Nevermind the Memory Bliss

Here’s a no-brainer: Life as we know it began with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind album. Wait, that’s not really true, is it? Well, here’s what I do know: Nevermind is the oldest CD I own. Granted, it’s not the first album I ever owned—that honor goes to the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill cassette I had in fifth grade or, if you want to get technical, a Pac-Man read-along record or something like that—nor is it the first CD I ever bought (more on that later). It is, however, the oldest CD that is still in my collection. That being the case, and if you accept the fact that the CD era didn’t truly begin until the 1990’s, then Nevermind is my logical starting point for any discussion of 1990’s music.

In many ways, the aesthetic qualities that I associate with early 1990’s music are sort of encoded here and were presented to me for the first time: buzzing guitars, irony, black humor, oblique one-word song titles, bi-polar quiet/loud song structures and sarcastic/passionate singing, cut-and-paste lyrics, tattered army green t-shirts, long unwashed hair with magenta streaks, blunt references to human biology. That famous wry cover image of the naked baby swimming for the dollar along with the meat/monkey collage on the back and the image of Kurt giving the finger provided the complimentary packaging for this exciting new thing.

Before we go further into that, let’s go back in time a bit to the year of our Lord and MC Hammer: 1990. The dawn of the 1990’s. I remember spending New Year’s Eve 1989 with my sister and her dance school classmates at their instructor’s house. We probably watched Bon Jovi videos. It was the first time I was fully conscious of a decade shift—I was barely three when 1980 hit—and I sort of remember mulling over the word “1990” silently in my head when the proverbial new year’s ball dropped and thinking that things already felt different in some indescribable way.

A description of the 1990 version of myself: I was 13 years old, listened to assorted hair metal and R&B pop music on cassettes and Paula Abdul was my imaginary girlfriend. I also had no complaints whatsoever about what turned out to be perhaps the worst year in popular music ever. Some musical highlights: Vanilla Ice, Wilson Phillips, Damn Yankees, the aforementioned MC Hammer, C+C Music Factory, that Queensrÿche ballad that sounded like Pink Floyd, the Pretty Woman soundtrack with that Roxette ballad and that freakin’ “King of Wishful Thinking” song. It seemed as if a bland, adult contempo aesthetic was everywhere, along with flat, monotonous dance pop songs that all sounded like they used the same drum machine pattern as Snap’s “The Power”. Popular music was wearing shoulder-padded suits and Z. Cavaricci pleated, tapered pants and, let’s face it, so was I.¹

1991 had nowhere to go but up in terms of quality, but let me stress again that a lack of quality was not something that I complained about at the time. No, I was perfectly content with my Poison and Color Me Badd tapes. In the spring, my friend Aaron and I would have intense critical debates—invariably involving the use of the word “suck”—over which was the better song: Extreme’s “More Than Words” or LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out”. Now, the latter song is pretty much a hip-hop classic, but I was championing the former. Yes, my first favorite song of 1991 was “More Than Words” and the likelihood of finding me in my bedroom listening to Z95 on my little gray and teal green Sears stereo, waiting to hear the song so I could fantasize about singing it to my forever girl Paula, was very great.

In late September 1991, I turned 15 and my mother was kind enough to buy me my first CD player from Montgomery Wards. Of course, I had to buy a CD as well. What did I choose as my first CD ever? As luck would have it, a certain classic and iconic album called Nevermind had just been released. However, a crappy Bell Biv Devoe remix album had also just been released, which was what I decided to purchase (although I recall the pickings were very slim at Wards and their entire CD selection was housed on a single highly disorganized industrial shelf).

Thus, the CD era officially began for me. My collection quickly grew into a tall stack of jewel cases and consisted of mostly lite hip-hop/R&B pop or dance music like EMF, the KLF, etc. I also belatedly discovered the music of Prince. I bought his 1991 album Diamonds and Pearls—admittedly one of Prince’s worst albums in retrospect—and grew increasingly fascinated with the Purple One. I began buying up his 80’s catalog as well as snapping up any CD singles I could find. This was the first time I intentionally began building a collection of a single artist. This was important in that it was sort of my first step into becoming more than just a guy who bought music because he liked a song or two. This was the beginning of connoisseurship. Prince seemed like a DIY auteur who created his own unique oeuvre and managed to be simultaneously weird and accessible, especially on grimier, less polished magnum opuses like Sign O’ the Times. The sexual nature of his lyrics never really registered with me as much as his range. The records possessed an anything-goes quality and a wide spectrum of sound and color, and I began searching for these qualities in other music.

Enter P.M. Dawn. Their debut album Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience became my first favorite album of the CD era and I proclaimed it as such, despite its ridiculous title. I was obsessed with their hit song “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” and played it constantly on my little Sears stereo. Although fairly dated now as far as production goes, I have to admit that the song still has a fetching combination of lush, psychedelic texture and pop melody that sets it apart from other pop hits of the era. Along with simple nostalgia, those qualities allow me to admit my teenage love of that song with far less cringing than expected.²

As far as I could tell, this was it. My teenage musical identity was going to be defined by hip-hop psychedelia and remixed slow jams and old Prince albums and “Unbelievable”.³ Then I caught the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video on MTV.

It’s common to refer to Nevermind as this Big Bang moment where everything changed in an instant. I suppose it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but the zeitgeist of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” spread very quickly in just a few months.⁴

What was it about “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that was so great? Why did it have such an immediate and seemingly universal impact? The video had a dirty brownish-yellow tint similar to beer and proved to be just as intoxicating, and the song dropped power chords like nothing else at the time. Power chords! I don’t think I even knew the term yet. I would anticipate seeing that guy tapping his Chuck Taylor every time I turned on MTV. It was like taking a bite out of a nice, crisp apple after eating nothing but junk food for your entire life; your body instinctively knows it’s healthy and thanks you with endorphins. It really was like that. Obviously, this was a common reaction as the massive, unexpected success of the song and the record wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Ah, the record. On Christmas morning 1991, I finally received it as a gift from my parents and I remember being sprawled across my bed in pajamas, carefully tearing open the now long-extinct CD longbox—this was done carefully because the cardboard covers of longboxes made great little posters for bedroom doors—and proceeding to listen to and absorb Nevermind. It was the first CD I put on while everyone was getting ready to go to church.⁵ The timing was perfect as it was right when my obsession with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was reaching a fever pitch.⁶ Now I had the source.

Nevermind really sold me on the textural beauty of electric guitar. No rock music I had heard up to that point had registered with me on a textural level. The fuzzed-out serpentine bass on “Breed”, the watery notes of “Come As You Are”, the gargantuan roar of “In Bloom”, the blistering opening shred of “Territorial Pissings”—that last one being the first song I had ever heard that I thought was “punk”—all sounded like some form of electrical energy charging the air in the room. It was as if those overlapping cyan and yellow halftones of wavy water on the inside cover were oozing out of my tinny little Sears stereo speakers, like static or Jack Kirby dots coagulating into globules of liquid sound. My speakers should have been glowing.⁷

If I had to pick a favorite track now, it might be “Drain You”. I always thought the jangly, immediately catchy-as-hell opening line of the verse—when it’s just Kurt before the bass and drums kick in—was the most Beatlesque moment on the record. Then, of course, he hits the distortion pedal and lets loose with trademark physiology-obsessed lyrics featuring infections and fluids and lines like “the water is so yellow, I’m a healthy student” and “you’re my vitamins”. Vitamins! I’m pretty certain I had never heard a song with the word “vitamins” in it, much less one that then used the phrase “chew your meat for you, pass it back and forth” as a chorus. If that’s not enough, there’s the nervous, flange-y instrumental section in the middle of the song that builds up into a thunderous, screaming crescendo then returns triumphantly to the first verse. Seriously, how could this alien monster of a record not stick its whale-sized hooks into a pubescent boy who was rocking dance moves to a Boyz II Men tape just a month or so earlier? Bell Biv Devoe this was certainly not.

Mildly amusing side anecdote: I owned the CD for over a year before I discovered the hidden track “Endless Nameless”. I don’t think I even knew what a hidden track was; remember this was the dawn of the CD era and hidden tracks had yet to become the ubiquitous gimmick they later became. I was aware that the CD would continue to track silently after the last song but thought it was just a glitch. There’s a part in that song that sounds like Kurt is shouting “Pearl Jam/I’m sorry, man”, which I know is incorrect but nevertheless cracked me up every time.

To make an oddball analogy, this record sort of reminded me of a rock collection, and I don’t mean “rock” as in “rock’n’roll”, although the record certainly is a collection of rock’n’roll. I mean as in a collection of stones and gems glued onto cardboard and labeled. This was how looking at the track listing sort of seemed. Perhaps it was elemental song titles like “Lithium” that gave this impression. Nevermind seemed like a collection of rare metallic ores, all shiny and possessing mysterious properties.

Mysterious is a good word. It’s something I miss in regards to music, the idea that a record could have a sense of mystery. In the Internet and iTunes age, it’s all too easy to preview tracks before they’re even released and do instant and exhaustive research on any artist, song or album. You can usually watch their videos any time you like on YouTube. These were not options in 1991. Alternative rock radio didn’t really exist locally yet—Q101 was still an adult contemporary station in 1991—so the only time I ever heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on MTV. When I first listened to Nevermind on that Christmas morning, it was with virgin ears. I had no idea what the other songs sounded like outside of descriptions I’d read in magazines.

Speaking of mystery, Nirvana eschewed a proper lyrics sheet in the Nevermind packaging in favor of a cut-and-paste poem that samples lines from the various songs. There are two lines in there, however, that are not actually in any of the songs but were the ones that stuck out the most to me: “The second coming came in last and out of the closet” and “At the end of the rainbow and your rope”. I always interpreted “coming” as a sexual rather than Biblical reference, which was probably intentional, and the juxtaposition of “rainbow” and “rope” conjured up images of Lucky Charms cereal and nooses, which is perfectly appropriate.

For the record, I also want to note that the music of Nirvana and Nevermind didn’t appeal to me because I was a ‘disaffected youth’ or because I related to its ‘angst’. I’ve read so many articles about how Nevermind had this massive appeal because it was speaking to a supposedly troubled generation of outcast kids from broken homes. Personally, I don’t think that’s true at all. I had a pretty cushy middle-class family life and I could not in any way describe myself as an outcast. I had no real 'angst' beyond garden-variety teenage puberty stuff. I think the music appealed to me and so many people because of its sheer melodic awesomeness. It truly is a perfect 90’s pop album—yeah, that’s right, pop—and is far more fun and smart and gleefully defiant than dark and depressed. It was uplifting, and listening to it was akin to charging up a battery in that thing that is often referred to as a soul.

Rainbows, nooses, fluids and infections, cyan/yellow energy globules, mysterious rock collections. Oozing sound through glowing speaker mesh. Electrically charged air. Buzzing guitars, middle fingers, gigantic riffs and sing-along melodies. Yeah. Nevermind really did change something in my wiring, wonderfully and irrevocably. Was this the beginning of a new golden era in rock music? I’m more inclined to say that it was the beginning of a new plutonium era. This music was radiation, and a grand mutation was at hand. My eardrums and fashion sense would never be the same. Thank God or something.

—


¹ To be fair, some quick Wikipedia research reveals that there were actually quite a few significant records released in 1990: Sonic Youth’s Goo, Pixies’ Bossanova, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, to name a few. Even Depeche Mode’s Violator could be included on that list, I suppose. These weren’t records I was listening to, however, and almost all of them were 100% off my radar. I also want to use this space to say that I never owned MC Hammer pants, to my eternal credit.

² “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” was the immediate predecessor to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in my continuum of favorite songs at the time and I think this makes sense in a lot of ways. Both songs initially appealed to me on a textural level in addition to having pop hooks, both songs have unique, unconventional titles and I don’t think it’s the world’s greatest leap in going from a kaleidoscopic, melodic pop song with hip-hop beats to a buzzing, melodic rock song with Led Zep beats. Play those two songs back-to-back and it's Fall 1991 all over again. Of course, maybe I’m just smoking something, but I don’t think the two songs are incongruous as you might think. Evidence of such seemed to manifest when Prince Be from P.M. Dawn appeared briefly in a clip on the Nirvana full-length video Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!, talking about how much he loved Nirvana. It was probably from some MTV interview, however, and was probably included for ironic purposes. Oh, well.

³ All of these pre-Nevermind discs eventually ended up in that great big CD Exchange in the sky.

⁴ Apparently not quick enough to prevent me from doing a speech in sophomore English class that included demonstrations of hip-hop dance moves using a Boyz II Men tape. I was probably wearing a polka-dotted rayon shirt. Yes, this actually occurred. I can’t recall if it was before or after I had seen the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video.

⁵ I’m certain I also received both Guns N’Roses Use Your Illusion albums that morning. Just sayin’.

⁶ I feel like my obsession with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” puzzled and bemused my mother at the time, but she later admitted to understanding why the song was a hit and cited its “beat” as one of its merits.

⁷ Please note that I was not and had never been on or even seen any drugs whatsoever at this point. I hadn’t even touched alcohol yet, with the exception of those sips of Old Style I had at the family picnic when I was six.