I would still have your babies. Except you're married. And that would pretty much ruin it. And plus there's that whole Target exclusive release thing, which seems weird, but I'm sure you've got a really righteous reason for doing it.
There were other bands, sure. My brother, seventeen when grunge descended upon the world in a flannel-clad tsunami, had all the albums. All of them. And I heard them all through the wall we shared, the music not quite sufficient to cover up the sound of my brother and his girlfriend having sex in the hours after he got home from lacrosse practice but before our parents got home.
His favorite band, having crossed over to grunge from metal, was Soundgarden.
My brother’s girlfriend was a would-be stoner princess, a girl who by all rights should have been getting finger-banged and/or date-raped by rich assholes in the back seats of five series BMW’s, but who decided to slum it for a couple of years before heading off to one of the seven sisters schools. Smith maybe, or Mount Holyoke. Somewhere she got to spend a few years being somebody’s femme before marrying well and moving to Connecticut.
Her favorite band, of course, was Nirvana.
I didn’t like Kurt Cobain’s snotty posturing. And the bassist–what was his name?–was underwhelming. And while I could get behind Soundgarden’s heavy bottom-ended rhythm section, Chris Cornell’s verbal gymnastics seemed a little too show-offy.
I was an eight year old that was in love with Pearl Jam. Yes, mostly because of Eddie Vedder. And not just because he sang with feeling, or wrote these quiet songs that were like short stories, or that he was completely free of bullshit. No, he was also my first crush. I was only vaguely aware of what it was my brother and his girlfriend were doing–the sound of her head hitting the wall in time to “Polly” or “Big Dumb Sex”–but whatever it was, I wanted to do it to the voice coming through the wall.
And of course I grew up and bemoaned what was wrought in his name, the overly-emotive and under-enunciated lyrical styling that was later adopted by such fecal stains as Matchbox 20, Creed and Nickelback. I may have, while drunk at college, denied ever having liked Pearl Jam when someone put on “Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town,” rolled my eyes to say oh, my, god. How tasteless can you get?
Because, of course, Nirvana had won the culture war. Empty irony won over earnestness. So much so that you can’t even speak of earnestness unironically. And the shitty part of it is, Kurt Cobain didn’t have to stick around and see the world he made.
Not unlike, say, my brother’s girlfriend.
She didn’t even say goodbye when she left for college. Fortunately for me, she stole all of my brother’s Nirvana CDs, and he was too busted up to replace them.
As my grandmother used to say, God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.
