A NYT columnist wonders about "Eminem’s endorsement, and the way he made it" and it makes me question whether Eminem did endorse Harris.

I'm reading "Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality?" by Jessica Grose:

Obama casually rapping a few bars of “Lose Yourself” got a lot more attention than Eminem’s brief speech. But in this tight election that could be decided by a few swing states — including Michigan — I wonder if Eminem’s endorsement, and the way he made it, will be the most consequential one that Vice President Harris receives.

What was special about the way he made what Grose is calling his "endorsement"? Reading the transcript and rewatching the video, I realized that Eminem did not make an endorsement at all — not of a candidate anyway. What Eminem endorsed was freedom of speech. That's where he put his Michigan clout:

"So look I wrote down a few things I wanted to say...."

He's a wordsmith, and he tells us he wrote it down. That means these words really matter. This is text. It's been crafted.

"I'm here tonight for a couple of important reasons."

There will be 2 reasons stated. Let's find 2 reasons and not hallucinate additional reasons.

"Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, marries Riley Hawk, son of Tony Hawk, in ceremony officiated by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe."

Metafilter discusses this event, saying things like: "The bride and groom are 31 and 30 respectively. You cannot fathom how old this headline makes me feel in my bones" and "My 46-year-old self, realizing that Frances is four years older than her father was when he died, is going to be sitting in the semi-dark this evening, listening to old albums and thinking about things."

"With a libretto written by... first-time opera makers, the show has Rousselle largely mumbling, rather than singing. Her mumbles are then translated..."

"... for the audience using supertitles.... Despite the opera’s central character being named Blake, 'the only reason people are going to see this is because of Kurt Cobain’s celebrity,' [said a Cobain biographer].... The idea for making 'Last Days' also had little to do with Cobain as a person, said [Oliver] Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence.... [Agathe Rousselle, who plays the Cobain character] best known for starring in the horror movie 'Titane' as a woman sexually attracted to cars, said... [s]he was bullied at school and one day one of the school’s popular girls threw a CD of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind' at her, sneering, 'That’s the kind of thing you weirdo would listen to,' Rousselle recalled. When she got home, she immediately played it. 'I lost my mind to it,' she said.... [Rousselle] said the opera was not about Cobain, but bigger issues like how 'becoming a myth will kill you' and 'the absurdity of being famous and wanting to disappear when you’re recognizable to pretty much everyone.' The opera could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points, she added."

From "A Kurt Cobain Opera Examines the Myth, Not the Man/The creators of 'Last Days,' an eagerly anticipated opera about a grunge star’s final days, insist it’s really about how society treats its icons" (NYT).

"As 'Norwegian Wood' played faintly on a crappy stereo, Courtney led me down a short hallway to the bedroom."

"I got to the door and opened it to find Kurt lying in a little bed in a little room, his back against the wall, facing the doorway, his shocking blue eyes gazing at me through the subdued lighting. His bare feet stuck out past the bedsheets, and his toenails were painted a rosy hue. The smell of jasmine flowers wafted through the screen of the window above his head. To this day, whenever I smell jasmine I’m transported to that moment. 'Hi,' he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.)... I asked Kurt what he was like as a kid, and he said something about being small for his age. I stood up, unfurled my wiry five-foot-six-inch frame, and said, in a theatrically manly voice, 'I don’t know what you’re talking about!' We exchanged smiles, and our bond grew from there. Somehow I got to talking about Arlo Guthrie’s 'The Motorcycle Song' and how I’d play it on the family record player and run around the house pretending I was a motorcycle. And Kurt said, 'I did that, too!'"

From "My Time with Kurt Cobain/Befriending a rock star isn’t necessarily as cool as you’d think—particularly when tragedy happens" by Michael Azerrad (The New Yorker).

The FBI releases its (very mundane) file on the death of Kurt Cobain.

Read it here. 

Here's the Billboard article on the long-secret file. It tells us that the 10-page file contains 2 letters — both from people who were concerned — based on what they'd read in book or seen in a movie — that the death was not a suicide but a murder. The file also contains the letter the FBI sent in response to each letter, telling them that murder is usually a matter of state and local law and that without "specific facts... to indicate... a violation of federal law," there's no basis for an FBI investigation.

There's a little bit more to it, but basically that's it. 

ADDED: What stationery do you use when you write to the FBI?

The many voices of Paul McCartney.

May I recommend this highly detailed episode of "The Beatles Naked" podcast? 

I'm not yet half way through, but I'm so impressed with the analysis. There's so much of it! With the music played, so you can judge for yourself. 

I was interested, for example, in the discussion of the emotional effect of any slightly out-of-tune singing. Is it "soulful"? And has our experience of it changed over the years as present-day music is electronically tuned to perfection?

And is it the case that there is a song that only Paul McCartney can sing and that song is "Helter Skelter"? The Wikipedia article on the song cites a number of cover versions, but the only one mentioned in the podcast is Bono's. It is mentioned with a scoffing laugh (just before saying that if Kurt Cobain had tried, he might have succeeded). I just annoyed myself by listening to the Mötley Crüe version. I also sampled a little of the Marilyn Manson "Helter Skelter." Here's the awful Oasis version.

I'm no expert, but I'd say if you're just going to do it like Paul and just approach what he did, why do it at all? As an homage? But it's an homage with a song that got its reputation twisted up into the Manson murders. Bono said Charles Manson "stole" the song from The Beatles and he was "stealing it back." 

Having just written about the connection between Trump's January 6th speech that — intentionally or unintentionally — seems to have inspired the storming of the U.S. Capitol, I'm interested to stumble so soon into this story of a vocal presentation that may have inspired murder. According to one Manson follower: 

When the Beatles' White Album came out, Charlie listened to it over and over and over and over again. He was quite certain that the Beatles had tapped in to his spirit, the truth—that everything was gonna come down and the black man was going to rise. It wasn't that Charlie listened to the White Album and started following what he thought the Beatles were saying. It was the other way around. He thought that the Beatles were talking about what he had been expounding for years. Every single song on the White Album, he felt that they were singing about us. The song 'Helter Skelter'—he was interpreting that to mean the blacks were gonna go up and the whites were gonna go down.

Of course, there's no way to hold The Beatles complicit in a murder scheme. At most, they could have thought that too many people are too attached to them and looking for messages and crazy connections and maybe they ought to stick to the peace-and-love songs so they don't accidentally inspire murder. It would be a different matter if The Beatles knew before they put out the White Album that there was a violent group set to rise up when The Beatles gave the signal "helter skelter."

"There is nothing like the energy and atmosphere of live music. It is the most life-affirming experience..."

"... to see your favorite performer onstage, in the flesh, rather than as a one-dimensional image glowing in your lap as you spiral down a midnight YouTube wormhole. Even our most beloved superheroes become human in person. Imagine being at Wembley Stadium in 1985 as Freddie Mercury walked onstage for the Live Aid benefit concert... It was Freddie's connection with the audience that transformed that dilapidated soccer stadium into a sonic cathedral. In broad daylight, he majestically made 72,000 people his instrument, joining them in harmonious unison.... I’ve been lifted and carried to the stage by total strangers for a glorious swan dive back into their sweaty embrace. Arm in arm, I have sung at the top of my lungs with people I may never see again. All to celebrate and share the tangible, communal power of music.... I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human... [T]ogether, we are instruments in a sonic cathedral, one that we build together night after night. And one that we will surely build again."

Writes The Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (in The Atlantic).

ADDED: Interesting that Grohl made Freddie Mercury his central example of the sublime. Mercury was the one artist Kurt Cobain — Grohl's former bandmate — cited in his suicide note:

[W]hen we're back stage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is, I can't fool you, any one of you.... I must be one of those narcissists who only appreciate things when they're gone. I'm too sensitive....

I think this is a sign that everything's going to be all right.

The Guardian, on its front page, features an article titled "The 10 greatest cardigans." And "cardigans" isn't some special British word for something more important than a sweater that buttons down the front. This is actually an article identifying and ranking the great button-down sweaters in history. #7 is that thick, nubby thing Jeff Bridges wore in "The Big Lebowski." #4 is that even rattier thing Kurt Cobain wore in Nirvana's MTV "Unplugged" performance. #1 is the J. Crew "symbol of Michelle Obama’s mastery of soft-power semiotics" that FLOTUS wore on her first visit to London when she met the Prime Minister's wife. Michelle Obama also wore a cardigan to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, but apparently the soft-power semiotics she deployed for the Prime Minister's wife had more greatness about it.

"25 years ago today, on September 21, 1993, Nirvana released its third and last studio album, In Utero..."

"... the defiantly raw and noisy follow-up to Nevermind, their much slicker breakthrough album... And if you really want to feel old, think about this: In Utero is an older album today than the Beatles' White Album was on the day In Utero was released!"

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.

But being prepared for tribalism doesn’t mean we have to live in tribal ways....

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:

Kurt Cobain was not about forgiving one’s enemies. In his personal journal, he wrote:

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.

ADDED: Perhaps the Cobain suicide expressed the terrifying old realization: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Shirt tucking.

I see — from reading the NYT — that shirt tucking is in issue:

July 10, 2017: "Untuckit Strikes a Chord With Self-Explanatory Men’s Wear."

Untuckit, it seems, was an idea so ludicrously obvious that no high-paid marketing genius had bothered to think of it. And fashion insiders sneered when [Chris] Riccobono and [Aaron] Sanandres conceived the company in 2010.

“They said, ‘No, you can’t use that name, it’s not sophisticated,’” Mr. Riccobono said....

The guys who were tuning in, however, did not need to see the shirts... to get the concept. Before long, Untuckit was popping up in GQ....

July 12, 2017: "A ‘Dad’ Look Is Suddenly Stylish: The Tucked-In T-Shirt."

It has recently been a common style at runway shows staged by Gucci, Lemaire and Fendi. Demna Gvasalia’s most recent show for Balenciaga, built around the idea of bad taste and so-called “dad style,” also featured the look....

[Andrew Luecke, a co-author of the recent book “Cool: Style, Sound, and Subversion,"] noted that it is... in line with the ’90s nostalgia sweeping through fashion of late. Kurt Cobain and the guys on “Beverly Hills 90210” favored the look, and it was part of the uniform adopted by their 1950s precursors, like James Dean and Marlon Brando.

“It’s such an easy way to tweak your look,” he said. “It makes your outfit look cleaner. It can be a little formal, a little nerdy. You can take it in all sorts of directions.”

I like the way there are 2 trends, completely opposed and both premised on bad taste. The main difference is that the tucked-in look is working on the old idea that if you're cool, bad is good. The untucked look seems to be more about ordinary guys wanting to look and feel reasonably okay.

But it's the untucked look that is selling product. There's something specific to buy (a closer cut shirt with a just-long-enough tail). The tucked look is just something to do with an ordinary product you already have. Why would the fashion industry bother to do that — show you a way to update without buying anything? Maybe these people are just irked as hell by the money Messrs. Riccobono and Sanandres are making with their too-obvious product.

By the way, I did not remember Kurt Cobain for his tucked-in t-shirt. I remembered his huge, very bulky sweater. So I looked for some photographs and found this, which you might want to emulate, seeing as how there's ’90s nostalgia sweeping through fashion of late:



Marlon Brando photograph added for comparison purposes. Yeah, he looks a lot better, but tucking in your t-shirt, which one will you more closely resemble? Keep your objectivity is all I'm saying.

hbo movie about kurt cobain is hard to watch.

That's what I googled after watching about a half hour of it. That turned up an NPR piece that said:

But a new HBO documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, looks beyond that well-known story. It gives motion to Cobain's artwork and photographs, and spends time with his media-averse family. And it's a film that is, at times, hard to watch.

And this from The Daily News:

It surprised [the director, Brett] Morgen that [Cobain's widow Courtney] Love has viewed this hard-to-watch movie at four screenings so far....

Kurt Cobain, who said "I like the Beatles, but I hate Paul McCartney"...

... sang "And I Love Her" his way, in a newly revealed recording, you can listen to here. Compare Kurt's darkness to the the Beatles original which you can listen to here.

"On the home movies I saw, Kurt is not meek. Courtney is not dominating him."

"I think this film is really going to challenge people’s perceptions."

In one eye-popping 1992 home video included in the film, Cobain and Ms. Love are seen blissfully living in druggie squalor in Los Angeles. Standing in a towel in the bathroom with shaving cream on his face, Cobain teases Ms. Love about her tabloid image as a man-eating monster. “You and Roseanne,” he says playfully, referring to Roseanne Barr. “You’re tied for the most-hated women in America.” She pretend-pouts....

In [one] lengthy recording, Cobain talks about trying to lose his virginity in high school to a “very fat” girl who attended special education classes. When his peers found out, Cobain felt so humiliated that he panicked. “I couldn’t stand the ridicule,” he says on the tape. “So I got high and drunk, and I walked down to the train tracks,” where he lay down, hoping to be killed.

Major theme: humiliation. Minor theme: fear of fat.

The movie is "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck," and the moviemaker is Brett Morgen, who made "The Kid Stays in the Picture" (which is excellent).

"My dad was exceptionally ambitious. But he had a lot thrown on him, exceeding his ambition."

"He wanted his band to be successful. But he didn't want to be the f**king voice of a generation.  In reality, if he had lived, I would have had a dad. And that would have been an incredible experience.... Even though Kurt died in the most horrific way possible, there is this mythology and romanticism that surrounds him, because he's 27 forever. The shelf life of an artist or musician isn't particularly long. Kurt has gotten to icon status because he will never age. He will always be that relevant in that time and always be beautiful."

Said Frances Bean Cobain.

"It's OK when SP makes fun of God, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc...."

"... but reference a rock star who blew his brains out 20 years ago and everyone goes crazy..."

"When someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind."

"I have many records, books and films featuring people who have taken their own lives, and I regard them all with a bit of disdain. When someone commits this act, he or she is out of my analog world. I know they existed, yet they have nullified their existence because they willfully removed themselves from life. They were real but now they are not. I no longer take this person seriously. I may be able to appreciate what he or she did artistically but it’s impossible to feel bad for them. Their life wasn’t cut short — it was purposely abandoned. It’s hard to feel bad when the person did what they wanted to. It sucks they are gone, of course, but it’s the decision they made. I have to respect it and move on."

That's not the only point Henry Rollins makes in "Fuck Suicide." My son John focused on one of the other points over at Facebook, where I'm participating in the comments. I'm choosing to focus on this because it made me reflect on the way I feel when artists who have spoken to me kill themselves. Unless they are in the final throes of a fatal illness, their suicide reveals something about the mind that gave rise to the art, and it infuses that art with different meaning.

"With the lights out, it's less dangerous... I feel stupid and contagious...."

An old song lyric evoked by the new headline "The Science Behind Suicide Contagion."

Publicity surrounding a suicide has been repeatedly and definitively linked to a subsequent increase in suicide, especially among young people. Analysis suggests that at least 5 percent of youth suicides are influenced by contagion....

There’s a particularly strong effect from celebrity suicides....The idea is to avoid emphasizing or glamorizing suicide, or to make it seem like a simple or inevitable solution for people who are at risk. 

I've noticed, in the coverage of the Robin Williams suicide, a grasping onto the belief that he felt compelled: He couldn't help it. That's comforting for survivors, and with some celebrities, everyone feels like a survivor, but it unwittingly sends the message to those who feel drawn to suicide that it's hopeless and that if you succumb, you won't be blamed; in fact, you will have made a profound statement of the magnitude of your pain, and it will fill the survivors with love and understanding (as opposed to the new load of problems and questions that you've created and escaped).

The end of the linked article — which I read after linking to the old Nirvana tune — discusses the Kurt Cobain suicide. It "bucked the pattern" — suicides decreased —  assertedly because journalists were careful to adhere to suicide prevention guidelines. There is no mention of the impact of the uniquely dramatic public performance of Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, reading his suicide letter out loud and interspersing her outraged commentary: 

I don't really think it takes away his dignity to read this considering that it's addressed to most of you. He's such an asshole. I want you all to say 'asshole' really loud.... God! You asshole.... And I'm laying in our bed, and I'm really sorry. And I feel the same way you do. I'm really sorry you guys. I don't know what I could have done. I wish I'd been here. I wish I hadn't listened to other people, but I did. Every night I've been sleeping with his mother, and I wake up in the morning and think it's him because his body's sort of the same. And I have to go now. Just tell him he's a fucker, OK? Just say "fucker." "You're a fucker." And that you love him.

"We'll never get to hear how the band might have developed; the analogy would be if John Lennon had died not in 1980 but in 1965."

Wrote my son John, yesterday, April 8th:

Nirvana released only three proper studio albums. In an interview near the end of his life, Cobain was critical of the band's soft/loud formula and talked about wanting to branch out stylistically. He was disappointed that the band up to that point had emphasized the heavy side of that formula instead of a poppier, Beatley side.... They should have done so much more. But they changed the direction of rock music in the few years they were around. I realize that other bands have a better claim to inventing grunge. Nirvana was to grunge rock as the Beatles were to '60s rock, or as Mozart was to the Classical style, or as Bach was to Baroque. They didn't invent their style. They perfected it. Cobain was the first to admit that he mostly ripped off a lot of other bands to make Nirvana's music. I'm so glad he did.

I appreciated that John was commemorating the date we learned that Kurt Cobain had killed himself, his body having lain dead, undiscovered, for 3 days. As I wrote over there, the date we heard the news matters deeply:

To me, it's the effect on people like you that is so significant. For the music that you and other young people loved to have suddenly taken on the meaning of the rejection of life -- that was terrible thing (in addition to the loss that you describe, to know that you would never hear more, never have the experience of hearing what would have evolved from what you already had made part of your mind and your life through love and attention).

John was 13 at this point, and he recounts hearing the news that day on MTV, in a report that used the phrase "a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head." He turned to me for an explanation, and I said "That means he killed himself."

The Crack Emcee is on the radio...

... right now. Listen here. [UPDATE: The live broadcast is over now. But you can stream or download it here.]

NOTE: He's there to talk. There's also music that's not his. Don't let me confuse you into mistaking Elvis for Crack.

AT 10:20 CT: The music part is over and Crack is talking now.

AT 10:43: They are going through some kind of countdown of greatest recordings of all time (from the "psychedelic soul" view point), and I like that the Little Richard song is "Rip It Up." That's my favorite Little Richard song. AND: Trying to retrospectively add a Little Richard tag to this blog, I discover a hidden reference to Little Richard in the dialogue from the Beatles' movie "Hard Day's Night": "Have you no natural resources of your own?... You could learn more by gettin' out there and living!"/"Out where?"/"Any old where! But not our little Richard. Oh, no. When you're not thumpin' them pagan skins you're tormenting your eyes with that rubbish."

AT 10:50: Crack gives a shout-out to "Meade and Ann."

AND: Actually the countdown is of Uncle Ray’s Top 100 Albums. You can see the whole list here. Little Richard's "Little Richard, “Here’s Little Richard," is #78, and I don't know the criteria for picking the track from the album.

11:10: After Uncle Ray says he loves on-line trolls, Crack disagrees and says: "It can get very dark." And the next subject is Nirvana, because Nirvana's "Unplugged" is next on the list (at #74). Crack expresses great appreciation for Kurt Cobain, "including the way he took himself out. He was very definitive about that." The album cut playing is "All Apologies."

11:25: Discussion of the n-word. (NSFW on the music that follows.)

11:42: After Ray played Meatloaf (which I had to turn way down), Crack said: "Meatloaf is the perfect example of why The Ramones were so necessary."

11:45: Crack finds more misogyny in Led Zeppelin than in rap.

11:55: Ray says Crack will be back next week "unless you get a job," and Crack says: "You're as bad as people on line."

Commemorating a suicide.

There's a lot of that going around today, 20 years after Kurt Cobain killed himself.

This is worse than the annual commemoration of the murders of John Lennon and John Kennedy, since it's a self-murder. If you like someone who's now dead, how about choosing some other day to think about them, their birthday, perhaps? When we care enough to make a national holiday out of someone who got killed — note that we've never done that for a suicide — we pick the birthday (Lincoln's Birthday, Martin Luther King's Birthday), not the death day.

But we all know why death days get attention. To dwell on the death is our own self-absorption. Where was I when I heard that X died? How did I feel? How did it change my life? Just admit that's what you're doing, remember that's what you're doing, and when you're doing it with someone who killed himself, don't forget he did that to you. He did that to the teenaged kids who loved him, changing that music they loved to something that contained the meaning death, the meaning that life is not worth living.

And he had not only his music, but a baby daughter. I don't want to hear about the suicide note that complained about how he didn't enjoy going on stage and being adulated by fans. Quit performing! Devote your life to your daughter. Shooting yourself is your first choice? That's what you say to the kids who loved you (and to your daughter)?