Nirvana/Malone doesn’t die/literature of exhaustion
In the past week or so, there have been two artists plugging high profile Nirvana covers. Puddle of Mudd’s cover of About a Girl was widely criticized for the woeful high notes. Risible as it is, “Worst cover ever” is a hyperbolic clickbait headline for what is just a poor effort, and that’s enough said on the matter.
Far more notable was “American singer-songwriter and rapper”* Post Malone’s reverently irreverent (or should that be irreverently reverent?) set of Nirvana songs that included the bulk of best-selling masterpiece ‘Nevermind’, the one with the baby on the front chasing a hook baited with a dollar that cemented Nirvana as rock legends. Post Malone wasn’t even born when this came out.
*Wikipedia helped me here. I didn’t know who Post Malone was other than my more clued up wife showing me a picture to demonstrate the likeness to her oldest boy, minus the singer’s characteristic face tats. I thought Post Malone was probably one of those mumble rappers I didn’t know anything about. I wondered idly if this was a reference to Beckett’s ‘Malone Dies’ (which I’m not pretending to have read but I’ve got a good memory for titles from the Modernist canon) and the book that followed it The Unnameable, which was said to be emblematic of the ‘literature of exhaustion’; marking the point when culture had become saturated and everything post-’Malone Dies’ is simply the reiteration of what has come before. I’m not going to sit here and try and analyse Post Malone’s catchy, beat and hook laden music as a 36 year old man sitting in his old playroom just remembering he’s been made a cup of tea. But as someone who grew up with Nirvana’s music, like a lot of people, I feel like I have something to say about this cultural event.
Yours Truly: “Simon, you like Nirvana?”
Simon Abject “Yeah, they’re the Beatles.”
What Simon meant by this obviously isn’t a direct musical comparison (hooky and polished as they both were) but a cultural one. The Beatles were the last precedent for the mania that surrounded Nirvana. To the point of practically sainthood for the fallen heroes of both. John Lennon, killed by a lone madman Mark Chapman who’d read the Catcher in the Rye too many times and taken the disenchanted voice of Holden Caulfield at face value, and Kurt famously martyred by his own hand. Except did he have too much heroin in his system to fire the gun? Anyone who’s watched Nick Broomfield’s documentary Kurt and Courtney might have their suspicions, and conspiracy theories abound that maybe he was too much of an influence for certain intelligence agencies… but this sounds like adolescent fantasy. “Just cos you are paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” A quote that a quick google suggests should be attributed originally to Joseph Heller but Kurt made his own. Genius steals, and all that. Furthermore, Please Please me is as far chronologically from Smells like teen spirit as the latter is from Circles, or whichever post Malone song you want to name. Which is to say, Nirvana aren’t exactly new anymore. It will be interesting to see what endures from this time we are in. The New Yorker paraphrased an article Mark Fisher’s K-punk blog “Just because something is current doesn’t mean it is new,” he writes in “K-Punk,” as he wonders if a time traveller from the nineties would find any contemporary music as radical as post-punk or jungle had once seemed to him. When everything is cheerfully “retro,” Fisher argued, we lose our grasp on history — and, without a sense of why the past happened the way it did, our anything-goes embrace of “happy hybridities” is an empty gesture. “What pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists,” There’s a sense we’ve reached critical mass regarding culture, that nothing new exists under the sun, everything has “been done” and all we have left is entertainment and iterations of what has gone before. Could that be the case? This spectacle I’m watching is simply a pop star singing old rock songs, but it’s about as exciting a gig as you could expect to witness down an average broadband connection.
“Are these goosebumps because the window’s open and I’m just sat in my shorts?”
Post Malone is shredding in his mancave at his home, complete with pool table and well-stocked (by sponsors?) bar. Every young musicians dream. Him and his co-quarantined bandmates in this iteration are enthusiastic and competent. Bizzy sits down a minute to watch. “It sounds more modern”. We try to put our finger on why. She says it’s cleaner, less fuzz. I think they’re not overusing the chorus pedal. They smoke and swig beer between songs.Two of them are wearing dresses, as Kurt used to provocatively in a time where that was less commonplace. It’s now a cultural signifier of the grunge era just flared jeans are of the 60s and 70s. “They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths” the whacked out dealer on Withnail and I said. Well Woolworths is bust along with half the highstreet, but you can get ripped jeans on depop okay. They are good musicians, having fun, with material they love and know well from playing backstage before gigs, and probably growing up. This is the music their parents listened to (excluding drummer Travis Barker, who was in Blink 182 and like me is old enough to be Post Malone’s dad or his lookalike’s stepdad… Bizzy’s hasn’t seen her boys properly in a while because of the same Covid shit that Post Malone wants to fight, it’s the new normal now, us all more atomised than every, all with invariably large amounts of time on our hands to recreate renaissance paintings with our cats and record quirky workout routines to Stop Making Sense. I pretend that it’s her son on screen tattooed and swearing: “is that your good frock darling?”) Their delivery is effortless, they know these songs inside out, but it still has (surprisingly considering the age of the material) a vitality and power that is a testament to Mr Cobain’s expert songwriting. And it’s a testament to Post Malone’s voice that he can pull off what is actually quite technical singing while drinking and mucking about. The Kurt print nonchalantly leant against the wall (they didn’t get round to hanging it, or they wanted it in shot) is an icon from the lower realms. An icon of droll antifashion cool and stylised anguish. “Nirvana is one of my favourit bands… we always jam this backstage… why not do something fun… for a good cause?”
Why not indeed? There was a backlash from other boomers apparently for handling this sacred material. But it belongs to all of us now. And the good cause is the. WHO.
Who?
World Health Organisation
Oh. Is that the WHO who Trump is stopping funding?
He said he would yeah.
That’s bad.
Tell me about it. And Post Malone raised nearly $3 million for the WHO. Without leaving the house. So any meandering speculation I could embark upon as to whether he’s the “right kind of outsider” to cover Nirvana songs is moot really. And I’ve been listening to his very produced and clean music while writing this and I’ve come to quite like it, like the philosopher Richard I met in the hostel in Toulouse who questioned his own irritation at the ‘modern music’ and came to find it ‘beautiful’.
