Unveiling NIRVANA's world of 'contradicted bliss'

Nirvana burst into the music scene when it was dominated by pop stars and the world was awaiting the arrival of the next big thing in rock music. It desperately needed an idol, a star, a father figure. Jim Morrison was long dead, Lennon was murdered and Roger Waters was out of Pink Floyd. Then came Kurt Cobain with his band Nirvana comprising him, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. He became the spokesman of what was beginning to be referred as Generation X. Nirvana was one of the pioneers of grunge rock movement and made it into a popular culture. Smells like teen spirit became the new generation’s anthem. Cobain was not a prophet, he was only an artist, a musician, a poet. The characteristic subtle tension of Kurt’s vocals, his in-between-songs screaming and disturbing, angry lyrics made him the torch-bearer of young generation’s rebellion against the established norms of the society. He was a rebel and enjoyed the cult status of a HERO in the word’s true sense. Even 20 years after his suicide, he is considered the ‘Lennon of our age’ (phrase used by Kurt’s biographer Charles R.Cross) and definitely the last true ROCKSTAR that rock history has witnessed.

Nirvana started off as a pure post-punk grunge rock band, then gradually incorporated various influences in their music, spanning different genres. While other pioneering grunge bands chose to express their angst and resignation against a world which they felt was hopelessly wrong through harsh, dissonant guitar chords (Soundgarden) and constantly focus-shifting, disconnected lyrics (Pearl Jam), traits which were to become the hallmarks of grunge, Nirvana chose not to bind themselves to such limitations.

BLEACH

The subject matter of the lyrics is mostly concerned with loneliness and forced isolation. What is noteworthy is that the music is markedly aggressive. A post-punk record, with nothing much to distinguish it from other Sex Pistols and Clash clones flourishing in L.A. at that time. The first song on the album is Blew ; these two lines carry the meaning of the entire album – “If you wouldn’t care I would like to leave/If you wouldn’t mind I would like to breathe”. They suggest the theme of forced isolation and entrapment and the desire to break free, using the spirit of grunge to express the deep-rooted angst against the society. The two lines also speak in a less violent way using the phrases ‘if you wouldn’t care’ and ‘if you wouldn’t mind’, more in the line of grunge or diluted punk than pure punk. In the song Paper Cuts, the lyrics are very disconnected, which was a trait of grunge rock – “The lady whom I feel maternal love for/Cannot look me in the eyes/But I see hers and they are blue/And they cock and twitch and masturbate”. No one can understand how eyes can twitch and masturbate! In Sifting there is a deliberate attack on the authority figures like teacher and preacher. There lies a lot of sarcasm towards the education system and Christianity in these lines – “Afraid to grade/Wouldn’t it be fun/Cross,says loss”. But the most significant line in this song is “Spell the smell/Wouldn’t it be fun” – the strong hallucinogenic essence of this line surely brings out the psychedelic side of the band. Again in Negative Creep, the repetition of the line “I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned” suggests that the band wants to be in the ‘other world’ of psychedelia (“stoned”) but stuck in the present atmosphere of grunge movement. All the songs in the album complain about imposed entrapment and loneliness, but in the last song Downer, there is a call for rebellion against the present hopeless condition. Use of words like “pessimist hypocrite master”, “conservative communist” and “apocalyptic bastard” bring memories of the old punk movement which was more radical and violent towards anti-establishment. In the same song, the words “surrealistic fantasy” clearly indicate the band’s infant-psychedelia which evolved with their next albums.

NEVERMIND

This was the biggest thing to have happened to rock music in the 90’s. The album came out in 1991 and straightaway dislodged Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the US no.1 spot. Cobain then made the famous statement – “Michael Jackson is a toast in our frying pan and rock is a weapon again”. From this album onwards, Nirvana developed their own form of grunge, highly symbolic and world-weary. The first song and the last aspire to ‘punkhood’ more than being grunge. The first song is the rock epic Smells like teen spirit, its lyrics are angry, harsh and ironic - “Load up on guns, bring your friends/It’s fun to lose and to pretend”. There is this odd sense of resignation in the line “Oh well, whatever, nevermind”. The effect of this song is very distorted with disconnected lyrics – “I feel stupid and contagious/A mulatto/An albino/A mosquito/My libido”. The last song Endless Nameless has angst filled and very disturbing lyrics – “Kill/And violent/Excitement/Right here”. It’s simply amazing to know that a hardcore rock band can also manufacture pure pop numbers like Polly and Something In The Way in this album. It really shows nothing but Nirvana’s versatility regarding music. Drain You showcases disconnected grunge lyrics – “It is now my duty to completely drain you/A travel through a tube/And end up in your infection”. The first few lines of Come As You Are “Come as you are,as you were/As I want you want you to be/As a friend,as a friend, as an old enemy/Take your time, hurry up”, are very contradicting, probably the way society expects us to do something and we end up doing just the opposite. Kurt is simply preaching to go against society’s norms and challenge them. The cover page of the album is quite amazing and subscribes to the genre of glam rock. The picture shows a baby under water trying to grab a dollar note. It’s very ironic in the sense everyone tries to save himself, when drowned, by swimming above water and trying to breathe freely. But the first instinct of the child is not to save himself but grab the dollar note, quite in line with a ‘nevermind’ kind of attitude. Glam rock spoke strictly against materialism and professed shunning of wealth and fame. This genre of rock was also against superficiality and artificial hypocrisies of man. This aspect is quite evident in the song Lithium – “I’m so ugly but that’s okay/Cause so are you/We broke our mirrors”. The meaning goes like this, a mirror gives us a reflected image but that’s not our actual self. By breaking that mirror, we are left with only our original self, there is no existence of the ‘other self’ – thus, we are not superficial and we present ourselves the way we are and do not pretend to be someone else.

I think Nirvana was a very experimental band. Some of their lyrics are in line with the theory of Colonialism. Much of Kurt’s songs (mostly in Nevermind and In Utero) are influenced by his personal life – his troubled loveless and companionless childhood which eventually led him to the consumption of drugs with a hopeless hope of finding tranquility. His lyrics focus on the individual, treating it as a whole body of information. The basic concept of Colonialism is that a ‘pure body’ is invaded by alien thoughts, implanted by unpleasant circumstances (in Kurt’s case, his parents and the society), which then take over and destroy the ‘pure body’. In Bloom perfectly fits this picture – “Nature is a whore/Bruises on the fruit/Tender age in bloom”. This same picture becomes even more vivid with Territorial Pissings – “When I was an alien, cultures weren’t options”.

IN UTERO

The dark feel to In Utero was obviously meant to counteract Nevermind’s sparkling, rip-roaring introduction into the 90’s that sounds comparatively fan-friendly. This album was Kurt’s way of responding to Nevermind, his way of lashing out against his own success. Reportedly disgusted with Nevermind’s slick sound, convinced that he had somehow sold out by making his raging songs too accessible, Cobain steered to the other direction. This time, no anthems. In Utero was Cobain’s attempt to scare away the bandwagon jumpers and reassert his own musical integrity. This album powerfully made the case that he would be his own man, but he wouldn’t destroy his talent in the process. Nirvana cut the album in two weeks and Kurt sang most of his vocals in a day, in one 7 hour stretch !

The first song on this album Serve the Servants is again a very personal song. The lyrics speak out about his hatred towards his parents and he simply couldn’t forgive them for being raised in a broken home and as an uprooted teenager – “The legendary divorce is such a bore” ; “I tried hard to have a father/But instead I had a dad”. Incidentally this brings to mind Kurt’s first poem which too was directed against his parents – “I hate mom/I hate dad/Dad hates mom/Mom hates dad/It simply makes you feel so sad”. However in the very first line of this song, we are shown the true concept behind this album – “Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old”. It’s quite clear that Kurt was tired of his success and fame and wanted nothing but freedom and respite. In Pennyroyal Tea too, we hear the same desire – “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld/So I can sigh eternally/I’m so tired I can’t sleep”. This in a way, also shows that Kurt was tired of being labelled as a grunge rocker, he wanted to try his hands at something absolutely different from grunge (“Teenage angst has paid off well” ), which he eventually achieves in this album. In his suicide note, Kurt makes it absolutely clear that he was slowly drifting away from music and his fans – “When we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins, it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love an adoration from the crowd. . . . . . . The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun”. Kurt’s notion of alienating himself from the audience just because he had become too accessible to them brings to memory the same condition of Roger Waters before penning down the highly critical album The Wall. Therefore, the lyrics are intentionally made abstract, self-deprecating and cynical so that everyone can’t understand them. In Rape Me, there is a metaphorical sense of Kurt being raped of his freedom and solace by the media and his fans. Although Scentless Apprentice is based on a novel ‘Perfume’ by Patrick Suskind, it’s also based on Cobain’s life as he never smelt the scent of love in his childhood – “He was born scentless and senseless”, senseless because he was numb to the warmth of love and affection.

Dumb deals with the theme that there is a carefree happiness in being just dumb. But midway through, these lines “We’ll float around/And hang out on clouds/Then we’ll come down/And have a hangover” bring out the essence of psychedelia very clearly. The use of ‘hangover’ surely points to the use of drugs which were a part of the psychedelic culture (It’s noteworthy that there had been an increased reference to drugs and alcohol in this album – the last song’s name says it all, Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip). This hangover is a sub-conscious state of mind where Kurt wanted to escape in the search of nirvana. The temptation of transcending to the ‘other world’ seemed to have been beckoning him when he started to pen down In Utero and hence becoming conscious of the psychedelic side of his music-genius. On this album, Kurt said thus – “I’m worshipped the world over, people think I’m a genius, my life oughta be perfect, but it’s not – and I don’t know why. And I’m gonna sing about it”. Maybe the other world was more perfect and peaceful to him than the real world, which ultimately steered him to a more expansive use of psychedelia – kind of expanding the indistinct glimpses in the previous albums to a more full fledged psychedelic rock in this album. In Utero is dominated by extraordinary vivid visual imagery, strongly reminiscent of psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane – “Meat eating orchids forgive no one just yet/Cut myself on angel’s hair and baby’s breath/Broken hymen of your highness I’m left black/Throw down your umbilical noose so I can/Climb right back” (Heart Shaped Box). Though the song is about an unreal visual journey, it still retains the grunge character of disconnected and contradicting lyrics. How can the most delicate objects like angel’s hair and a baby’s breath be used as weapons to cut down someone? One of the most interesting songs of this album is Very Ape where Kurt seems to be transiting between the two worlds of psychedelia and harsh reality – “Out of the ground/Into the sky/Out of the sky/Into the dirt”.

OTHER SONGS

The song Sliver from the album Incesticide is a semi-autobiographical song about his childhood. Kurt even tried his hands at singing David Bowie’s folk song Where Did You Sleep Last Night in the album MTV Unplugged Live. In the same album we can find the song The Man Who Sold The World. As the name suggests, it’s about a materialist and power-crazy man, which falls in the line of glam rock. There are a few unreleased songs as well. One of them is Moist Vagina; the song is a strange psychedelic song which explores the world of sexual freedom. Probably the last written song of Cobain is Do Re Me; the lyrics are fabulous – “I might be dreaming/If I may, if I might/Wake me up”. He seems to be transiting from the psychedelic world to the world of reality, the hopeless condition of the present time seems to drag him to harsh reality.

Thus, we can see that Nirvana’s world of music consciousness was a boundless territory. Their lyrics were clear, abstract, outstanding, dark, ironic, amusing and disturbing at once. We could drown in the black rains of distortion and sarcasm, we could transcend to the ‘other world’ of eternal tranquility and then come back to the not-so-perfect society and revolt against it at the same time. All I can say about them is that they were one of the most versatile rock bands in modern times.

'Nirvana' means total and absolute bliss. Kurt’s concept of bliss was a bit different from the traditional notion of freeing one’s soul from the cyclic process of birth and rebirth. In the early Nirvana-days, the bliss was found in the domain of grunge and punk rock, where he pioneered the rebellion of break-away from the rules and regulations imposed by the society. And he did attain bliss in being a non-conformist. The whole generation followed him too, campaigning for anti-establishment in the search of bliss. In the late Nirvana-days however, there was a shift in Kurt’s concept of bliss. He wanted to escape from the suffocating world of fame and stardom to the more peaceful and perfect ‘other world’ , an unreal yet sub-consciously surrealistic world (referring to psychedelic rock). But, quite paradoxically, he finally achieved absolute bliss to transcend to a world of ‘love, peace and empathy’ (the exact words in his suicide note) by committing suicide. The whole string of events to attain bliss is very much like Cobain’s lyrics –- self-contradicting and disconnected.

Looking at it from a different perceptive, Kurt had a very troubled and loveless childhood. So music was like a Messiah to him, his battered soul found a refuge in the comforting bosom of music. Penning down lyrics for Nirvana and singing them out in his own characteristic style, he found peace within himself. Just when Kurt found total bliss , he suddenly wanted to run away from the world of music which actually brought him bliss – so strange and contradicting ! Kurt always (maybe loved) to contradict himself, be it in his lyrics or his suicide note. Ultimately, he did not attain, but ‘got’ bliss by escaping from the world of music and surrendering to Death.

Maybe Cobain was a lunatic or a genius, maybe he was an escapist or a rebel, maybe he was a loser or a hero – I am not going into the controversy. But his contribution to rock music will always burn ablaze, it will never fade away . . . . . . . . In the seductive and vast ocean of our memory, Cobain will always sail along steering his ship of revolutionary ideals.