-eyed, hallucinating.

Now I love a good banjo riff as well as the next guy, but I find her interpolations at odds with Cobain’s intentions. “The empty hand of innocence” is a play, of course, on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” which conservatives are in the habit of praising. And she drags us back in time to the winding sheet of the dead from Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle,” to the “dark satanic mills” of William’s Blake’s “Jerusalem.” She has, in her interpolation, rituals of sacrifice: “silver sacrificial birds” who beat “goatskin drums.” She was attempting to place him into a ritual context, a context that had been forged in the Vietnam era of “forgotten men” who perform an “anti-ritual” dance.

But all of this is absent from the much more nihilistic, much less hopeful lyric that Kurt Cobain actually wrote himself. And this is why, I think, he fled life itself. Not, as Patti Smith would do, into a useful metaphor of denial (of the things that other, lesser minds hold dear). No, Kurt Cobain had not built his identity on a principle of negation. He was not thinking of himself as an entertainer of others. He was an individual who looked outside himself for someone to come and “entertain us.”

This is the opposite of the people he displaced: people like Michael Jackson and Patti Smith. Those people, however much they varied in their approach to Modernism, had sought fame. But Kurt Cobain was bewildered by it. He fled it by fleeing life itself.

Postmodern Despair

The postmodern world is a world in which the individual is humble enough not to raise himself up to the level of God and where people are forced to act out of their individuality alone. And this individuality, which had served the Modernists so well, was starting to show its cracks. Some people, like Nina Hagen and Patti Smith, attempted to go backwards in time to shore up the dying efforts. But in doing so they miss the larger point. The modern is dying. And we have nothing yet put in its place.

And not even the valiant efforts of Paul Anka can rescue us:

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