Tag Archives: Constructing an identity through media

Nirvana: Nevermind & Unplugged

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 20, New York: I’d originally planned to listen to Nevermind exactly once through, then write up a post and move on to the next album. Nirvana, it turns out, it pretty fantastic. I’ve spent the last two days listening to Nevermind a bunch and falling back in love with the Unplugged album. This music is really something great.

I was of the Nirvana generation— that cohort of teens and preteens for whom this album was the Beginning of Music. As it was a musical turning point, it was the turning point of my adolescence. Post-Nirvana I wore my Dad’s old flannels and one time tried to sing in a rock band (I was terrible, by the way). All the guys at my school grew their hair long and shaved underneath it. I asked my barber to do the same and he tried to talk me out of it; I didn’t really understand the difference between curly and straight hair. I had that mushroom haircut for at least a year.

I’m so happy that this was the music that defined my cohort. We could have done a lot worse. This music feels original, and to listen today, it feels timeless. It’s of its time, but stands outside it, too. It’s haunting to watch the videos of Cobain now, particularly this one from the Unplugged show, making wry jokes about David Geffen buying him a $500,000 present. It’s a shame to have lost him.

Nirvana is always for sale. David Geffen still needs the money.

Guns n’ Roses: Use Your Illusion 1 & 2

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 18, New York: First off, spending a work day listening to Guns n’ Roses sure does make for an odd mood. This is a music that is so unlike what I listen to now— loud and energetic and adolescent. I was never a GNR superfan (or a concert attendee, even once), but I was a teenage connisseur of popular music. These two best-selling albums were the first that I bought to follow a trend, and it felt great. I bought them from BMG, as a part of my introductory eight albums. The songs on my new CDs were all over the radio. They were all over my MTV. I was a part of a movement! I’d bought a subscription to a movement!

It’s surreal to listen to Guns n’ Roses now— particularly the blatant adolescent shock value of the lyrics (I cringed all the way through “Back Off Bitch”). More surreal perhaps to watch the video for “Estranged”, in which Axl— who lacks a second vowel in his name and is ALSO TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD AT THIS POINT— wears jeans shorts for the majority of the whole video.

Upon a re-listen, there are really two albums here. Not Use Your Illusion I & II, but rather Use Your Illusion: The Hits and Use Your Illusion: The Filler. Through the lens of time they are very, very different experiences, yet they are mixed and muddled together. And the hits hold up because holy crap there were so many hits off of this album! The Rock: “Civil War”, “Live and Let Die”, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. The Ballads: “Don’t Cry”, “Estranged”, “November Rain”. And each and every one these I found myself singing along to.

And then in the filler I was just lost. Half of it was entirely unfamiliar. The music sounds foreign today, this hard-rocking band in a studio where so many notes are punctuated with guttural exhalations and every drumbeat echoes like it was recorded in a silent and empty stadium. I bet for the actual Guns n’ Roses fans this album was a bit too polished. But hell, Slash sure can play a guitar. And Axl, for his faults, sure does have a vocal range.

For kids my age, Axl and Slash were quickly supplanted by Kurt and Eddie. But “November Rain” is the song that followed all of us dance to dance, through middle and high school. It was the super-long slow dance song. It was the song you had to make sure you were dancing to with the right person. With the right person, November Rain was the only song that came anywhere near to the eternity that you wanted to spend awkwardly circling with hands limply draped on shoulder and hips. With the wrong person, it was an endless prison. I spent every school dance both loving and dreading November Rain.

PS— How fucking cool of guitar player must Slash have been to get HELICOPTERS to shoot his solo? New thesis: Slash is the coolest thing about Guns n’ Roses/rock n’ roll.

If you find yourself compelled, go listen to them on Rdio.

Jimi Hendrix

August 17, New York: This post will launch a new theme: Constructing an identity through media. (Note: The last theme is not complete, but I’ve got two big honkers to finish and that will take some time.) Where A Long Waltz Through Nerddom was about quiet, private identity, this one is about consciously building a public face and doing it through the music, books, and movies I consumed. I was typical for my age in this way. In my teens, you were judged by guests in your bedroom on the CD rack you displayed. In my twenties, that same collection became the cornerstone for digital identity: your favorite books, movies, albums were crucial fields of Friendster, Myspace, Facebook.

As best as I can remember, the albums of Jimi Hendrix were the first instance of this in my life. For a lengthy period in middle school I became a MASSIVE Jimi Hendrix fan. It was my differentiator. I had Jimi t-shirts, I bought as many Jimi albums as I could, I listened to Jimi constantly. I knew the music was great and it was indisputably not nerdy. My Dad was thrilled; better to hear “All Along the Watchtower” blaring from my room than more of that ‘rap crap’. It was also, importantly to me, not what everyone else was into at the time. I had my own thing.

If I’d ever had a talent (or more than passing interest) for guitar, this would have been a life-defining period. And my Hendrix phase would have lasted a lot longer. As it was, it was just a phase. I never got past the strum. I’ve not really listened to a ton of Hendrix since middle school; I’d really burned through that library.

For this project, I focused on six albums: the three canonical Jimi Hendrix Experience LPs, the live Woodstock album, the Band of Gypsies album, and a compilation Blues album that I loved. This music really is incredible. It makes me inordinately proud of middle school Andrew to have been a big Hendrix fan. The songs are loud and dense and varied and so full of sound. There were just three guys in the Jimi Hendrix Experience! Making so much noise! And it is fun that I still know many of these songs note by note, like “The Wind Cries Mary”. Or “Voodoo Child”. My lord, that song. It was fun too, in this listen, to track his career through these albums and his soaring arc toward deep blues. Electric Ladyland is my favorite of the Experience albums, and it’s really thanks to “Voodoo Child”. That song should be in everyone’s canon. It’s like Jimi Hendrix was the Christ-figure messiah of the blues, he took it from Old Testament to New. Introduced a new epoch.

Much of this theme will not be as satisfying as listening to six Jimi Hendrix albums. The next few posts are going to move solidly away from distinctive identity and start to flow right on into the sometimes-lamentable mainstream of my youth. But this should be a fun one nonetheless.

Of all of these Jimi Hendrix albums, I would most recommend you pick up the Blues album. It’s really something special.