An Old Fart Listens to the Rock Music
Cover of In Utero
I just had the unsettling experience of being shocked, at 30, by a rock song—one that hadn’t had that effect when I first heard it at 14. Not Margaret Dumont scandalized or ironic Claude Rains “shocked, shocked,” but, well, shocked shocked. In the dumb literal sense of jarred or shaken or slapped in the face.
Because it was mentioned in an essay I’m reading, I tossed on Nirvana’s In Utero for the first time in a while, and actually listened to it for the first time in a good while longer. The first 30 seconds or so of “Rape Me”—that lyric over that ambling, beckoning melody that abruptly turns furious? I must’ve heard it a hundred times in the 90s, and tonight it made me look up and go: “Woah, what?”
As a teenager, adult taboos all look like absurd Victorian drawing room rules of etiquette. I remember, vaguely, the controversy over the song and the Walmart fatwa requiring it to be listed, bizarrely, as “Waif Me” on any copies Tom Walton’s boy would peddle in his shops. They were being edgy and provocative and pissing off the grown-ups, which was what rock bands were supposed to do, and therefore ballsy and cool even if a bit predictable. At 14, rape was a sort of abstract bad thing—not anything that had happened to me or (so far as I was aware at the time) anyone I knew. Not even something I’d thought about the horror of in any serious way. Probably the same was true of most of the 14 and 15 year olds flocking to Sam Goody for the album. Just: Edgy lyric. Clutch.
The year after In Utero came out, Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral. You probably remember “Closer”—the one with the steampunk-before-steampunk music video and the chorus “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” Now, I spent a decent span of 15 wrecked, but I’m nonetheless confident that at the time I had never fucked anyone like an animal. Or like a robot. At all, really. This was not part of my lifeworld. It was not something I could seriously imagine saying to anyone else, or having said to me—and certainly not in circumstances where saying it might conceivably be a prelude to doing it.
Something about this seems perverse—beyond the obvious, I mean. Precisely at the age where we’re both aware and emotionally raw enough to find rock songs consuming and important—formative, even—we have no context for the elements that make them really powerful as opposed to mechanically provocative. It’s like reading Ender’s Game or seeing Heathers for the first time in college, only in reverse. We’re not even equipped to deal with what makes them conceptually interesting: What does it mean for a male songwriter to deliver Cobain’s lyric, or Reznor’s, either as character-poem narrative or as metaphor?
The thing is, I wouldn’t care enough to listen to either of these songs—at least not in the same way—if they hadn’t been my soundtrack well before I’d assembled the prereqs for either of them to properly slap me in the face. Nostalgia is the hook on a line connecting very different emotional responses, which end up getting sewn into the song’s patchwork audience.
Mulling this makes me a bit more sympathetic to parents who are Margaret Dumont–scandalized by rock lyrics, but no more inclined to credit their fears. They’re imbuing the song with a force it has for them, but probably not for their kids. If nothing else, the worry about what it will do to little Johnny at 14 ought to be balanced by the thought of what he’ll get out of it at 30.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Julian Sanchez, True/Slant Coldcocke. True/Slant Coldcocke said: An Old Fart Listens to the Rock Music http://tinyurl.com/ycsq3r9 @trueslant [...]
This made me literally laugh out loud at the computer. I’m glad that you stopped being so serious, like with the reesentiment stuff.
Not entirely related, but this reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about girls’ dancing at the club to songs that have lyrics like “fuck here in the eye!” I mean if it has a good beat who cares what the lyrics are, right?
I’m a slightly older fart than you (32) I’m surprised I wasn’t more surprised by that Trent Reznor stuff back in the day, jeez. That song kind of gives me pause now.
Thirty, blah, you wish you were an old fart…at 44 I’ve had the option of hearing both these songs just before I crossed the Rubicon from coolness to someone who can’t be trusted…having by this point in my life served in the military, attended college and been victim of a heartless corporation downsizing I came to view the Nirvana song written for dual audiences. Certainly its out there for the kids in all its rock and roll controversy and glory, an attempt to piss parents and Tipper Gore off and wave a huge middle finger and the flag of teenage resistance for that generation. But Cobain was also closer to my age than he was to the teenagers gobbling up Nirvana albums.
For that reason I also felt the song was written for my generation and our experiences. I saw it as angry metaphor for how most of us get treated in life, by politicians, corporations, organizations, etc. etc. In my world view back then I saw myself as one of millions who were a source, financially and otherwise, of power for a select view. To me, Cobain was screaming out at this injustice.
Now I’m a parent and though my world view has not changed that much since my early late twenties/early thirties I am now the protector and keeper of a beautiful young girl. Gone now is the metaphoric power of the song, replaced instead with just the cringe factor of someone singing about a violent crime, mostly perpetuated against young women. On the rare occasion it gets radio air play around here, before the first words can be fully uttered, if the kids are in the mini van (oh, the sacrifices we make) a new station is punched into the radio.
The recession has made me remember it’s anti-everything that is trying to screw me rationale I gave to it but despite that it still cannot get air play in our household.
As for Reznor, fuck, that guy is just nuts. : D
Thanks for giving me something else to look forward to. I was watching The Sing-Off on Hulu with my 6 yr old last night. The Pussycat Doll judge critiqued the nice college Beelzebub boys using a particular word, at which point my daughter turned to me and asked: “What’s sexy?”
I had never thought much about how to literally define “sexy” before, much less to a 6 year old girl.
Margaret Dumont, as in, Groucho’s Margaret Dumont? Is that a widely-accepted stand-in for “The Easily Scandalized” with a sizable percentage of the audience currently? (Bravo, if so. [If it's also the name of one of "Tipper's Army" or something, ah, well ...])
I am an old fart and I have daughters. I also like music. “Rape Me” has a “theme” even teens might get. Reznor’s lyric would make me “uncomfortable” while listening with one of my kids, but that’s more than manageable. A bunch of what’s been on “Pop” radio is less manageable. It’s a lot of degrading of selves and others. The (really incredibly clever) “If You Seek Amy” – and the “artist” behind it – is a lovely example of what I’d prefer kids, mine especially, weren’t listening to or buying in any sense of the word.
It’s our duty as farts, since before Victorian times, to bemoan the downward spiral of “this generation;” I have a hard time, though, thinking they’ll be nostalgic for many of these “songs” a couple of decades from now. As for the “artists” creating them, a paraphrase of Dumont’s friend works well: “I have a mind to join a club and beat them over the head with it.”
You know your old when you think teenagers are still listening to Nirvana. In Utero came out in 1993, 16 years ago! In 1993 I was rocking out to All Apologies, Heart Shaped Box, and Rape Me at the ripe age of 6 years old because my older sister was allowed to listen to it. We didnt really understood wtf Kurt Cobaine was saying, and Im not talking about his lyrical themes, we literally couldn’t make out what words he was saying. We listened because it sounded edgey and energenic and it was on MTV and K-Rock all the time. This was also the era of Beavis and Butt-head, Howard Stern, and Sir Mix Alot. Kids were exposed to all kinds of bad stuff. God only knows what teens are listening to today, but I’ll bet only a handful have heard Nirvana and I bet what they’re exposed to is no worse. You old fart!
I don’t think I said anything about contemporary teenagers listening to Nirvana. Though come to mention it, it’s not like it would be the weirdest thing in the world; probably half of what I listened to at that age was music that had been released 10-30 years earlier.
In response to another comment. See in context »Are you reading Eating the Dinosaur?
Extremely insightful as usual, Julian. You are so right: the concerns of parents are not trivial and are sound, but any effective fix would be worse than the problem itself. I have always thought that these conflicting concerns would best balance if your insight were merely given more currency in our culture. I think it should be easy: music company execs are the life-sucking underbelly snakes of capitalism, and they would be treated as such by any self-respecting culture. I have never understood why we give them a completely free ride on the First Amendment.