0.27.1 - What is a legacy?
Last week, I heard Oasis described - in a news piece about their hugely cynical and vastly profitable reunion tour, an event solely responsible for introducing the British public to the concept of Ticketmaster's 'Dynamic Pricing' model - as 'the biggest band in the world'. As someone who works in the world of statistics and data, this immediately gets my back up because the first question I want to ask is "how do you quantify that? did you measure it against every other band in the world? Where's your dataset, I want to check some things myself...". However, journalism and hyperbole often share a sordid bed together so on its face it should not have stayed with me, annoyed me as much as it did. My understanding of the reality of Oasis is they were a band that produced two well liked albums across 3 years, disappeared entirely into the swirling vortex of their own hype, released a third album which was so self-indulgent and catastrophic that it became the definition of a career-killer, and they spent the rest of the time never getting back to their glory days while the Gallagher brothers conducted their public family feud across every media platform that would have them. How, then, can we justify imagining them as the 'Biggest Band In The World'?
Last week, I was out somewhere, I can't remember where, and I overheard someone say to a friend in passing "You know what Nirvana are? They're just a T-shirt company now" while referring to a nearby gaggle of alternative youth, one of which was sporting the now iconic Nirvana smiley face design. It's depressing to me how true that is now, how the death of their lead creative force after a combination of mental health crisis brought on by the reality of global fame combined with addiction issues only made worse by the former, spared the world from a two-decade later nostalgia cash grab tour which I'm sure Kurt would have hated on principal; but in turn, the lack of that nostalgic appeal means the cultural idea of Nirvana has somehow become separated from the musical reality of Nirvana, and that this reality, this musical legacy, should have been the one to live forever.
Right now, as I've been writing this, I've seen posts on LinkedIn of all places begging for Oasis tickets for this weekend. This is my second swing at this article, because the first one devolved into just a long diatribe about how the Oasis fandom are the football hooligans of the music industry (which I still think is true but I'm going to try and keep this as positive as I can). I've spent this week trying to order my thoughts about this, work past the visceral frustration that Oasis seem to cast a far longer shadow than their body of work would suggest, and understand what makes them so revered.
Let me start by saying that I don't have a problem with Oasis and their music (well, the first two albums at least) in general. I'm going to try very hard not to make the hacky reductive claim about their music that they just ripped off the Beatles, somewhat because I think there's nothing wrong with being inspired by music which has come before you, but mainly because they owe far more of a debt to producers like Max Martin and Trevor Horn than they do the Beatles. No-one should be surprised that a bunch of lads from a northern picked up guitars and drums and played some 4/4 rock songs. The power of the songs on Definitely Maybe and (What's The Story) Morning Glory** is the pure memetic value of them - these are songs written to trick your brain into remembering them, using framing and predictable chord transitions and incredibly well known song structures to find shortcuts through your mental defences. They sound like the music of the past because that carries with it a wave of comforting nostalgia while still being new; they take what worked on them, and their parents, and they refine and weaponise it to its most concentrated form. These are not brilliant songwriters, musical prodigies looking to widen the boundaries of musical experience; they're a bunch of scallies with guitars and a rhyming dictionary who through luck or good judgement created the junk food of rock music, a collection of morish, endorphin generating empty calories which we've convinced ourselves is a treat.
When I said I don't have a problem with Oasis and their music just now it's possible I underestimated the strength of my own feelings.
I think the real problem came not from Oasis, but from the craze that surrounded them. The British music press, the media, everyone adored them. Music critics used words like "swagger" to lionise them in the press because they couldn't write articles that said "Everyone likes these Oasis songs because they're catchy and people like to sing along to them because they are easy to remember". The newspapers and radio and TV loved them because they were a walking soap opera, performed without the need for writers or actors, and it came with its own soundtrack and counted as 'youth programming'. The Gallaghers and their endless drama was TV ratings gold, and they could always be relied on for a newspaper headline or scandalous interview where they suggested other musicians should die of deadly sexually transmitted diseases.
Despite my cynical remove from the magic spell they cast over the entire globe in the early 90s which has never seemingly faded, I wasn't completely immune. Somewhere in my CD rack is a CD single of "Roll With It", though I'm delighted to say that I never owned an Oasis album at any point in my life. It's undeniable that Oasis write songs that stick with you, but heroin is addictive too and I'm not advocating for that either. After struggling with it for a week, the stark reality hit me that my problem with Oasis is that they are basic, and that's why a lot of people like them. What gives me great comfort is that the moment Oasis began to ingest their own press hype - from a gaggle of writers desperately trying to think of how to spin "its got a beat and I like it" into 3,000 words - they disappeared so far up their own arseholes they formed a singularity so powerful it sucked away the rest of their career. When I started listening to Be Here Now, an album I knew only by reputation, I was bemused because I didn't think it differed substantively from the stuff from the earlier albums. Then, critically, it just kept going. And going. It has 11 tracks (and a 2 minute outro/reprise thing) and its 71 minutes long. All Around The World is 9 minutes 20 seconds bell to bell. Never has a band decided to do more with less, convinced of their own indestructibility. It's turgid; the magic trick which convinced people that their four minute major chord songs filled with nonsense lyrics were good could not stand up to extended scrutiny. But somehow, we forget. Instead, we think about drinking warm Stella in the park and singing Wonderwall before getting tanked up and looking for a fight.
Kurt Cobain woke up one morning to discover that Kathryn Hanna from riot grrl act Bikini Kill had written 'Kurt smells like teen spirit' on his bedroom wall. What he didn't know was that Teen Spirit was the name of a unisex perfume his hookup at the time wore, and that it was a jab at the fact he smelled like the girl he was sleeping with. Instead, to him it read like it anointed him the voice of a voiceless generation, the mouthpiece of a teenage revolution against the tedium of the music industry and the expectations of white picket fence America. It's an easy mistake to make. To be fair to Kurt, I thought the same thing (about the sentiment of the song, rather than Kathryn Hanna travelling the world, stencilling the phrase of the bedroom walls of disaffected youth everywhere). Teen Spirit was a mostly American brand I believe, and even if it were not, at the age of 15 or 16 when I heard this song, my knowledge of perfume brands for young women was frankly poor.
In my teenage years, we lived in a pretty working class section of a pretty post-industrial northern town, and part of that meant that some of the people I knew in school in turn knew other people who were, to use what I think is the most appropriate term, sketchy. Through one of those sketchy friends (Tim), I think me and my extended social circle grew to include Dan (nicknamed 'Frog' because of his wide eyes), and sometimes when Dan's parents weren't home, we'd all head round to his house and hang out. A lot of weird and memorable stuff happened at that house***, including two separate truly stupid house parties, and it was in Dan's parent's front room, watching him play Mario Brothers on his Super NES, that I first heard Nirvana. I'm pretty certain that we spent the afternoon in that room, handing around controllers and listening to Nevermind on repeat.
By the time I was 17 I was all-in on Nirvana. I had a Nirvana T-shirt (not the modern boring one everyone has, not the clothing brand on, but a grey In Utero album cover shirt); In Utero was one of the first two CD's I ever bought; Bleach I owned on cassette and lost in the great car scrapyard tape disaster of 1996. Much has been written about how Nirvana launched Grunge, killed hair metal, became the voice of a generation of disaffected youth and I wasn't very disaffected but it still spoke to me on a primal level. The fact that it didn't sound like anything I'd heard before, that it didn't sound like it belonged on the radio next to Michael Bolton and Diana Ross but we'd forced it there by liking it enough that The Man had to acknowledge it, that was what made it important. Nirvana never wanted to be Rock Stars, never wanted to be the face of a generation, didn't want music press interviews and we're outright belligerent and anarchic when forced to do live performances.
They didn't want to be Oasis, didn't want to be the biggest band in the world, just wanted to make angry music about life and get paid.
Nirvana's music certainly doesn't lend itself to drunken pub singalongs. No-one is taking their acoustic guitar to open mic nights to perform Negative Creep or Serve The Servants. In all aspects they exist to me as the opposite of what Oasis offers - no vague allusions to stardom or happiness or nights spent in the pub with your mates, no major key bombast, no adherence to the musical tropes which came before them; instead, Kurt writes about homelessness, frustration, addiction, and a world which expects conformity in the face of a growing wave of teenage rebellion.
I'd been putting off listening to Nirvana because I didn't know how I could talk about them in a meaningful way without just circling back to "I listened to their music and it redefined my relationship with music in a way I never expected, and the bands I listened to because I listened to Nirvana formed the soundtrack to my most formative years as a young adult" over and over. I had to bend my own rules, or at least write a special exception for Nirvana to include Incesticide (an album of B-sides which contains some live performances of songs on other studio albums, but its 75% new original material and its in their discography so it counts) and I had to think long and hard about whether to include Unplugged in New York. As I covered in my Pearl Jam article in the section "Some Thoughts On Grunge", I think these albums count enough as studio albums to be included. I think there's a widely held belief that the Nirvana Unplugged In New York is the best of that series live performances, and it's certainly the most well known and is a genuinely interesting insight to the band playing together in what feels like a looser, more laid back format than they've been seen before, but it's not the best, just one of the best.
I wasn't yet 18 years old when I found out Kurt Cobain had taken his own life. Both Catherine and I have known people who've taken that most final step and it's always a combination of tragedy and helplessness, and I have no truck with the sensationalising of a terrible, desperate act. With that sudden, unexpected conclusion of what Nirvana was, it felt at the time like the legacy of their music, the legend of the people involved would carry on eternally. But there, at that moment, is that when Nirvana became a brand rather than a band? There were more Nirvana shirts on display then, as the last notes of their original music started to fade into the background; everyone was keen to be a part of a cultural moment, even if that moment didn't include liking or even listening to the music which had brought it into the public consciousness in the first place.
Twenty-plus years later, a band which produced two musical equivalents of Peter Kaye nostalgia comedy before disappearing into their own black hold of hype and drama and releasing an unlistenable third album are "The Biggest Band In The World", and the band which redefined what music sounded like, released five albums over five years to greater success before being cut short by tragedy are a nice T-shirt for your kids to wear.
There's no justice.
* I know there are other Oasis albums after this one but I refuse to listen to any more of their music or credit it in any way towards the critical part of their career, the part where people liked their songs and bought their albums. Sorry, Heathen Chemistry and Dig Out Your Soul, your princess is in another castle.
** Look, I'm no fan of Oasis but they've got got good album titles, I'll give them that. Punctuation, leading parentheticals, a album title referenced in a lyric, its a slam dunk home run.
*** With no context; a house party for 17 year olds which somehow had a bunch of mid-20's nazi skinheads turn up, warping the patio door of the house by spraying deodorant on it and setting fire to it, breaking a window panel because someone threw a shoe down the stairs, finding one of our friends eating packaged bird seed in the kitchen saying "tweet tweet I'm a bird", someone throwing up in Dan's parents en-suite shower and it not being discovered till his parents got back 3 days later, that sort of thing.
^ When I was younger, I used to think that wine critics, specifically british wine critics like Jilly Goulden and Oz Clarke (seen here) had a secret bet to see who could describe the tastes of various wines in the most ridiculous and inscrutable ways. As someone who now appreciates wine and whiskey and the subtlety of flavour profiles in those beverages, I am less judgemental though it is still very outlandish on occasion.
However, nothing prepared me to the absolute insanity that exists inside the perfume enthusiast community when I was looking for an image of Teen Spirit to use in this article. I think everyone should visit fragrantica.com and just browse around until your brain melts. The page for Teen Spirit, for example, suggests the profile of Teen Spirit is: Glue, Balloons, Oaks, Gummy Bears, Butterflies, Burgers, Nightmares, Rain, Dust, Noise, Void, Snaks and Ruins. Just purely insane.
