The Axis of Acceptance: Why My Younger Friend Doesn't Like Nirvana

By Jonny Walls


The Vicious Cycle

They say fashion is cyclical, but I think that descriptor should be applied to pop culture in general. As I've waited patiently for pantaloons to make a comeback, I've discovered that we can learn a lot about ourselves by examining some of the cultural cycles in our more immediate vicinity.

A few weeks ago, in the throes of a late-night nostalgia kick (one of my favorite pastimes), I pulled up Fuel's Sunburn on Youtube. As I sat on my computer that evening, listening to Brett Scallions scream about letting the sun fall over him, something shocking occurred to me.

This would never fly in today's musical climate.

Don't get me wrong. I like Fuel. I don't love them, because they're not a great band. But I like them, because they're a good band. Like, love, or hate them, however, one thing is unarguably true: They are quintessential nineties rock.

Nineties rock has a sound. I didn't realize it during the nineties, but now I can see it so clearly. It's like the difference between swimming in a lake and flying above it in an airplane. In the former situation, you feel that lake it in your very bones; you're one with it. It's your whole world. In the second, you sort of forget what it was like to be in the lake, but you can actually see what it looks like. You can see what shape it takes.

The Axis of Acceptance

Here is an axiom upon which the rest of this essay is built: All people reach a moment in their lives when they decide for themselves what kind of music they like. They accept a certain style of music as their own. This age is usually right around middle school, coming into full bloom in high school, although of course this can vary from one person to another. It's no longer what their parents or anyone else made them listen to; it's their own music, based on their own decisions. This point henceforth will be called The Axis of Acceptance. The Axis is not fluid. For each person it is one era of music, and that era it remains for the rest of his life.

Here is how The Axis of Acceptance works:

1. It's based loosely on decades, and it clings to whatever the current style is when The Axis is reached.

2. That style becomes the basis for all good. Your Axis' influence over you is akin to how you view your parent of the opposite gender when searching for a mate. Realize it or not, The Axis is what you will compare all future music to, no matter what. You may go in the complete opposite direction in the end, but it's still what you will hold up as the standard. It may not even end up being your favorite style, but it's the basis for working out what is good.

3. Anything from two eras ago or more is fair game. For some people, the vintage stuff may even be superior. We find variance here, as some may say, "Well, The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, and I love the New Pornographers, Death Cab for Cutie, and Sufjan Stevens as well, who are all, obviously, totally influenced by The Beatles' music." The Beatles' lingering prevalence in today's music provides the backdrop against which their brilliance can be appreciated. Others may flip this point of view and say, "My favorite band is The White Stripes and I also love Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and a lot of sixties/seventies music."

4. Last—and most importantly for our purposes—according to The Axis, the musical era prior to that of your Axis is OFF LIMITS. Sure, a few GREAT bands may have risen to the surface that are either tolerable or even enjoyable, but the overall vibe of the last decade is SO LAME.

Think of the generation designations themselves. There are exceptions and anomalies, but there is a lot of truth in what they say. I think The Axis is the same when it's all taken as a large picture. Step back a few feet, forget about all that fell in the cracks, and look at the finished painting. The greater image rises to the surface, and all the brush strokes fade away.

Discovery Through Experience

I have a friend who is four years my junior. He is, by all accounts, including my own, an intelligent, thoughtful appreciator and creator of good art. He likes good films, good literature, and good music. But he doesn't like Nirvana, who is my favorite band, and largely considered one of the most important bands of all time.  And it's not an, "I appreciate Nirvana, but it's not my favorite kind of music," thing; it's simple indifference. He claims not to like Kurt Cobain's voice, doesn't like the style, basically doesn't see what the big deal is.

He has since gone on the record claiming that he doesn't like nineties music, period. Remember that nineties sound  I mentioned? He hears it too. And he does not like it.

This dichotomy of good taste and bad vibes toward such a critically and historically loved band, besides vexing me endlessly, got me thinking.

In my desperate search for answers, I came upon a sobering realization: I have said these exact same words. But for me, it was the eighties. The glitz, glam, electronic, candy coated, fake, plastic feel of the whole decade made me sick. "Give me something real," I said. "Give me something raw."

With this epiphany under my belt, I came to an important conclusion (and I hope when I say this my friend will remember the glowing build-up I gave him only moments ago): He simply doesn't get Nirvana.

It's not his fault. He never swam in the Lake of Nineties Music. He's only ever seen it from afar. He has simply fallen prey to The Axis' awesome power, just like I did before him.

The Painting: A Brief Summary of Recent Music Through My Own Eyes

When I reached my Axis of Acceptance, I was in seventh grade. It was 1996. I had been raised on oldies and Christian music, and then I heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time, and everything changed. I was a few years late to the grunge party, yes, but I was still in the midst (though in the final third) of the resultant era. The glam and glitz of the eighties had been replaced with a straightforward, raw, emotive, stripped down rock sound on the heels of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, and the rest. So that became my Axis.

The movement held strong and morphed slightly through the nineties, and as bands like Silverchair, Live, Bush, and Fuel (to name a very few) formed or rose to prominence, I was all aboard. They all had unique sounds, but they also fell under the same general banner of sound: straightforward, guitar-based rock; emotive, honest vocals; and unapologetic lyrics. That is, they sang passionately (which can mean a host of things, such as angrily, or hopefully, or pleadingly), and they did it honestly. No winking to the camera. No half joking front. They sang about what the song was about. That doesn't mean that lyrically they weren't abstract or poetic, but it means that the songs were about something honest, and by God, they meant them.

This was comfortable for me.

And Then...

I still remember the first time I heard The White Stripes. I was fresh out of high school, and my friend, mentioned earlier, was just entering. I saw this music video:

On one hand, this was the most raw, stripped down music since the Pixies, even more so than  Nirvana. But what I interpreted was a wholly foreign aesthetic. Do you hear the way Jack garbles the lyrics in the musical breaks? Do you hear the whole so-simple-it-sounds-like-we're-not-actually-trying thing? I thought to myself, "This is a joke. This guy's just screwing around." They were too aloof even to condescend to such a standard form of rock as including a freaking bassist in the band. It came off as campy, cutesy,  un-serious, give-me-attention-for-being-weird music.

I wrote them off. It was the eighties all over again.

But in the coming years, the transition continued, and more bands dripping in tongue-in-cheek vibes started pouring out of the record labels, like The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines, and, a little later, The Killers. (Notice too the "The" band names, a subtle statement of a return to sixties form and a rebellion against the moodier names of the nineties like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam.)

I hated all of it for a while. I couldn't take any of it seriously. But eventually, without even realizing it, I came around and softened to the whole style. I even came to love some of it. I suddenly realized that it had its own unique, but no less worthy, musical gifts to offer. The transition was so smooth, and so subtle, that I didn't even notice it when it happened. It wasn't until I considered my friend and his similar plight with nineties music that I really considered how it had gone down.

When we moved out of the self-serious bands of the nineties and into the tongue-in-cheekiness of The White Stripes and The Killers and co., in some ways, popular music was hearkening back to the eighties. The eighties—whether it was Aha!, Boy George, or the Hair Bands—was shrouded in a candy coating of wink-wink, nudge-nudge quirky-ness. Beneath a lot of those ridiculous synthesizers and ludicrously over mixed drums was heartfelt, soulful, genuine artistry.

A representative sample: The Killers, some twenty years down the road, began picking up the old eighties mantle again, sticking campy, bright, ludicrously peppy synth punctuations over their furious guitar tones. It's ironic in the sense that this peppy synth fluff is not what one expects to hear alongside lyrics like, "Heaven aint' close in a place like this," but when you got used to it, the dichotomy kind of worked.

Also, even through the White Stripes' stripped down sound, it wears a heavy coating of irony. It's a, "Let's make this sound kind of crappy in hopes that it will actually sound awesome," attitude (which it turns out, worked).

To be clear, I'm not saying the White Stripes sound eighties. I'm not saying eighties music itself is making a comeback or that today's popular music is ripping off eighties music. But what I am saying is that many of the overarching sensibilities that defined the eighties and made them stand out from the nineties have helped guide the new era back away from the starkly contrasted nineties.

Somewhere around 2005, I realized that I was enjoying eighties music when it came on the radio. I would turn Bon Jovi up rather than turn it off. It was ok, now, to like Boy George. When did that happen? In the nineties, if you popped on some Culture Club at a party, people wouldn't smile knowingly and say, "Oh, this guy and his culture club!" They would say, "This shit sucks. Turn it off." Once again, the change happened so subtly I didn't even notice.

As popular music, in many ways, began to hearken back to the sensibilities of the 80s, I found that what I thought I had been so sure of about "good" and "lame" in my youth was slowly falling away.

The Crux: Candy Canes on a Coffin

I had come full circle when I finally acknowledged that I enjoy Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan, in many ways, is the polar opposite of Kurt Cobain and represents neatly the difference between my friend's Axis and my own.

Sufjan's music is shrouded in irony. Bright, peppy horns and funk-tastic keyboards lift his music to a sort of sweet, bubbly, playful aesthetic that never takes itself too seriously.  Meanwhile, Nirvana's music is immediately arresting. They're not messing around one whit when they thrash out the opening chords of Teen Spirit, and when the somber, dry, acoustic tones of "Something in the Way" fade out at the end of the album, there's no question that we've been on an exploration of pain and sadness.

But look a little deeper at Sufjan. Sufjan's music is like candy canes hanging on a coffin. If we look past the brightly colored, sweet treats on the outside, we find a deadly serious artist searching the universe for answers about life, death, right, wrong, pain, and joy. Lyrics about the invention of Cream of Wheat come minutes before a chilling recounting of the mass murders committed by John Wayne Gacy Jr.

Now look a little deeper at Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. Behind their wall of aggression and anger, artfully ironic themes make us realize that all of the black clad, depressed generation X-ers claiming Kurt to be their spokesperson were on the butt end of a great joke. ("Teenage angst has paid off well; now I'm bored and old.") Through deadly serious expression and searching through misery and hopelessness, Kurt still found a way to wink-wink nudge-nudge those who weren't too wrapped up in the seriousness of it all. A closer inspection finds wonderfully abstract, satirical themes usually sung in sugary sweet melodies that wouldn't be out of place on a Beatles record, if housed in different sonic tones. It's the difference between those who run home crying, offended by "Rape Me," and those who know that the real target of the scathing song are the bullies in this life who take advantage of those weaker than themselves. With Nirvana, that candy is on the inside of the dark coffin.

What a Difference Four Years Make

It's amazed me what a difference four years can make in a group of people. At least part of it, I'm sure, is that I found my Axis at the final third of my era. Four years later, my friend made the discovery at the beginning of his. We were right on the line, on opposite sides.

It was hard for people of the grunge generation to accept the glitz and sparkle of the eighties and, in turn, the ironic, tongue-in-cheek throwback of what The White Stripes and Sufjan Stevens started. While Sufjan kids may look at a picture of an eighties wedding complete with the bride's frizzed out hair and the groom's robust mustache, they laugh and call it "epic." Nirvana kids would have just called it "stupid." The Sufjan kids get so deep in ironically praising Chuck Norris that they almost forget that he is actually a bad actor. The Nirvana kids would just roll their eyes in disgust, say he sucks, and change the channel.

My point is, we just think differently.

What Does it all Mean

Writing off an entire decade is foolish, as I learned. With the GREAT ones who rise to the surface of the lake, like Sufjan and Nirvana, you will find underneath the earmarks of their eras timeless, artistic, and dynamic music. But even beyond the great ones, down in The Lake, in the average, solid, earnest music of an era, you will find that maybe it's not so bad once you accept an era for what it is. I would hate for anyone to miss out on any of it because The Axis has them convinced that the days of "good music" are either behind or only just returned.

In 2001, I was fresh out of high school, and I would soon be hearing The White Stripes for the first time. I didn't know it at the time, but one era was slowly melting into another, as the eighties and nineties had done before.

That was ten years ago.

My friend admitted to me recently that, despite his disdain for nineties music, he actually "kind of likes Fuel." He's also been asking me for a mix of Nirvana: the best of the best, something to try on with new ears that just may reveal to him what he's been missing. I'm hopeful that he'll find, just as I did half a decade ago, that if you get out of the plane and dip your toe in the lake, you may find that you want to take a swim. It's not all that bad.

By Jonny Walls