Patch #32: Loud quiet loud
Nirvana T-shirts, power trash, wordless communication, risky discos, and raw feeds
I started noticing the Nirvana T-shirts in Costa Rica. The first was worn by a woman in her late twenties, at a place my kids called the Gato Bar. That wasn’t really the name of the bar. My kids called it that because the first time we went there, on our first night away from home, they watched a cat in the parking lot jump into the back seat of a Toyota Fortuner, an event that generated a lot of conversation about whether we should leave the windows of our own vehicle opened or closed. The Nirvana shirt was the one you imagine when you think of it: yellow smiley face, tongue out, x’s for eyes. It was two sizes too big. The woman wearing it also had a nose ring and Doc Martens, even though it was, as the song says, 96 degrees in the shade, and, if anything, more humid after dark than it had been during the day. A week or so later, I saw a second Nirvana T-shirt worn by a Tico heading to a skate park in Nosara, his shirt perfectly accented by a wool beanie. There were Nirvana T-shirts on the beach, in grocery stores, and at Juan Santamaría Airport.
Since returning home to Denver, I’ve seen too many Nirvana T-shirts to count: on teens, mostly, but not only. A few months ago, I saw a striped version of the same shirt worn by a mom in her mid-thirties holding a baby in a Jiffy Lube waiting room. The trend is not limited to t-shirts alone. A week or so ago, I stood in line for self-checkout at Whole Foods in front of a teenager wearing a mustard-colored Cobain cardigan. He was buying a $12 chocolate bar covered in edible flowers and an off-brand diet soda. Would he pay with his palm? Rebellion, as my kids say, is confoozled. Asking the question that would have been the obvious one to the me of the nineties: whether these people have a real relationship with Nirvana’s music, renders you a gatekeeper and it’s also more than a little silly. But I’ve been wondering about these Nirvana T-shirts, and also the future of consciousness, and the also the future of connection. Since the latter two threaten to break my brain, I focus on the former, searching for clues across the feeds as to why a band from my youth is relevant to young people—particularly a band that I saw live as a teenager in Seattle. The Pacific Northwest of the nineties was okay, and definitely of a particular place and time, but I never would have predicted then it would engender such ardent and unquestioning nostalgia.
The rebellious seriousness of Nirvana, which would seem to be the allure of their iconography and aesthetic associations, was always a little confoozled. Cobain liked punk and metal to be sure, but he also had a soft spot for bubblegum pop confections and ghost bands who never achieved anything like notoriety. He liked Beat Happening because they emoted without fussiness or technical skill and weren’t self conscious about what they lacked. He liked The Meat Puppets and The Vaselines because they made mainstream music that was too weird to ever be embraced by the mainstream. Cobain, a kid from Aberdeen, tried things and they worked better than anyone could have imagined. Legend has it “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was based on an ironic lift of the riff in Boston’s nerd-schlock masterpiece “More than a feeling.” Which may be why Paul Westerberg, legendary lead singer of The Replacements, said he thought Nirvana sounded like “Boston with a hair up its ass.” The critique was always a little circumspect, especially from someone who did a (great) Kiss cover of “Black Diamond” on Let It Be, loved the Raspberries use of impeccably stupid guitar riffs to convey the tenderest of romantic aspirations, and coined the useful phrase “power trash” to describe his own music (and so much more).
None of this matters anymore. Did it ever? Westerberg’s typically cutting dig was based on an acknowledgement Cobain made himself. The song that changed the culture started out as a jokey confection, but it ended up encouraging a joyless earnestness, morose self-involvement, and questionable anger for many young (white) men who had nothing much to complain about—a movement that would reach its nadir at Woodstock 1999 with shirtless dipshits burning anything they could get their hands on and screaming obscenities at any of the women unfortunate enough to be in proximity. The revolution, unfortunately, was televised. Cobain would have been horrified had he lived to see it, but none of it would have surprised him. His movement—a word he would have surely loathed—would fizzle.
Even as I question the importance of all this, I go deeper into the histories, looking for something. In the knots of music history and the turgid prose of rock critics, I find puzzles without pictures on the front of the box: shards, fragments, anecdotes, and memories made all the more appealing because, so often, they cannot speak for themselves. I hold onto a probably misguided belief that the pop artists of the past can teach us something about the future.
I like the off moments, the deep cuts that only emerge if you read the histories. For example, while Cobain and Westerberg never did formally meet, they did encounter each other once in an elevator. The exchange is documented in Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements:
Cobain and Westerberg would cross paths just once, in late 1992, in San Francisco. Westerberg was in town recording, Cobain was there producing an album for the Melvins, and they were both staying at the Triton Hotel. One evening they rode up an elevator together in awkward silence, exited on the same floor, walked to neighboring rooms, then shut their doors without acknowledging one another.1
Mehr’s reading of the situation is pretty clear: this was an awkward silence between two notable figures who no doubt knew who each other were, but were uneasy with the scene-making tendencies their fame required. Perhaps they genuinely disliked each other’s music. Perhaps Westerberg, who was forever self-sabotaging his shots at fame or finding bad luck even when he wasn’t, was just jealous of Cobain’s meteoric, world-changing success. All of these interpretations are credible. They are also pretty boring.
The interpretation I prefer, which may well be a work of fiction, is that the interaction in the elevator was a higher-order, wordless exchange between two artists operating at Jedi-like levels of communication; that—their respective substance abuse challenges and mental health needs aside (I do not write this dismissively or without empathy)—they didn’t need something as insufficient as words to communicate; that their exchange happened on telepathic frequencies unavailable to less plugged-in beings; and that these frequencies were available to them as a result of their acts of creation, their identity as artists, and their accomplishments at tapping into the trauma and frustrations of their respective generations in spite of all of the obstacles that interceded. My further hope is that these sorts of spontaneous, wordless exchanges grow more accessible to a broader audience of individuals, and that our quality of life improves because of it.
The truth is I have been questioning the worth of words and ideas a little. I’ve been wondering what the value of credentialed explanation is in an increasingly irrational funhouse. In response, I’m looking for something a bit more experiential and a bit less intellectual—body experiences instead of mind experiences—and this desire is only amplified by the instant avalanches of text generated by artificial intelligence. Maybe it was never about the words, but the feeling that preceded them—the yearning and grasping and unexplained experiences beneath the words that made them feel human in the first place. Because what I do know, what I feel in my gut, is that in these piles of logic, there is a lacking.
Such a statement requires elaboration with the words that are part of the problem, which probably helps explain why this essay has been so hard to write. I am collecting fragments that do not necessarily fit together. I think of Kurt Cobain and Paul Westerberg in an elevator. I think of a Mitski lyric that always seems to be in my headphones: you’re an angel and I’m a dog. I think of the performance artist Marina Abramovic and her patient explanation of truths she has long known and expressed through her work again and again. Are they part of an interconnected web or randomly collected pieces of power trash?
Abramovic was recently interviewed in the New York Times. The whole thing is worth reading, from her explanation of why context matters in art to her simple exhortations on the importance of feeling. But what I’d like to call attention to in relationship to our discussion here is Abramovic’s comment on the role of wordless exchange:
If you do long durational work, you change. There’s some growing and opening of consciousness. Your energy is changed. People can feel this. So if the artist is changed and the public is changed, then we don’t need objects between them because human beings are communicating on a much higher level of energy and emotion. You know, they say that the most vulgar way of transmitting knowledge is if the master talks to the student. The highest is if they’re sitting in silence and there’s no word mentioned. If you get that kind of communication, an object between you and the viewer is not necessary. It’s a pure energy exchange. This is the highest art.2
Abramovic’s status as a towering art figure can give her words the impression they come from high on the mountain, but I don’t think that’s how we should read them. In her writings, I sense an earned gravitas and no tolerance for bullshit, yes, but also a deeply human vulnerability that allows her to face difficulty with honesty and courage. You have to feel it. These spaces she confronts, beyond words, need not be tsunamis of emotion like those we associate with love and grief; they offer the multitude of permutations that surround and branch from every experience: an infinite web of sense data that translates to infinite qualia available to those who take the time to notice. She speaks to a raw, mysterious, constantly varying feed, thrumming and undulating beneath the surface.
The good news is that this raw feed is available to all of us, not just artists singular and lucky enough to find appreciation for their work. The less good news is that our environment of constant stimulus, noise, and curation makes the raw feed more elusive. I also think we are at a fork in the road. Many of the AI-enabled technologies currently coming online, ostensibly to make our lives better, could amplify noise, diminish it substantially, or (most likely) do something in between. I’m biased toward a world of disappearing devices and intuitive interactions designed to improve sensory awareness and human connection. But I also interrogate this belief because, in absence of anything like proof that it’s actually happening (vs. plenty of proof it’s not), the hope for a sudden reversal can seem like a techno-optimistic fever dream.
Maybe it is that, in a time of rapid technological advancement, some of the most interesting things are happening offline. I recently participated in an immersive futures workshop hosted by Stuart Candy and Immersive Denver where four groups organized and performed interactive pieces set in 2084 for thirty audience members. In one of the rooms, designed in part by my wife, Michelle, we all sat in a circle and checked in with each other, as you would in church. It was very simple. “Turn to the person next to you. Ask how they’re doing and what feels good for them today.” Even though I knew I was participating in a construct, doing this small task of asking a stranger how they were doing felt radical. When was the last time I had done that with so much intention and listened deeply to the response? Why does sitting in a circle without phones feel so futuristic?
Building on this idea, one of the most moving things I’ve read in recent memory was “Risky Disco,” an article in Harper’s by Sara Hendren. Hendren documents a “sensory workshop” environment in Scotland: a multi-purpose space designed for free-flowing improvisation and “raw feed” experiences. In Hendren’s words:
The sensory workshop is something outside of enrichment, something much more unpredictable, a multipurpose room that can shift its shape a thousand times under the sustained improvisation of the people at hand. It’s an effort meant to loosen the day’s clock a little, let an emergent world arise for a short period of time, a source of discovery for both artist and guest.3
But what is really moving, I think, is that the sensory workshop is designed for people who, for a variety of reasons, including neurodivergence, wouldn’t normally encounter such spaces or the permission to experience them. These are safe, private, spaces designed to connect individuals to sensory catalysts without judgement, to access, if only for an afternoon, the cathartic release Kurt Cobain must have felt the first time he played “Negative Creep” at the O.K. Hotel, or the sweaty energy Westerberg unleashed when he played “Customer/ Rattlesnake” at the Entry. Hendren sums it up better than I can: “In the sensory workshop, a person at the far edge of the social contract encounters all the joyous, necessary inefficiencies of relationship and all the useless, urgent vitality of art.”4
Which sounds, when you think about it, not only like a worthy idea for a tattoo, but a pretty good aspiration for everything from parenting to building whatever you might be building to old age to doing nothing at all alone or in the company of others. In the contours of this idea, we can see a connection to everything from the rise of psychedelics to the extreme measures some are going to to tune out noise and experience the raw feed with less mediation or interpretation. We can see a quieter future despite the squalling noise of the present.
Recommendations:
Reading: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Listening: Tracey Denim, by Bar Italia
Music credits for article audio:
Opening Theme: “Cepheid Disk” by Airglow via Wikimedia Commons
Closing Theme: “Comfort in Uncertainty” by bbatv via Wikimedia Commons
Mehr, Bob. Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements. Kindle ed., Da Capo Press, 2015. Kindle location 404.
Marchese, David. “Marina Abramovic Thinks the Pain of Love Is Hell on Earth.” The New York Times, 29 Oct. 2023.
Hendren, Sara. “Risky Disco.” Harper's, Dec. 2023.
Hendren, Sara. “Risky Disco.” Harper's, Dec. 2023.