Nirvana

Music saved my life. I don't know how, and I don't know why, but I remember exactly when. I was fifteen, a delicate stage of growing up if you happen to live in Casal di Principe, in the sick, violent heart of Campania. A town that repels you and holds you at the same time because - to borrow the words of people who've actually saved a few lives (Massimo Volume) - "even when there's no love, there's something else." In the best-case scenario, you risk spending your adolescence outside a bar - one of many - among old gamblers who'd wager their wives' honor on three of a kind, and kids who thrill to sing the exploits of Camorra bosses. Luckily, unlike most of my peers, I had other idols, other role models: one of them was called Kurt Cobain. Had it not been for his music, I won't say I would have ended up mixed up in something bad - that's not true - but I might now be sitting in some bar watching life go by, waiting - like a Beckett character - for something that will never happen. If instead I'm here writing, it's because, in the end, Godot showed up for me. And he took me away.

Yes, I started loving music because of Kurt Cobain. I discovered his Nirvana thanks to a Polish guy who worked as a house painter for my uncles' company. Talking to him one day, he recommended I listen to "Nirvana Nevermind: too good" (sic). Who knows if he's still alive; some time later I heard he was shooting heroin into his veins. We rock addicts are strange animals: we go on and on about critics - Scaruffi's nonsense, the Italian doyen Bertoncelli, Lester Bangs's unmatchable style - and then it's the first junkie who walks by who ends up enlightening us.

Still, "Nevermind" wasn't the first Nirvana record I bought; the little shop in the nearby town didn't have it that day - it was August 6, 2001, and I was treating myself for my name day. Instead, the clerk put two other albums by the same band in front of me: the cover of the first was almost entirely black, while the second featured a stylized, decomposing skeleton. Since I've always been drawn to the aesthetics of horror, I went with the latter. It was called "Incesticide" and was essentially a collection of scattered tracks that hadn't found a place in the band's official discography (back then I hadn't yet picked up the music-geek lexicon, which for this kind of record demands the label b-sides & rarities): there were irresistible power-pop covers of a band with an unsettling name (the Vaselines, God bless them!); there was the enigmatic "Aneurysm," with its (dis)harmonic stumbles folding in on themselves (the most Sonic Youth-like of all Nirvana songs, as I'd later discover - but back then, who the hell had ever even heard of Sonic Youth?!); and above all there were tracks like "Dive," "Sliver" and "Downer," which floored me. Before that day I'd never heard such dark power, never felt so much rage packed into a single voice, and I ended up wondering whether that rage wasn't mine too - whether that unease of living, of being in the world, that I sensed beneath that alarming scream, went beyond the simple discomfort of being in this particular world of mine, home to little more than twenty thousand souls. Maybe I was just a brat who felt like a stranger in the place where he was born and raised, or maybe I'd discovered existentialism without ever having opened a book on the history of philosophy.

I bought "Nevermind" afterward. By that point, I absolutely had to hear it. I figured that if the tracks on "Incesticide" were leftovers, then the "real" albums must be devastating bombs. I wondered what unimaginable wonders "Nevermind" - "the most beautifullest Nirvana record," as the same clerk at the same shop put it, with poetic license - would introduce me to. I put it on, and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" flattened me instantly. In that moment I understood the importance of great song titles: they always deliver on what they promise. That "teen spirit" swept me away, and my bedroom turned into a power plant of raw energy, the "Raw Power" of Iggy Pop, who back in 1991 had already named, live on stage, three kids from Seattle - Kurt Cobain (voice and guitar), Chris Novoselic (bass) and Dave Grohl (drums) - as heirs to his Stooges, though what did I know about any of that. The only thing that interested me was understanding the reason behind that music. I read articles, did some digging. I discovered that for many, Kurt Cobain had been the hero who carried independent rock to the top of the charts across half the world; for others, the voice of a generation - and from that moment on, of every generation of teenagers to come - or even the antihero who gave a voice to the losers, the nerds, the ones life had burned out. But there were also those who said Kurt Cobain had just been a wimp who played guitar, and not even all that well, a junkie asshole, a paranoid who couldn't bear the weight of his own success, so much so that he shot himself in the head. Which, against his will, quickly turned him into an icon you wore to feel cool. A cold icon, though - like Andy Warhol's Marilyns - an "alternative" brand for recognizing yourself within a certain social category, a way to believe you stood apart from the crowd. In short, a way of giving up one label only to unknowingly pick up another. What the t-shirts and the pictures couldn't tell me, though, was the story of the simple kid, with his humanity, his fragility. After all, Warhol had died in 1987, the very year Nirvana formed, and never got the chance to turn Cobain's image into an object the way he had with Elvis's. No matter: marketing and idolatry took care of that instead. But Pop Art was the last thing on my mind; I kept asking myself who Kurt Cobain really was, and why that music.

I found the answers to these questions only when I listened to "In Utero": the true, desperate masterpiece of Nirvana. The spiritual testament of an accidental rock star. Reading between the lines of the twelve songs on their third and final proper album, you can probably glimpse the real Kurt: a kid like so many others, marked by a childhood that wasn't easy but wasn't tragic either (his parents, like so many others', were divorced), who loved listening to the Sex Pistols, playing his guitar and singing his songs. For himself, first and foremost. And once you start from that perspective, it becomes difficult - not so much to enjoy success (let's not kid ourselves, what musician wouldn't feel gratified by a huge following and financial possibilities multiplied a hundredfold?) - but to come to terms with the moral responsibility placed on you by those who elected you as their mouthpiece. That's what Cobain, in the end, couldn't bear.

"Nevermind" had been a bolt from the blue, an unexpected clean sweep. It blew up the grunge bubble, but it certainly wasn't the genre's founding father, nor even its most direct example. Cobain himself wasn't all that fond of it. He considered it a record with too clean a sound - the crystalline production was by Butch Vig, future mastermind of Garbage - and too catchy: essentially it was melodic punk, sometimes speeding into hardcore, sometimes triumphing in power-pop. A gem too polished for a genre that was supposed to be dirty ("grunge" comes from "grungy," slang for "dirty"), a genre whose noble, derelict forefathers included Butthole Surfers and Mudhoney.

For the follow-up to "Nevermind", fans expected more sing-along anthems like "Come As You Are", "In Bloom" and "Stay Away". Cobain, instead, wanted to go back to the past and to grunge; the real kind, the viscous, fetid grunge of the debut "Bleach". So he called in Steve Albini to man the mixing desk, the prophet of hard, pure sound, capable, thanks to his system of microphones scattered throughout the studio, of capturing a band's physical sonic charge. But it wasn't enough, or rather, it was only enough to get back that raw grunge sound. The past, the one Kurt wanted back, he couldn't have any more than I today can have back my adolescence. Don't worry, I have no intention of killing myself at twenty-seven, and that's because I've listened to "In Utero" so many times that in the end I transfigured the anger, despair and nihilism into positive energy, into a desire to live. A paradoxical effect for a record that, in Cobain's original plans, was supposed to be called "I Hate Myself And I Want To Die". Paradoxical only up to a point: they call it "art", and in its highest examples it serves precisely to help us accept the pain of life, to transcend it.

For me, "In Utero" will always be the album of maturity; for Cobain, unfortunately, it remained the album of the end: the end of the dream, of the game, of the illusions. The realization that he wasn't able to stay on top of the wave without feeling its weight and without feeling dirty; the realization that he wasn't like Michael Stipe, about whose Rem the Nirvana frontman had, not by chance, once declared: "They achieved success in a way similar to saints." Translation: they made a pile of money, but never went against their principles.

Cobain too had made a pile of money, and he'd earned every bit of it, but, unlike many of his peers, he felt he had betrayed himself and feared that, in the long run, he would betray his audience too. So he was thinking of quitting. Not music: life. Wanting to title an album "I Hate Myself And I Want To Die" went beyond any provocative intent or damned-poet posturing. It was clear that the magic had broken from the very start, the enthusiasm dissipated. Cobain had gotten what he wanted - to feel like Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer - but right at that moment he'd realized that being like them took not just great talent, but also a huge, redemptive nerve. Success is only beautiful if you know how to handle it. Cobain wasn't capable of that, and decided it was time to end it all. First, though, he had to shed his last skeletons, his last ghosts, by throwing his unhealthy desire for self-destruction right in the world's face. The sonic aesthetic of "In Utero" is steeped in this bleak feeling. Its poetics go even further.

"Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old". Just to set the mood, that's the opening line of "In Utero", an album that stacks one psychoanalytic session on top of another until your brain bursts and hands you the bill. "Serve The Servants" is the first track, and with its lacerating distortion and aggressive rhythm it gives the impression that yes, pain can still be defeated, that the vibrant disease called existence can still be cured. The last track is "All Apologies", an electro-acoustic ballad caressed by the windswept sound of a cello, pointing toward a way out: we're not the only ones suffering, there's a world out there full of things and people to blend into and recognize ourselves in. That's the whole point, right there in "All in all is all we all are", the final line of "In Utero", repeated like a mantra: a line that collides Neil Young with Guicciardini, Saint Francis with Coleridge, Heraclitus with Piet Mondrian. Between these two extremes lie eleven other songs, eleven other ways of rummaging through one's own conscience: there's life as retribution ("Rape Me": musically, a variation on the theme of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; narratively, the desire of a raped woman to give her attacker the same treatment) and life as attempted vindication ("Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle", which tells of the sad decline of an old actress unjustly branded insane), love as an antidote (the great single "Heart-Shaped Box") and death as eternal ecstasy ("Pennyroyal Tea", proof that blues, punk and Leonard Cohen can be one and the same thing), the scream of Darby Crash ("Milk It", a tonal ordeal with a whiff of post-hardcore) and Munch's "The Scream" (the inhuman "Scentless Apprentice", inspired by the macabre novel "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer").

"Nevermind" will remain the most important Nirvana album due to a series of historical circumstances: an album to sing out of anger or rebellion, but also to hum in the shower. "In Utero" isn't like that; not because it lacks melodies ("Dumb", in this sense, is a serenade to melancholy worthy of the Beatles' catalogue), but because it's one continuous psalm of despair that leaves you literally speechless. And breathless. An album to be contemplated in silence. It's probably the last great grunge album, the swan song of an almost ineffable genre; after it there would only be the beautiful, forgotten yet unforgettable final flourish of Barkmarket's "L. Ron".

"In Utero" essentially wrote the word "end" to that utopia of eternal adolescence - that desperate, naive utopia - which was lit in the heart of the Eighties by immortal bands like Replacements and Husker Du, and was finally extinguished by a shotgun blast on April 5, 1994: "Ok, guys, we believed in it, now let's pick up the toys, turn off the lights and go back home."

These days "In Utero" turns twenty, and on September 24th Universal will release the inevitable deluxe edition, which adds a slew of bonus tracks to the original track list. A celebratory release that will probably delight both the philologists, who'll have even more material to dissect, and the most ravenous fans, greedy devourers of every note produced by their hero, even the merely imagined ones. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing to celebrate. Fans' aesthetic scavenging is even worse than the ad libitum speculation carried out by a record industry with its back against the wall. Maybe it's because I'd want my fifteen years back, maybe it's because I'm an incurable romantic, or maybe it's simply because I still have respect for the dead - even when they bear an illustrious name - but there are no special contents that can tempt me. I'm holding on tight to my copy of "In Utero": aged, yellowed, bought twelve years ago. Back when, idol-worshipping brat that I was, I too might have scraped the bottom of the barrel for extra content. Today it's different, I've learned that music is a serious matter. It can scrape something else entirely: the bottom of the soul. It can make you cry. With joy or with rage. It can save your life.

Thanks to Carlo Bordone for the small but invaluable advice

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15/09/2013