Smells Like Paper Machete

I had a super fun time returning to the Paper Machete show this past Saturday to talk about Nirvana, 1991, and 2011's inevitable 20 year anniversary retrospectives in the media. Something happened where not all of the show ended up being recorded, so my piece won't get podcasted, and so I wanted to post it here:

Only a month into the new year, 2011 is already a significant one. It's the year of the most hyped and possibly also the actual worst snowstorm in Chicago history. It's the year that, along with the very last few days of 2010, people turn old enough to drink that have never lived in a world without continuous, uninterrupted new seasons of the Simpsons on TV. It's the last year before the end of the world, of course. And it's the year that, this coming September, will mark the 20th anniversary of the song that changed everything, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," by Nirvana, and their album, which also changed everything, "Nevermind," and so many others.

The year 1991 reads like a book of saints in the alternative canon. There's the two other wings of the late-'91 alternative rock power-triptych, Pearl Jam's "Ten" and Soundgarden's "Badmotorfinger;" there's REM's "Out of Time", Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Blood Sugar Sex Magik", the Pixies' "Trompe le Monde", to name just a few, which will make 2011, in addition to all those other things, a landmark banner year for documentaries and retrospectives.

By this fall, we can expect to see . . .
a bunch of them about Nirvana, "Nevermind", and the wave of cultural mutilation that followed, to remind everyone how much it changed everything. They'll feature talking heads like Butch Vig and Dave Grohl, both now very, very expensive looking. They'll feature other talking heads like Michael Ian Black and Lisa Loeb, about whom viewers will undoubtedly wonder why they're being asked about this topic at all. And, we can hope, they'll feature Courtney Love as sparingly as possible.

They'll show footage of Kurt Cobain in a ripped dress, languidly destroying a stage and everything on it like a bored postmodern tornado. They'll show clips of mosh pits, stage diving, people screaming into microphones, and lots of dirty plaid flannel; people in ripped jeans and homemade t-shirts; girls with hair so bleached it looks white, in short short babydoll dresses and plastic baby barrettes. They'll speculate about why, in late 1991, American youth culture was READY for "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

They'll show pictures of C&C Music Factory; of Vanilla Ice in the overalls with the image of his own face airbrushed onto the bib; of hair bands and Rick Astley, to show how bereft of content and meaning the music of the late 80s was.

And they won't be wrong. "Something to Believe In" didn't really give alienated suburban tweens very much to believe in, after all, did it?

And that's why the networks don't have to wait until the "Nevermind" release anniversary to start waxing alterna-nostalgic, and start selling ad time, if they don't want to.

1991 was already cooking before the release of "Nevermind", a big steaming pot of counterculture brewing, the patois of sweaty flannel, Manic Panic, vinyl records, weed, and slightly water damaged used Bukowski paperbacks wafting out to record execs and alienated suburban tweens everywhere, sitting up late on Sunday nights watching "120 Minutes" on the only TV in the house, with the volume turned almost all the way down, so their moms and dads and stepmoms and stepdads wouldn't wake up and see Trent Reznor screaming "Head Like a Hole," and then suddenly start finding even more thin excuses to check under their beds and go through their closets.

"Head Like a Hole" was actually one of the videos playing on the episode of "120 Minutes" that aired 20 years ago this week. Also Sonic Youth; the Cocteau Twins; the Jesus and Mary Chain, whose level of drug use and sibling-on-sibling public violence those guys in Oasis could only dream about; and the band that started out as a self-proclaimed crappy Jesus and Mary Chain rip-off band, the Pixies, who incidentally released their *last* album in '91.

All of these bands had been around since the mid to late 80s, and although they hadn't quite broken through to popularity with MTV's mainstream viewership, who still preferred Nelson and Vanilla Ice, they'd been gaining a cultural foothold with tweens for a little while already by 1991.

Supermarket checkout lines in 1991 featured, for teenage girls, the glossy "Seventeen" magazine, which told you about hair, clothes, and boys; alongside the glossy "Sassy" magazine, which told you about hair, clothes, boys, punk fanzines, how to sew your own weird clothes out of stuff you find at thrift stores and garage sales, indie rock, and featured an advice column written by underground heroes like Dean Ween and Kim Gordon.

1991 was also the year of the inaugural Lollapalooza tour, about which there will probably also be at least a few documentaries and retrospectives this year. It featured: Nine Inch Nails, still a few years away from "The Downward Spiral" and Hot Topic, coming off of an unsuccessful European tour opening for Guns 'N' Roses; Ice-T, with BODY COUNT, for Pete's sake--remember "Cop Killer"??; the Rollins Band, the Butthole Surfers, Fishbone, Living Color, the Violent Femmes!

And don't forget the Jim Rose Side Circus, a freak show whose "freakishness" was, in 1991, still able to rely heavily on tattoos and piercings, long, long before every cheerleader and topless spring breaker in America sported a pink rhinestone belly button ring, a butterfly tramp stamp, and a tongue stud.

Before the wild breakthrough mainstream success of "Nevermind" was a glimmer in David Geffen's eye, the Jim Rose Circus by itself was news in summer 1991. Well, MTV News at least. And so was the idea that maybe, if the world of the Babysitters Club and the mall didn't feel like enough, maybe there wasn't something so terribly wrong with you, like your mom or dad or stepmom or stepdad thought there was. Maybe it was not only OK to be different, but you could even make a living doing it.

The kids in early 1991, 20 years ago from right now, already wanted green hair and a platform from which to reject the authority and institutionalized boredom that limited them.

They were already . . . ready.

They were already starting to notice that there was something that didn't quite fit about their parents' small worlds, the small worlds of their small suburban blocks. They were already stealing glances out the windows, and starting to suspect that the idea that you had to dress like everyone else, be good at sports like everyone else, read the same magazines and watch the same TV shows as everyone else, wasn't real at all. That it was propped up, with scaffolding, like a Western movie set on a backlot, a backlot that if you just opened the door, you could walk out into, and then if you kept walking, you could walk through, and out of, and away from.

By the first week of 1992, "Nevermind" had shot to number one on the Billboard charts, displacing, of all people and albums, Michael Jackson's "Dangerous", and selling 300,000 copies a week. By the end of '92, everybody had bought their pair of Chuck Taylors and dyed their hair with Black Cherry Loreal box dye.

By then, if you wanted to show how counterculture you were, all you had to do was buy a t-shirt.

But in the first cold months of 1991, years before there was an internet to give you infinite possibilities and the unique paralysis that goes along with them in just a few seconds, there was this window where if you were a lonely, dissatisfied suburban tweenager, this crazy, dirty, bleached out, ripped up, eyebrow pierced world beyond the movie set was reaching out to YOU, just so you would know it was there, and that you could buy a crappy guitar and a book of chords and join it. And hardly anybody, quite yet, was using it to try to make a bunch of money off you.

There was this window, in 1991, where it could save you. Maybe this year someone will make a documentary or a retrospective about that.

Participating in a live show means keeping a piece around a certain length when read aloud, so I focused on a couple particular things. While I was writing it, I kept thinking about how the internet has changed the way kids relate to the rest of the world and therefore also changed the landscape of suburban alienation. I kept wondering what it's like now for kids to find their heroes, as John Waters described them in his one man Christmas show I saw recently, "whoever the people are that give you the courage to be everything you were raised not to be." It would be fun to eventually expand this into a longer piece that talks about that, too, and the ways that maybe everybody in every era has to find that for themselves.