Can an album still define the times?
Sally Breen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing, Griffith University/Gulf Today
It’s 1991. In the basement nightclub Green on the bottom of the Land’s Office building in Brisbane city I’m late and most of my friends are already inside. I can’t see anyone I know in the smoky haze and the club looks different. Hundreds of posters hang from the ceiling – a baby swimming under water with a hundred dollar note floating in front of its face. Nevermind Nirvana.
I’ve heard of Nirvana – I’ve listened to Bleach – but I haven’t yet sat in lounge rooms passing around a six shooter with the lights out, the faded sepia wash of the Smells Like Teen Spirit film clip crashing over me, I haven’t yet taken to dance floors to head bang as if I just got awarded a weapon in an unofficial army. That sense of war and saturation will come later, in a matter of months.
I say hi to the DJ. He’s jumping around to the Pixies – high, expectant, weird. Not unusual. He hands me a copy of Nevermind on tape and shrugs. Free merch. Something he’s never done before. And that ambivalent gesture says something. In 1991 my friends and I think we’re caught up in a groundswell, an alternative moment, a grunge aesthetic that has spread organically, in a street way, from Seattle and landed like a hand scrawled message on the tide. In a way this is true.
We’re in bands (sort of), we know what Sub Pop is and we’re into rock and roll lineages thrashing around to the obscure before it’s ubiquitous. But here, in Green, something else is also going on. These posters and free tapes are a prelude. A message being sent around the world about one band – Nirvana – and what they represent by the same record companies that will in the end milk the guts out of alternative rock until it’s homogenised and pasteurised, until it’s not dead exactly but has become a watered down, less edgy version of itself.Not because the music changes. The music doesn’t. But because the sense of otherness and ownership we’re experiencing gets appropriated to the point of no return and the alternative space has been de-territorialised.
A seismic shift in the culture
Cut to 2017. One year after the 25th anniversary of the release of Nevermind – when most media outlets run with stories about “what ever happened to that baby on the Nevermind album cover” and you can buy a Nirvana t-shirt on the Shein clothing app for three Australian dollars. These facts do not dilute Nevermind’s importance.
Popular culture is always in the process of recycling itself – Docs are back, Sonic Youth are back, Nirvana are back. Flannelette shirts are back. Tweaked for the times and in play until some other kind of retro symbolism replaces them.
A slippery, post-truth era
Today even the most cynical music critics agree that artistically, Nevermind stands the test of time, whether that assessment is based purely on sales or influence or aesthetics.Kurt’s face bounces back. Like the best crash test dummy, he keeps returning, a big hole in his head, sure, but still there, staring back at us from all kinds of screens not in play when he was, bobbing around in the back seat of a car you can barely remember driving looking sometimes like a girl, sometimes like a guy. When he erupts back into the frame you don’t necessarily want to switch him off. Kurt’s an old lover you’d still kiss. A teacher you don’t want to punch in the face.