Writes my son John on Facebook, with audio and commentary on various album cuts. [ADDED: Also presented in blog form, here, where it's easier to read and enjoy.] Example:
“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is one of my favorite Nirvana songs, with manically oscillating guitar noise over relentlessly thumping drums. Most of the song is not quite “radio friendly,” but it gets most melodic in the bridge, with Kurt Cobain offering uncharacteristically straightforward advice: “Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends/Find, find your place/Speak, speak the truth.”As I wrote in the comments over there:
“Hate, hate your enemies/Save, save your friends...” made me think of a book I just read, which identified that sort of thinking as one of the "three great untruths" that are ruining the American mind...The book is "The Coddling of the American Mind," which identifies "The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People." From Chapter 3 of the book:
The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict. When the “tribe switch” is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,” which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games.It's not easy to forget that Kurt Cobain committed suicide, but, reading those lyrics, I feel that it's worth reminding you that he shot himself to death less than a year after writing that. It's hard to know, reading lyrics, whether the writer is speaking in his own voice or inhabiting a persona whose views he hates. Lyrics Genius, annotating those lyrics, says:
But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways....
Kurt Cobain was not about forgiving one’s enemies. In his personal journal, he wrote:And then he blew his own head off, and somebody else blew out John Lennon's heart.
John Lennon has been my idol all my life but he’s dead wrong about revolution… find a representative of gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers [sic] head off."
ADDED: Perhaps the Cobain suicide expressed the terrifying old realization: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
पोस्ट्स
७४ टिप्पण्या:
Gluttony or oppression? Why not one of the more interesting of the six other deadly sins? Did KC kill himself because he was overeating? Or is drug abuse an example of gluttony?
So many questions, when we could just enjoy his music and not think of the wreck of a human being he was when he killed himself.
“‘John Lennon has been my idol all my life but he’s dead wrong about revolution… find a representative of gluttony or oppression and blow the motherfuckers [sic] head off.’ And then he blew his own head off, and somebody else blew out John Lennon's heart.”
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn't notice that the lights had changed
Speaking dispassionately, there is far more evidence that Courtney Love had Cobain killed than that Kavanaugh attacked Christine Blasey Ford.
I am Laslo.
"So many questions, when we could just enjoy his music and not think of the wreck of a human being he was when he killed himself."
I'm almost 100% sure he didn't want people to " just enjoy his music."
Have you listened to “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”? The sound of the thing itself informs you that it doesn't want to just be enjoyed.
I'm fed up with your fucking sexual vendettas, Ann.
You're a backstabber and you've lived out your life in the midst of backstabbers. The staff lounge at UW Law School must be a madhouse of rich kids like you bitching about oppression to advance their careers.
Your asshole act has become a complete negative in my life.
I'm retired. I put up with enough backstabbing assholes in corporate law firms to last me the rest of my life.
It's difficult, but I must turn off the screeching of assholes seeking revenge in order to focus on something worthwhile, like my work.
Have a good life, asshole. You're a fucking waste of time.
Cobain and Lennon are two prime examples of assholes who should have just "shut up and sing(sung)"
Hate is exciting for the ego because it gives the ego free reign to assert, judge, and fantasize.
What is harder to see is that fear, shame, and guilt are also ego-driven. Depression is profoundly selfish. Self-hatred leaves the ego at the center of its own drama.
Does Shouting Thomas wake up early to type his love letters, or does he and his keg never go to bed?
Cobain thought it would be the coolest thing ever if he and Courtney committed suicide with a shotgun, after just having had a baby. He keep repeating his imaginary headlines. Fortunately, Courtney told him to go first.
Right now with this Kavanaugh thing the Left wants us to divide us into the Men vs. Women in the tribal war of all time. The Left assumes that ALL women must vote Dem and that if a woman doesn’t vote Dem she’s a traitor to her gender.
It is also interesting to note that lawyer Katz is a lesbian. Easy to run a war on men when you hate men because they are men. And cashing in - big time - on her hatred of men.
@Shouting Thomas - dude, get a grip! Is Althouse fucking forcing you to read? If I were her I would be thinking about notifying the local sheriff. And please understand, I think 2nd Wave Feminism was the most destructive movement of the 1960s. But, really!
Kurt Cobain is no hero. He abandoned his wife and young daughter.
I'd like to believe that ST has cleverly demonstrated the topic at hand with his post. I'd like to.
Listened to Nirvana religiously in high school. Had Kurt Hit Parader pic up in my locker. First to have a Kurt memorial t-shirt at my high school.
Listened to In Utero at the gym recently for the first time in years. What a terrible piece of shit.
Re: the post, sure, we could all get along better if Progressives respected the Constituion and used the Constitutionally designed-means to change its content. Or perhaps just quit trying to force everyone to go along with their mad schemes. You want to coddle the poor? Fine, do it by subscription not compulsion.
The conspiracy is that Courtney Love had him murdered. Nick Broomfield’s Kurt & Courtney explores the topic though fails to convince in my opinion. Nonetheless, I was a huge fan of Broomfield’s (and Nirvana’s) in the 90s.
@Matt - yeah, there is that moment of adulthood when you realize a good amount of musics you liked was shit. Baby Boomers believe they had the finest music ever - but that is because the radio quit playing Donovan decades ago. Well, maybe the elders in the Bay Area are still getting their freak on to “Atlantis”.
Rock stars do not make good role models.
RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTER = Hit single. A commercial song that will "shift units," (move records out the door of the store).
"You're a backstabber and you've lived out your life in the midst of backstabbers... I put up with enough backstabbing assholes...."
When did I ever stab anyone in the back? I've only laughed in your face. A face-laugher is the opposite of a backstabber.
"RADIO FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTER = Hit single. A commercial song that will "shift units," (move records out the door of the store)."
Both "unit" and "shifter" seem phallic to me.
Both "unit" and "shifter" seem phallic to me.
When all you have is a vagina, everything looks like a phallus to you.
Nirvana was the sound of Rock as a tree, freshly cut and falling, whereas Zappa was a bush, ignored and taken for granted: always in need of pruning, and always bearing fruit.
I'm not trying to be difficult, but, honestly, I'd put the excited shock and dislocation I experienced, hearing a song from "You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 2" for the first time (or almost any other mid-to-late 70's Zappa album) against all of Nirvana's - and the Foo Fighters' - entire catalogues. Hell, get all the Grunge bands together and they can't beat, or come close, to lesser works like "Joe's Garage".
Nirvana's rewards end after only a few listens. And only a few years. And only one death.
I miss Zepp's John Bonham more.
BTW - If you watch the new Quincy Jones documentary on Netflix, you will hear Henry Mancini explain that, by the '60s, white men still wondered aloud if black skin was a hindrance to scoring films.
That rhhardin approach to filmmaking is what America's really been about.
"Uh-huh-huh, do you want to see my unit?" — Butt-Head
Shifter — I think of a stick shift in a car.
mockturtle said...
"Rock stars do not make good role models."
Zappa - conservative, one wife, four smart, well-mannered, well-spoken kids, a house and a business, with no drugs beyond cigarettes.
And people called him the king of the freaks for his entire life.
I knew someone who was friends with Courtney Love's first husband, (another rock musician). Apparently, he (the first husband) was scared to death of Courtney.
That said, I don't suggest or believe she killed Kurt Cobain or had him killed.
I saw Nivana on their last tour, at a show at Roseland Ballroom in NYC. I wouldn't have gone, but a friend had an extra ticket and invited me. In theory, I should have enjoyed them: I like loud hard-rock and was a fascinated devotee of punk before any records even started coming out. (I was reading about the NYC city "underground music" scene centered around CBGB and MAX'S KANSAS CITY from whence punk sprang in the Village Voice and other music journals while I was in college in Florida. I bought the self-created 45 rpm records from TELEVISION and Richard Hell and the Voidoids by mail-order. I bought the only copy of the RAMONES first LP from the one record store I could find in Jacksonville, FL that had it, the month it came out. I was already a fan of the NEW YORK DOLLS, MODERN LOVERS, THE STOOGES, MC5, etc.)
However, I found NIRVANA...boring. Not enough sonic variation or song variety. They didn't seem original, but mainly a talented but un-original descendant of the many bands that came before them and by whom they had been influenced.
I walked in on a friend doing Courtney Love, on an office desk, when she was still screwing her way up the ladder. She was always craven. Was she a killer? I don't know.
She definitely had no self-respect.
Everything can be phallic, or maybe it can't.
Althouse, go to www.reddit.com/r/absoluteunits for a demonstration of the current idiomatic meaning of the word "unit," a large bulky thing. The phallic connotation is not in evidence. We're talking about fat things.
Shifters are only phallic for manual transmissions. In the early 1960s, my grandpa's car had a pushbutton automatic transmission, which was odd even then. Is a pushbutton "clitoral" like a stick shift is "phallic"? While the start of the video is amusing, here is the transmission at issue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAslCTRwsPk&t=0m56s
"Friendly" can also seem phallic, if you have the right attitude. "Radio," not so much, unless you recall the RKO tower in Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Althouse at 4:58: Mark Judge.
Althouse at 8:08: Mike Judge.
I think we now need a Judge Reinhold reference.
So I will point out that he never groped Phoebe Cates, he only masturbated while she was in the swimming pool.
I am Laslo.
I suppose each generation has a few favorite musicians that they use to mark their territory. That's how they know they're distinct from the previous generations and from each other. People used to think that there were real and significant differences between the Beatles and Rolling Stones fandoms, and Bob Dylan fans believed that they were above such silly quarrels.......I suppose it's fun to be part of a tribe, but I'm just as glad to have outlived such foolishness. Intruders in the dust. We all seek to belong, but even in our most primal moments of belonging we're aware that we're a bit different than our dearest companions.
"Zappa - conservative, one wife, four smart, well-mannered, well-spoken kids, a house and a business, with no drugs beyond cigarettes."
Wikipedia says he had 2 wives.
Ann Althouse said...
Both "unit" and "shifter" seem phallic to me.
That's kind of extreme. It's definitely a radio reference. But I can see it. A female band could cover it, and change the emphasis, maybe, though it might take some obvious penile imagery for others to get it.
I'm familiar with the slang use of "unit" from 1970s — speaking of punk bands — I'll always love The Units.
Ann Althouse said...
"Wikipedia says he had 2 wives."
You're right - my bad (I never liked Gail anyway).
"That's kind of extreme. It's definitely a radio reference...."
Identifying one meaning doesn't exclude others. That's the whole idea of "double entendre."
Make a list of double entendre in rock songs. It's a long list.
Ann,
"I'll always love The Units."
I'd forgotten about them. How funny! They were fun!
That's when music had possibilities....
"So I will point out that he never groped Phoebe Cates, he only masturbated while she was in the swimming pool."
And then she moved in with her Abnormal Psychology professor. Prescient.
In Utero was a pretty uneven, disappointing follow up album to Nevermind.
It sounds exactly like an album recorded in Minnesota in the winter would sound.
Is Shouting Thomas gone?
Ann Althouse said...
"Identifying one meaning doesn't exclude others."
Yeah, but isn't that kind of unfair? (I'm asking.) They're trying to make a statement about commercialism - something I was actively engaged in while with this band - and you're slapping another meaning on it. One we fought for, BTW.
It just seems like a stretch you don't have to make. Not saying you shouldn't, but why?
I read a biography of Peter the Great, the Russian Czar. He imposed some reforms on the Orthodox religion of his era. Something to do with legislating the length of the beards and how to make the sign on the cross.. Some people made the sign of the cross with three fingers to indicate the Holy Trinity, and others made the sign of the cross with two fingers to indicate the divine/human duality of Christ's nature. The Old Believers and the reformers took this very seriously. If you made the sign of the cross in the wrong way, it was considered a real affront. People were murdered because they made the sign of the cross the wrong way.......People are at their most atrocious when they are at their most righteous.
@Matt - yeah, there is that moment of adulthood when you realize a good amount of musics you liked was shit.
Actually the opposite is true, and if the music really is shit, like Nirvana, people will still tend to like it more if they've heard it when they're younger than when first exposed to it as adults: "The most important period in forming lifelong musical tastes for men comes between ages 13 to 16. Women formed their tastes slightly earlier than men, roughly between ages 11 to 14."
I'm pretty sure that the music you like as an adolescent has very little to do with shaping you as an adult. Maybe it might encourage you try a joint or participate in a drive by shooting, but other than that the impact is minimal.
Punk purist Steve Albini's letter to Nirvana about possibly recording their "In Utero" album:
"...I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal "production" and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.
If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to "sweeten" your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever...) then you're in for a bummer and I want no part of it..."
Nirvana recorded the album with Albini.
Nirvana then had parts of the album remixed and "sweetened".
Then Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head.
Punk's self-masturbatory fetishization of purism and authenticity cornered many into perpetual adolescent angst.
Insert here the sound of John Lydon laughing.
I am Laslo.
From Wiki:
"...After the recording sessions were completed, Nirvana sent unmastered tapes of the album to several individuals, including the president of DGC's parent company Geffen Records Ed Rosenblatt and the group's management company Gold Mountain. When asked about the feedback he received, Cobain told Michael Azerrad, "The grown-ups don't like it." He said he was told his songwriting was "not up to par", the sound was "unlistenable", and that there was uncertainty that mainstream radio would welcome the sound of Albini's production.[53] There were few people at Geffen or Gold Mountain who wanted the band to record with Albini to begin with, and Cobain felt he was receiving an unstated message to scrap the sessions and start all over again. Cobain was upset and said to Azerrad, "I should just re-record this record and do the same thing we did last year because we sold out last year—there's no reason to try and redeem ourselves as artists at this point. I can't help myself—I'm just putting out a record I would like to listen to at home." However, a number of the group's friends liked the album, and by April 1993, Nirvana was intent on releasing In Utero as it was. According to Cobain, "Of course, they want another Nevermind, but I'd rather die than do that. This is exactly the kind of record I would buy as a fan, that I would enjoy owning."[54]..."
Like I said: perpetual adolescent angst.
I am Laslo.
I remember "Heart-Shaped Box" as being the only thing that really stood out. The rest grew on you. Or me.
Steve Albini made a lot of money for doing nothing. He's became the HMO of Rock:
You pay him, to tell you, that you really should be eating right.
"Big Black" was a racist, sexist anti-monster, though. No doubt about that.
"people will still tend to like [music] more if they've heard it when they're younger than when first exposed to it as adults"
I stopped listening to contemporary music when I was in my late 20's, a few years before Nirvana became popular. Not sure why, just had other things to do. I stopped listening to the music of my youth also, because, well, one shouldn't live in the past, should one?
When I hear the music of my youth now, I generally think, hmmm, that's not really very good, is it? but it does have the occasional nostalgic twinge.
When I hear contemporary popular music, it is all just noise and caterwauling.
Althouse: "When did I ever stab anyone in the back? I've only laughed in your face. A face-laugher is the opposite of a backstabber."
Well, we will just have to measure the length of ypur arms and perform a DNA analysis to confirm you are a human before we accept that particular assertion, now won't we?
Oh, let me guess, you have suddenly un-repressed a memory that you fear arm length measurements and DNA tests, right?
Well isnt that convenient Althouse...if that is even your real name...
"I'd forgotten about them. How funny! They were fun!"
Thanks for knowing them. The bassist was my brother-in-law.
"Yeah, but isn't that kind of unfair? (I'm asking.) They're trying to make a statement about commercialism - something I was actively engaged in while with this band - and you're slapping another meaning on it. One we fought for, BTW. It just seems like a stretch you don't have to make. Not saying you shouldn't, but why?"
All I said was it's what it made me think. I assume artists see the potential multiple meanings of the words they use. The more obscure the other meaning, the less one ought to blame the artist for carelessly allowing other, unintended meanings from showing.
Not that Senator Grassley is an artist, but I'm sure he didn't mean for his trombone talk to seem sexual, but it was ludicrous and poorly controlled, so I laugh at him.
For Nirvana, I credit them with intending this double meaning. I don't know, of course. I would think less of them if I knew it were unintended.
"from showing" should read "to show."
"Steve Albini made a lot of money for doing nothing."
I somewhat agree with this. The dude is a self-promoting purist, with the requisite authenticity fetish. And his own work confuses edginess with just being an asshole.
However, they released his 'revisit' mix of "In Utero" a few years back, and it is a far better album.
My problem with the original mix was that the polish wasn't a good fit for the songs (whereas you could argue that that same polish fit "Nevermind"s cross-over songs well): the In Utero songs were more off-the-cuff, and the production highlighted the holes.
You can listen to the Albini mixes on YouTube. The mix of "Heart-Shaped Box" is a good example: the verse guitars have the radio-friendly-unit-EQ and volume stripped away, and the drums breathe and ghost, not just pound.
The vocals aren't as loud in the mix, and the harmony vocals and double-tracking have been removed: you can hear a performance, not just a pose.
Not as good as a single, but better as a song.
I am Laslo.
Ann Althouse said...
"The bassist was my brother-in-law."
BWAAAAAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
THAT'S EVEN FUNNIER!!!
Ann Althouse said...
"All I said was it's what it made me think."
Right.
"I assume artists see the potential multiple meanings of the words they use."
Not always, but yeah.
"The more obscure the other meaning, the less one ought to blame the artist for carelessly allowing other, unintended meanings from showing."
I get it.
"For Nirvana, I credit them with intending this double meaning. I don't know, of course. I would think less of them if I knew it were unintended."
I still think it's unintended, but I worked in radio (and with Consolidated), so I think they meant it in the context of the questioning-of-record-companies movement at the time, that we, Fugazi, and a host of other bands were into.
I must say, your tastes seem to have been greatly expanded from your music posts of the past. All of a sudden, we're more simpatico than I remember.
Re tribalism -
You really do have to live in tribal ways. This will happen whether you like it or not, and indeed tribes will emerge spontaneously if an existing tribe fails to maintain itself culturally and politically. There is only so much give in human nature.
This used to be better understood. Modernity brought hubris and piles of unwarranted ideological assumptions, that were no more scientific and less grounded than the ancient empiricism.
The US, semi-officially, adopted the very successful nation-building propaganda systems of 19th century European nationalism. This made "tribes" out of geographical expressions. France, Germany, Italy most successfully, others not quite so much (Russia, Spain, Belgium, the UK), but enough. The US, however, is the greatest success of this process.
This can be considered an oppressive, despotic program, and so it is and has been. There are going to be losers. There is collateral damage. But if you are going to continue to be the USA, and especially if you are going to integrate millions of disparate immigrants, you are going to have to carefully brainwash them. You need the politico-cultural consensus of 1905.
This was largely abandoned, partly through enemy action, partly the "long march", partly class-and-caste based hubris - misplaced compassion for instance - partly through deliberate politics. The only way out in the case of the US is, at this time as always, through the active suppression of ethnic politics, ethnic education, expunging of ethnic complaints (BLM, NAACP and La Raza, organized feminism, etc.), and an official promotion of nationalism. But that is not going to happen.
I liked In Utero. Better than Nevermind. I actually wasn't much a fan of Nirvarna during the baby in the pool with the penis album cover phase. The best part about this story is the 4-page fax sent by producer Albini on his terms for working with the band. That was awesome. Doesn't get any more real.
The book is "The Coddling of the American Mind," which identifies "The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People. From Chapter 3 of the book:
The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently
In elementary school and junior high, I had seen enough evidence of tribalism, of in-groups and out-groups and of the tendency to cast someone out of the tribe. When I got to the regional high school, I found even more evidence of tribalism. For example, those from the town where the high school was based regarded those from my hometown as "dumb farmers." When it came to tribalism, I already knew that we "dumb farmers," though we may have been sinned against in the regional high school in the tribalism game, were just as much sinners, judging by the tribalism I had already seen.
Before I got out of high school in the '60s, I came to the conclusion that we all form tribes- though I didn't use that term- that we all have in-groups and out-groups. I had seen that opposition to the Vietnam War was decided at times on group affiliations- not just on well thought out political opinions. The father of a peer had signed a petition against the Vietnam War- a petition that appeared as an ad in the NYT. The son let it be known that a lot of the cool people had also signed the petition.
Most of us living in the North during this time viewed ourselves as unprejudiced, especially compared to those horrible racists down South. Before I was out of high school, I had come to the conclusion that the South had no monopoly on racism.
I'm not sure that I could even identify a Nirvana song. It is definitely ironic how Cobain ended up, considering what he said about John Lennon.
"Steve Albini made a lot of money for doing nothing."
Albini wasn't afraid to take money from the labels, but did sink most of his time and efforts into the bands he hosted and their songs.
Let's just say I was there.
I have never understood Nirvana. What is the genius of this group? The material certainly is not complicated, and falls short of original in examples like Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are.I have asked numerous people this question, and nobody could pin it down. Anybody who is a fan, I would certainly appreciate insight into that.
It could be argued that an enemy by definition is someone worthy of hate. That said, there can be excess glorification of hate from villains pretending that hate justifies their villainy, and also from girls excessively wanting to indulge their cruel desire for destruction because it can be sexually pleasant for love to be accompanied with hate from the consideration that girls feeling fake love from the sordid love potion of sodomy have a hard time feeling hate.
Thing is, though, girls tend to be more sexually attracted to males who by nature aren't particularly as bold and reckless as they are about wanting love emotion in females to be associated with hate emotion in females, at least when it comes to girls hating so much they actually act on their hate. For every male who uses power, stratagem or luck to boldly manage to his own benefit to obtain, pander to, and keep a following of recklessly destroying females hellbent on destruction, there's untold males who try for that sort of thing only to fall into hell (or self-destruction) or into a thermidorian reaction from those who look concernedly agape at the excessively indiscriminate destruction (or the prospects of that). And that sort of thing doesn't just happen on a grand scale, it can happen on a lesser scale in local or office politics, etc. Any way, if you've got DNA from ancestors who've attracted recklessly destructive cruel girls to their benefit, you've got DNA possessed by even more uncles, brothers, cousins, etc., of ancestors who from a lack of sacredness were hanged, beheaded, exiled, drawn-and-quartered, fired in disgrace, etc., because they were viewed as not sacred about not encouraging (wrong) excessive destruction. Whatever sexiness might be claimed to be accrued to a male from the former consideration will more than be made up for by the unsexiness of the latter. (And recall that being the sort to have excessively homicidal catsy-girl lovers when one obtains them means that the catsy-girl-lovers/catsy-girl-lover-inflicted-destruction is low in your male ancestors, suggestive of a very unsexy inability to sexually attract very many catsy-girls.)
Catsy girls can get sort of frustrated sometimes by the tendency of sexually attractive males to be very prudent and (they might say) cowardly about not suffering the punishment from hell (either in this world or in some spiritual setting) that intuitively seems possible if one allows cat-like girls attracted to you to get more destructive as a result of their attraction than what is right, which on average I suppose is about what people in general or even the world of the dead feels would be appropriate. Though mostly all good girls want males to be brave when it comes to doing what is beautiful and right, when it comes to wanting or permitting lovers who are excessively destructive from catsiness, girls (and especially catsy girls) prefer the male who is by nature the proverbial cowardly lion. True, they wouldn't want males who are afraid of catsiness because they've been affected by self-made pain-sensitizing chemicals coursing in their groin, but if that's the sort of male she else would be attracted to, well she probably has all sorts of other problems (and what may be an advantage to carnivores compared with humans, most of the pain-sensitizing chemicals that make sodomy especially terrifying and a good tool for controlling torture are in humans supposedly produced by the seminal vesicles rather than the testes) that she ought to sort out before considering actually destroying particular males just because she feels they are bad. The good news is that when a girl feels overwhelmed by deferring from love to one who seems more keen than she that they not go to hell (on earth, in the self-destructive regions of the brain, or in some other place) by her destroying more than is right, her deference can make her enjoy more being totally indifferent to the entreaties of whomever it is right for her to send to hell by taking him beyond what he can take and slowly and cruelly into the hell that intuitively would seem to await him after death if he is truly a very bad person. In other words, this frustration of females can help ensure that (e.g., in societies which believe in ritual killing by female priestesses) those killed by catsy females will especially tend to be those which they believe will be judged as worthy of ending up in the part of the land-of-the-dead where they will be cruelly and exceedingly tortured, and intuitively this place seems destined for just the most immoral people, though the logic of the relevance of such a cruel place on an intellectual level seems like it might depend on how the land of the dead in general feels about the morality of catsy cruelty, i.e., females getting off sexually on inflicting cruelty just to enjoy sex that in its particulars is incompatible with her being too screwed up by sodomy to feel hate.
I don't really know much about Colbain or even music generally, but maybe he allowed himself to be manipulated by female(s) indiscriminately cruel, something the young are more susceptible to, especially if they very much put themselves out there and have busy lives incompatible with the process of figuring out how things are, which as regards figuring out the morals of cruelty is best done at leisurely pace. The Colbain song you linked to seems pretty good I guess, at least for that sort of style of music.
I have never understood Nirvana. What is the genius of this group?
I don't know what the gnius is, but I know who it was. It wasn't Cobain, it was Dave Grohl.
Your asshole act has become a complete negative in my life. - ST
Much the same could be said about you.
It wasn't Cobain, it was Dave Grohl.
Yes. And his post-Nirvana career bears that out.
On the flip side, we've actually hosted Krist Novoselic at our house for a small, political fund-raiser back when he was floating the idea of running for Lt. Gov of Washington state. Nothing came of it - as he's a bit too Libertarian for these parts - but it was, well, kind of a trip having a member of Nirvana in my house.
Ever the hero in his own movie, Shouting Thomas appears to be taking his balls (ha!) and going home.
Gahrie said...
"I don't know what the gnius is, but I know who it was. It wasn't Cobain, it was Dave Grohl."
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Never in a million years.
Shouting Thomas has been a sporadic poster here since before I ever started posting here, as far as I can telL. He seems to have been a regular presence here when I was a newbie. I don't recall what year I started posting here, but it was while GWB was still the President, so that's been quite a few years.
In any case, this is ST's modus operandi: he'll blitz the blog with a few or many disjointed, ugly, enraged, unhinged, completely non-sequitur rants...then he'll disappear. Just when you think he's gone for good...he pops up, again with non-sequitur insults and tirades that seem as if they belong in a movie we can't see or hear.
He'll be back again.
Kurt Cobain was overrated.
"Your asshole act has become a complete negative in my life. - ST"
Much the same could be said about you.
Yeah, no doubt. It's not like anyone ever has or ever would accuse ST of being a decent, kind or positive guy. The amount of resentment he harbors could power an atomic bomb.
Is the Coddling book good?
What I do like about Grohl was how he lobbied the RRHOF for Rush's induction. He seems like a cool guy who has a deep appreciation for what came before him. I wish I enjoyed his music, too, but I guess that's just me. The sound is a bit scratchy and atonal for my taste.
Bricap said...
"What I do like about Grohl was how he lobbied the RRHOF for Rush's induction. He seems like a cool guy who has a deep appreciation for what came before him. I wish I enjoyed his music, too, but I guess that's just me. The sound is a bit scratchy and atonal for my taste."
Cobain's mad genius gave Grohl's nice-guy mediocrity a leg-up to the Big Time. The Foo Fighters are a placeholder in Rock. An equivalent of the napkin put over a drink before going to the bathroom. I've started up lawn mowers with more power, and found things, in my own vomit, that are more memorable than any of his songs. (After all these years, and all that glowing press, I still can't tell you a single title of one FF song). Acts, like his, killed Rock, because they just couldn't put up a fight.
The only Rush song blacks know is the opening to "Tom Sawyer". Now, if that's a legacy of greatness that deserves to be next to, say, Jimi Hendrix or Smokey Robinson, then so be it. But I don't think so.
That's "The Coddling of the American Mind" for realz....
And that brings us back to my original question as to what this "mad genius" of Nirvana is all about.
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