Happy Birthday, Kurt Cobain!

The esteemed Pisces would've been 45 years old today. For your enjoyment, I've arranged some of my favorite Nirvana videos.

"About a Girl"
Sony Music Studios
New York City, New York
November 18, 1993

"Drain You"
Paradiso
Amsterdam, Holland
November 25, 1991

"Junkyard"(or "Token Eastern Song")
The Garage
Denver, Colorado
October 11, 1989

"Spank Thru"
Castello Vi de Porta
Rome, Italy
November 19, 1991

"Scentless Apprentice"
 Pier 48
Seattle, Washington
December 13, 1993

A Thank You to Sleigh Bells

Every once in a while, a musical group comes along that's deserving of our gratitude. One of those groups is Sleigh Bells, the Brooklyn noise-pop duo who made their network television debut last night on Saturday Night Live. I would like to use the following paragraphs to express to them my appreciation.

Thank you for bringing back the Jackson Soloist guitars I remember so fondly from my childhood, watching videos by bands like Def Leppard, Ratt & Living Colour. Culturally, I thought those instruments died after Seattle and could only be seen at Slayer shows and, subsequently, shows put on by bands of kids who went to Slayer shows. Like typewriters, you've shown me everything old can become new again.

Thank you, Derek E. Miller, formerly of Poison The Well, for (probably) going to all those Slayer shows, and for wearing a Nirvana t-shirt in the "Comeback Kid" video with In Utero's winged invisible woman on it (even though I've had that shirt since high school and you're copping my style. Admit it.).

Thank you for giving us Alexis Krauss. Her voice is so tranquilizing, her hair is so shiny & her legs just don't fuckin' quit. After the break-up of Be Your Own Pet, I never thought I'd see a frontwoman who could hold a candle to Jemina Pearl Abegg. I've never been so happy to be wrong.

Thank you both for being from Florida. Anybody who's lived here long enough knows it produces few significant artists. It doesn't really get any more uninspiring than Jupiter & Thonotosassa.

Thank you for a break-out that (with any luck) can take some much-undeserved attention away from less-interesting fellow-New Yorker Lana Del Ray. You have the noise & the power. She has the lips & the sadness.

Thank you for marrying drum machines to Marshall stacks. Somebody had to do it eventually.

But most of all, thank you for being cool and not making music that sucks. Before you, there seemed to be a Deficit of Cool and a Surplus of Suck from the music that's found on television.

Godspeed.

The Best Nirvana Song Ever

Yesterday was my Dad's birthday, so I'm writing about "Aneurysm," my favorite Nirvana song. Most people would never equate their father's birthday with a fairly obscure song by a now-fairly obscure, once-monumental, without-equal punk/rock three-piece. But I do.

When I was still too young to appreciate an unknown song by a band I didn't know I would soon worship before obtaining my driver's license, I was just another ten-year-old that only liked whatever his Dad liked, which was Van Halen. Back then, it seemed like my father had a lot of free time, at least as much as I did, and he would spend most of this time watching footage of (almost) every Van Halen concert ever performed.

My father loved Van Halen so fervently (and still does) that I can say with 99.9 percent certainty that theirs was the first piece of music I had ever heard in my life. I can't imagine my father not playing "Unchained" for me, his first-born son, within the first twenty-four hours of my existence. These things are just what fathers do when their children are born.

By now you're probably asking yourself what this has to do with Nirvana, and it is this: my father loved rock music, and he instilled this Love of Rock in me, almost immediately upon my birth. Most of my early childhood memories involved consuming rock music with my father either (a) in front of a television, or (b) in the passenger seat of his car. It was in the (b) setting that I first heard Nirvana's "Aneurysm." I wouldn't love the song for at least another five years. At the time, its lyrics were my only memory.

I remember the lyrics because they were so cliché. "Come on over & do the twist," opens the first verse after my favorite "gas-then-brake" song-openers of all time, a term I use to describe parts in a song that start small & quiet at first, then launch you into its maximum level of Rock, then simmer you down again like a sonic roller-coaster.

The empty meaning of the first line, and that it sounded like something the Chubby Checker would come up with, is what made it so memorable. Line Two, "Overdo it & have a fit," was interpreted childishly to be a reference to what happened in the song before the verse. Line Three, "I love you so much, it makes me sick," is still clever, regardless of how literally it described Kurt Cobain's love for Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill. Line Four just repeats Line One.

The second verse is same as the first, with the minor adjustment in Line Four, when Kurt sings, "Come on over & shoot the shit." For whatever reason, this got my Dad every time. He found this lyric patently hilarious. It might've had something to do with his upbringing in a small Tennessee town, but he's still entertained by it to this day. When I was ten and singing this lyric in the car with him as the song played, it was the only time I could say the word "shit" without any negative consequences, and being able to do that is memorable for all children.

I was fifteen and already an established fan when I realized how exemplary "Aneurysm" was to Nirvana's catalog. It is the best of everything they were, and probably the best of everything that was Rock & Roll in the 20th Century.

The melody and structure are impeccable. Bass, drums & guitar freak-noise count off the opening measure, then the most perfect arrangement of four chords ever conceived, with Dave Grohl hitting the cymbal one, two, three times at every other fill. It's what heroin must feel like (also referenced lyrically). Its verses are quiet, then loud, quintessentially derivative (and expertly reductive) of anything done by the Pixies, and the chorus (on the Incesticide studio version) employs a '60s-era echo ("Beat it, beat it") reminiscent of a time when women with shimmering bouffants did that sort of thing.

To top it off, the song's lyrical content combines into one idea the only two subjects rock music always glorifies: being in love & doing drugs.

I don't think I would have ever loved this song, or even this band, if it wasn't for that one afternoon in 1996, riding shotgun in my father's Honda Civic hatchback. For all of these reasons, "Aneurysm" will always be my favorite Nirvana song, and my father is the only person I have to thank for that.

The Case for Books

I should start by saying this debate has lost its freshness, that this post is overdue and that it will be long, but I believe that both sides should argue their points ferociously until a consensus is reached. Once this is finally achieved, we can all go back to living our lives.

Here's my position: Books are books. I don't want them to go away, and I don't think they should.

Here's why I bring it up: On Monday, Torie Bosch posted on Slate's Future Tense blog a criticism of comments made by author Jonathan Franzen about e-readers. In case you don't know, e-readers are electronic substitutes for books. Franzen's point was that e-readers are lame because they reduce literature (words in ink on paper) to a few bits of information on a plastic screen. In his opinion, words on paper feel "permanent," unlike words on a screen that could imply the potential for third-party tampering.

Seeming a little burned, Bosch responds that some serious readers prefer a device like the Kindle because of it's convenience when traveling. Franzen: 1, Bosch: 1.

Here's what I think: When I'm on a plane, carrying three books with me if I'm engrossed in three simultaneous plots doesn't seem like such a hassle. What seems like a hassle? Staring at a frozen, E-ink rendering of Joseph Conrad's face when my library of 100 e-books refuses to open for some inexplicable reason.

Franzen's isn't the most radical opinion I've heard. Tom Chivers of the Telegraph scoffs when he posits that Franzen fears "surreptitious" editing by e-publishers, and a few people scoffed a decade ago at the thought of reading a book on a computer.

Does Chivers forget that today burning books is still a common practice among certain people? In the near future they might find it more effective and covert to just gradually "edit" such troublesome texts over an inconspicuous length of time. Perhaps after the author dies and his copyright expires? If the current decline of the publishing industry is any indication, it's that anything is possible if there's a market.

Listen, I don't hate new technology. One top of doing for my book collection (a "library") what my iPod did for my music collection, I think e-readers are cool because they enable me to adjust their text to both my size and font preferences (something I also enjoy with a blog), and a good font totally has the power to improve my day, let alone my reading experience.

I don't hate new technology because I love my MacBook. If it didn't provide me reliable access to the internet, I wouldn't be able to watch shows that aren't provided by my television, get maps and up-to-date pictures of places I've never been to, or purchase four manual typewriters on eBay at below-market prices, laughing in the short-sighted faces of all those owners of mega-chain, brick-and-mortar typewriter retailers. Your days of riding the gravy train are over, assholes! Ha ha ha!

I don't hate new technology because my touchscreen Samsung phone is fucking awesome. I don't have to be near a computer to Tweet anymore, and that's fucking awesome. It has completely revolutionized the way I read news, and that's fucking awesome. It even has a "Books" application that allows me to read Alice in Wonderland and The Picture of Dorian Grey for free. Without it, I would have never known that reading books on my phone totally gives me a migraine.

Although I agree with Franzen's opinion about e-readers, I will admit that I don't agree that people who think differently should be disparaged with pompous lecturing. That being said, I have no patience for anyone of the opinion that books were a primitive shelf decoration from an unenlightened time when peoples' phones didn't cause car accidents or allow eighth-graders to send pictures of their genitals to each other.

Besides, both products have their own niches. E-readers are great for guilty-pleasure trash that no respectable person would ever want on their shelves or be seen enjoying in public: diet books, Letters to Penthouse, anything by Chelsea Handler or Bill O'Reilly. On the flip side, I can't think of anything more ridiculous than reading a book like Atlas Shrugged or Joyce's Ulysses on an electronic device. It's not like a 21st-Century gadget like the e-reader was invented because consumer attention spans have gotten longer.

But our economy doesn't really welcome the idealistic, "share-the-wealth" attitude that I do, so a company like Amazon will do everything in their power to destroy anyone who would even think of taking eyes (and business) away from them, no matter how negligible a fraction. It sucks and it's not fair. Blog about it.

This debate has probably been raging for an entire decade, but what's really frustrating is that it seems like we have the same number of answers & solutions to the myriad of questions & problems we had at the start, which is still "none." With the exception of now having to watch commercials on the Internet, the intersection of media and commerce still has a broken traffic light and everyone's movin' & shakin' when it seems the safest and most appropriate.

If I could make a prediction of what the future would look like based on the looks of the present it would be this: the book will never die. Ink & paper bound tightly inside a virtually indestructible cover is a commodity that is as elegant as it is undecorated; also, a book smells better than anything with a battery. 

For readers to cast aside books, and the love of their contents, for the disposable, inconsequential convenience of another God-forsaken machine seems to me both absurd and disloyal, but these times we're living in are pretty absurd and the cost of loyalty is only getting higher.

For me, this is how it works: when I read a book that I love, I want it on my shelf. I want enough of them on enough shelves to fill an entire room (called a "library"). In that place, whenever I want, I can reach up and pull one down. Feel it, see it, hold it, keep it forever. This copy. These words. I own them. They're mine.

That's my position. Happy Groundhog Day.