Day 4: Book Recommendation, and More Music Crap
I just finished Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live, and I enjoyed it immensely. Supposedly it’s about him driving across the country and visiting places where rock stars died, to ruminate on whether or not the best thing people can do for their careers is to die.
Suddenly, everyone remembers you fondly and all your sanctimonious interviews in the press seem more legit. You absolutely gain cred if you’re famous and then die tragically/young.
And the book is sort of about that, but it’s more about Klosterman driving around and thinking about his life, his relationships, and pop culture, and somehow turning it all into a self examination of pieces of his life.
Klosterman’s a music guy, so I’m pretty sure a lot of his references and jokes went over my head, but he and I feel and understand the same way about different things. Unimportant, pop culture, minutia that only you and maybe a dozen other people around the care about, yet it still takes over your life? I got that. Trying to figure out why things in your life are the way they are by applying parts of movies, TV, and songs to aspects of your existence? Double check. His style and outlook speaks to me, which basically means everything I just wrote is a nice long way of saying the book is really good, and I heartily recommend it.
The reason I’m writing about this, though, is because Chuck Klosterman, rock critic, essayist, and author is the first person of such standing that said it’s okay that I don’t care about Kurt Cobain.
Don’t get me wrong, you can love him and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that, but he died when I was 11 and not really into music at that point, and certainly not anything like Nirvana. I happened to enjoy being a child and was in no such rush to grow up by listening to an older kid’s music in an attempt to appear more mature.*
*Appearing mature has never been a huge priority for me, actually.
Then as I got older, and was looking for rebellious music, because, hey, I was 15 and saw the world for what it was, man, and as a self-appointed expert in everything, ever (as all teenagers are), I needed music as cynical and world-weary as me.
I found punk.
So all the talk of not being understood, suburban ennui, the world not understanding me, and the me not trying to understand it back, I found it in 1977’s New York, and 1985’s Southern California, not 1991’s Seattle. I could see the similarities between the two movements. The stripped down sound a response to disco, and larger, more bombastic rock bands in punk, and hair metal, and synth music from the 1980’s for grunge, and the mutual lyrics and content of the songs trying to find the author’s place in a world moving too fast or is too numb to what this new generation wants and needs.
But I went with punk, and for a large reason, because some of the songs and bands were about tearing everything down to build something else in its place rather than being pissed off at the world that you can’t change. There was a feeling of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ rather than ‘me’ versus everyone else.
I’d (probably) never riot, or take to the streets, but it was nice to think about, and made me feel, I don’t know, bigger than I was, maybe?
Plus, punk had catchier choruses which were easier to sing along with.*
PS- I’m shallow.
Kurt Cobain was an artist, one who touched countless lives, and just maybe, changed the face of music in the 1990’s. It was a shame someone who had so much to say had to die so young, but I won’t beatify the man, because he never touched my life.
I always felt bad when people would bring him up, because I never had anything to say. Everyone talking was roughly my age, which meant they all had experienced this great transcendental, communal experience of which I was never a part of, and I always thought it was because I didn’t get it. That it had gone over my head and all these people have an insight that I will never have. It’s like I had checked out of this great movement, and was, (pop) culturally diminished. So maybe it wasn’t guilt. Maybe it was shame.
Shame that I wasn’t as advanced as my compatriots, who had felt some sort of connection to him before he passed or shame that I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand what his music meant at that time. Shame that while the world was gathering to mourn, celebrate, and canonize, I was proverbially peeing behind the proverbial door.
And maybe that’s all true.
But I don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.
Matt