Give Me a Leonard Cohen Afterworld So I Can Sigh Eternally

The new issue of Spin arrived today. Kurt Cobain was on the cover, which didn't strike me as odd (due to Spin putting Old Saint Kurdt on the cover what seems like annually). Odd didn't describe the feeling that struck me. The feeling felt more like a creeping sadness. You see, the mag was pimping the 20th anniversary of Nevermind. And that made me feel really old, and as an extension of this oldness, it made me feel irrelevant.

Nevermind dropped on September 24th, 1991. I was almost 9. The album didn't enter my conscious mind until sometime in the next Spring, when the local top 40 station KDWB started playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" sandwiched in between Michael Bolton and Arrested Development joints. I liked it, but I also liked "Warm It Up" by Kris Kross and "The First Time" by Surface. There was no filter, it was just another pop song.

Nirvana didn't really resonate for me until right before the release of In Utero in the Fall of 1993. By then, I had started qualifying genres and realized I liked the rock music first, the rap second, and all the other shitty pop third. The Friday before the release of In Utero, MTV ran a special episode of 120 Minutes where they played all the videos Nirvana ever did in chronological order (and, for some reason, "It's The End of the World As We Know It" by R.E.M). When I saw the "In Bloom" video air after the two songs I knew off Nevermind (SLTS and "Come As You Are") I was fucking hooked.

The video appealed to my nostalgia (yes, even at 11 I was nostalgic)with it's faux Ed Sullivan setting, and my sense of weird (holy shit, those dudes are wearing dresses and breaking shit!). Oh, and it rocked. I knew that I would have to buy Nevermind when I actually got some money of my own.

I didn't actually buy the CD until after Kurt Cobain died. It was, however, amongst the first four CDs I bought with my own money from the BMG Music Service (also Aerosmith Pump and Permanent Vacation, and August and Everything After by The Counting Crows). Nevermind didn't disappoint. It was the first CD I actually listened to the whole way though (usually I listened once, picked the singles and songs I liked, and skipped the filler) and it was the first CD where I studied the liner notes intently. It was also taken away from me by my dad for a while, due to my brothers reporting me for the picture of Kurt flicking off the camera on the inner sleeve.

To say that Nevermind was one of the moments that changed my view of popular culture is not an understatement. It was the first piece of entertainment that I loved that was both sort of outsider AND mainstream. It taught me to give the whole album a chance, goddammit, because a "Drain You" might be lurking amidst all that filler. And it conditioned my ears to the kind of verse, chorus, verse soft loud shit that would blow my mind later on (The Pixies Doolittle was a big influence on the group).

Sadly, Nevermind belongs to my generation, and our grip on pop culture is slipping away. There are probably 10 year old kids out there right now hearing the new Foo Fighters album who have no clue Dave Grohl was in another band. It seems a lot of the shit that blew my mind back in the day has lost it's punch. Clerks was the first movie I ever saw that had my sense of humor, and with every shitty movie Kevin Smith makes, Clerks dies a little. Same goes for the rebels of my era. Ice Cube was a scary, scary motherfucker (who y'all loved to hate) and now he makes family films. Charles Barkley was the most bad ass dude on the court not named Michael Jordan, and now he's a joke machine (who still entertains, but he HAS been a role model to up and coming announcers).

The older I get, the more out of touch I seem to be with whatever the fuck is it. I don't get Affliction and Ed Hardy and shit (well, I GET it being ridiculous) and I probably never will. Same goes for things like Twilight...I mean, really? Sparkly werewolves or whatever? I try to get it, but I just don't. There was a time where I would actually understand why people liked something, now it escapes me. And this makes me feel like, to quote a sort of modern artist, I'm Losing My Edge.