The line between cool and uncool has never been less defined:
We live in a world where Hall and Oates have become as
influential to emergent indie-rockers as Joy Division, and
Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" has become as much of a
hipster-bar last-call anthem as "There Is a Light That Never
Goes Out". And yet, even in an era of omnivorous musical
consumption and boundless genre tourism, the sight of a
computerized Kurt Cobain belting out Bon Jovi's "You Give Love
a Bad Name" in a recent Guitar Hero 5 demo reel was
enough to revert the good/bad taste divide back to 1988
borders. For Nirvana fans, the Guitar Hero scandal was
more than just a case of a dead rock-star's visage being
exploited for the sake of peddling product. Few artists treated
record collections as an extension of personal politics quite
like Cobain; having him sing a hair-metal hit is not just
contrary to his musical taste, but his entire value system.
(Though one can't help but wonder what a guy who once skewered
alpha-male behavior in a song called "Mr. Moustache" would make
of indie's current facial-hair fetish.)
And yet, Cobain was no stranger himself to challenging
accepted notions of cool. When it first emerged 20 years ago,
Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, represented an
equally heretical notion to some indie aesthetes:
Flipper-grade sludge-punk molded into Beatles-schooled pop
schematics. By 1989, indie rock was already making a
rightward shift across the radio dial-- Dinosaur Jr. had
covered Peter Frampton, the Butthole Surfers were dropping in
not-too-subtle Black Sabbath and Zeppelin references-- but
rather than using post-hardcore noise to desecrate their
traditional FM-radio influences, Nirvana used it to give
their dinosaur rock more teeth. In Cobain, they had a
frontman with uncommonly melodic instincts, but shot through
a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood; in Krist
Novoselic, a bassist who could hit the heretofore untapped
sweet spot between Paul McCartney and the Melvins.
But unlike most rock bands who divided pop history between
before and after, Nirvana's impact was not immediate. Upon
its release, Bleach was a modest indie rock success
at 40,000 copies sold, and the album's low-budget legend-- it
was recorded for a scant $600, footed by the band's temporary
second guitarist, Jason Everman-- often overshadows the music
within. At that point, Nirvana had yet to divest itself of
its Pete Best: drummer Chad Channing, whose scrappy style
wasn't fully suited to the band's growing propensity for
crater-inducing stompers. (Three Bleach tracks--
"Floyd the Barber", "Paper Cuts", and "Downer"-- were
actually helmed by Melvins thud-master Dale Crover, and you
can really tell.) And the album's first single-- a cover of
1960s Dutch-popsters Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz"-- is more
emblematic of the dementoid new wave that Nirvana would
indulge in on their future B-sides than the metallic
Pixies-punk that would turn them into stars.
But rather than unfairly compare it to the platinum sheen of
sophomore release Nevermind, Bleach is best
appreciated today as a snapshot of a specific time and place,
of a Seattle scene bubbling up before it turned into a media
adjective: In the Aero Zeppelin grind of "School" and the
Mudhoney-quoting scum-bucket thrash of "Negative Creep", you
have the perfect audio manifestation of the stark,
exhilarating black-and-white Charles Peterson photos that
captured late-80s Seattle like a series of strobe-light
flickers (and which populate much of this reissue's 52-page
photo booklet). Original producer Jack Endino's new
remastering job gives Bleach a much-needed boost in
fidelity, but there's an intrinsic, primordial murkiness to
this album that can't be polished-- while Axl was welcoming
the masses into the Sunset Strip jungle, Nirvana dragged the
Sub Pop set into the bleak, chilly backwoods from which they
came.
Though briskly paced, Bleach is a front-loaded
record, the maniacal/melodic contrasts of its stellar first
half-- anchored by the epochal anti-love song "About a
Girl"-- ceding to the more period-typical grunge of its
second. The bonus live performance included here (recorded in
1990 at Portland's Pine Street Theater) suggests as much,
mostly ignoring Bleach's side B to showcase
important transitional tracks: the scabrous pop of "Sappy"
(later to emerge as "Verse Chorus Verse" on the 1993 No
Alternativecompilation); "Dive", a blueprint for
Nevermind's plutonium-grade rockers; and "Been a
Son", which bears the influence of Cobain's beloved Vaselines
(whose "Molly's Lips" is covered here). It's a testament to
both Endino's live-in-the-room production style and Nirvana's
raucous onstage energy that Bleach and the bonus
concert set sound like they were cut in the same session. But
the concert also presents Nirvana in a light that the band's
subsequently troubled and tragic story so rarely affords
them: a simple, playful power trio who could lay waste to a
drunk club crowd on a Saturday night.
Two years and one Dave Grohl later, the circumstances
couldn't have been more different for Nirvana. Amid rumors of
Kurt'n'Courtney drug problems and inter-band acrimony, the
trio took to the stage for their headlining Sunday-night
appearance at the Reading Festival, effectively cementing
their status as the biggest-- and most gossiped about-- rock
band in the world. If Bleach contains just trace
evidence of the band that would, almost overnight, force
radio stations to flip formats and record stores to open up
"alternative" sections, the Live at Reading CD/DVD
provides formidable evidence of perhaps the last rock'n'roll
band to transform the monoculture in its own image. And yet,
despite Cobain's cheeky show-biz entrance-- rolled onto stage
in a wheelchair by music journalist Everett True, singing a
line from Bette Midler's "The Rose", and then
mock-collapsing-- the Reading set shows a band that hadn't
changed all that much fundamentally from that Pine Street
Theater gig two years previous.
Cobain's newly acquired, generational spokesmen duties didn't
make him any more fond of engaging the audience with stage
banter, ceding emcee duties to the jovial Novoselic during
guitar changes. And even when playing to the biggest audience
of their career, Nirvana blast through the 25-song setlist
with a barrel-down, no-bullshit intensity that suggests it
didn't matter if they were playing to 100 people or 100,000.
And most pertinently, both concerts capture the band at
crucial, between-album turning points: where the Pine Street
Theater set shows a band burnishing its pop appeal, Live
at Reading betrays Cobain's eagerness to tear it down,
dispensing with the obvious Nevermind hits by the
mid-set point, while reserving the encores for seething
covers of 80s California punks Fang's suitably sardonic "The
Money Will Roll Right In" and the Wipers' "D-7". In
retrospect, the concert crystallizes the moment when Cobain
stopped serving his servants and started serving himself,
pointing the way to 1993's notoriously caustic In
Utero.
Given its long-standing popularity as a bootleg, you can't
help but wonder why Live at Reading wasn't
officially released back in the mid-90s instead of the live
compilation From the Muddy Banks of Wishkah;
certainly, Reading makes for a more appropriate,
electrified complement to the band's other career-defining
performance, 1994's Unplugged in New York release.
And for the sake of squeezing the entire set (save for "Love
Buzz") on a single disc, the Reading CD excises
pretty much all of the DVD's between-song interactions (most
notably, the goof on Boston's "More Than a Feeling" that
precedes the similarly riffed "Smells Like Teen Spirit") and
key contextual interludes that reveal the tumult leading up
to this triumphant performance (e.g., a heartfelt plea from
Cobain to have the crowd shout a conciliatory "We love you
Courtney" in the wake of her receiving the Yoko treatment
from the British tabloids). But the CD's career-spanning
tracklist-- touching on the best of Bleach, most of
Nevermind, choice singles and B-sides ("Sliver",
"Aneurysm"), three In Utero previews ("Tourette's",
"Dumb", "All Apologies"), and the aforementioned covers--
actually makes it a far superior, more comprehensive
introduction for Nirvana newbies than the band's 2002
greatest-hits compilation. Like the Who's Live at
Leeds or Cheap Trick's At Budokan, it's an
indispensible document of a legendary band at their most
invincible.
And even if you're the sort of Nirvana die-hard who's been
sitting on an audio bootleg of this gig for the past 17
years,you really need the DVD-- for a band whose visual
legacy mostly amounts to a handful of stylized videos and the
lowkey Unplugged special, Live at Reading
effectively grants you side-stage access to the band in their
mosh-pit-stoking, drum-set-toppling, putting you as close to
the action as the band's mysterious friend Tony, who's seen
flailing onstage throughout the show like an epilpetic Bez.
Like the Bleach reissue, the Live at
Reading packaging is heavy on photos and other scrapbook
visuals, but entirely bereft of liner-note reminiscences and
analysis-- because lord knows we don't need another
essay-length rumination about Nirvana's cultural import and
Cobain's conflicted relationship with stardom. The most
lasting images on the Live at Reading DVD-- from the
60,000-strong pogo pit, to the blood sprayed on Cobain's pick
guard at set's end, to the awkward but poignant post-show
meeting with a young, leukemia-stricken fan-- tell you
everything you need to know.
![Bleach [Deluxe Edition] / Live at Reading](http://cdn.pitchfork.com/media/nirvana200.gif)
The sixth circle of Dante
Alighieri's version of Hell, also the sixth level of EA's
I've held off posting about Girls because of certain
reservations I had about them. Specifically, I can't listen to
the lead singer's voice for a long period of time. But whenever I
do sit down to listen to their album, Album, I'm not
overwhelmed or blown away, as their 
Photo:
Adam Bueb
As if 
I've been listening to a lot of happy music this month.
That's a trend I don't want to end just yet, and it's a trend
that Wolf Gang perpetuates with excellent single "The King And
All Of His Men."
"He plays a
vampire in a flashback sequence. I didn't get to see any of it,
but all reports from the director David Slade and everyone around
say he just kicked ass. I'm real excited to see it ... [His role]
started out as an old Spanish, sort of unrelated vampire, in a
flashback sequence. Billy Black's talking and telling the story
of the werewolves, how they evolved, and how they met the
vampires and stuff. [Murphy's cameo is] in a sequence that
involves that."
8 out of 10
6 out of 10
Breathtaking and beautiful were the Antlers on 
