Nirvana: Nevermind

Ass-Headed Bottom: I've recently tried walking around my (sob) home-city of Dallas. For sheer unwalkability, this place is second only to Houston (a city markedly inferior to Pandaemonium in that its planners refuse to build or repair sidewalks), but Dallas is perhaps even uglier than its hideous fat sister to the south (or possibly east or west; my long-term memory has abstained from the map of Texas). Nevertheless I shall persevere, or at least I refuse to give up to my destined slobbery this quickly. Therefore I insist on walking around and around these residential neighborhoods, garishly disfigured by Christmas lights no doubt visible from Orion (Christian quasars, I call them), ignoring work entirely and dreaming of nothing at all. But even that gets dreary, so as of this evening I'm changing it up by walking an album at a time (or if I'm feeling snooty, a symphony at a time), and as I haven't bought any new music in years, I figured I'd start with the first cd I ever owned, Nirvana's Nevermind.

But come to think of it this is probably the only album that ever sounded better on cassette. I used to stay up all night at camp and listen on my Aiwa walkman, such that in the morning I would fall asleep in the pool during swim lessons and risk drowning. Indeed, I still can't swim well, and would inevitably perish, cursing Nirvana, were I ever to get caught in a riptide or whatever. Sure, these guys couldn't really play their instruments very well, and Cobain's lyrics were juvenile for the most part, but there are pleasant surprises everywhere on the cd once "Smells Like Teen Spirit" mercifully ends. Counter-culture homilies (e.g. "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you") often sound better when removed from the hopelessly frenetic pace of punk, and a few less-predictable lines (like "It's okay to eat fish, 'cause they don't have any feeeeeeeeeeeelings") have a creepy, subtle satirical quality, perfectly crafted for the '90s (a stupid decade, but hardly as irretrievable as the '80s). And it's those songs nobody bothered about--"Lounge Act," "Drain You," "Breed"--that in the end rock the most, and had me just this evening shambling around in my hoodie (admittedly, a yuppified hoodie from [shoot me, and make it hurt] Banana Republic) spitting on the parking lots of Dallas like a pissed-off teenager again. Even if Cobain had no business owning Leadbelly's guitar, the solo from "In Bloom" is hard not to hate everything to, and that's a kind of excellence.

Oh, and the photo up there is of Spencer Elden, the original baby, now seventeen or so. Not much to look at, huh? So we all best focus on the music.