I think, in the ~3 years I've run this site, I haven't said many controversial things. Generally, when you consider your job to be "point people at awesome music," there's very little room for dissent. It's true! Maybe I just have great taste, or maybe there's no point in going "No, that new David Bowie album isn't as amazing as you think it is" (because it is) or, most likely, because I'm just not doing this on a big enough scale to stir up any ill-will from anybody at all. This lame little site (amazing as it is) is mainly for me an my friends and nobody else sees it except when I happen to get retweeted by an artist I cover. (And their fans never stick around anyway.) My co-worker Stacie has said that she never even has to read the site, because as soon as I tweet a link, she just shrugs and goes "Okay, he liked that."
True enough.
The 5 is an idea I had a few weeks ago when I was having my bi-monthly internal struggle about whether to stop doing SOTW altogether. Except it wasn't internal because it was on Twitter. It kind of comes out of the same place as the Best Song Ever tourney, which I never did finish #2, which is that I'm interested in trying ways of praising or quantifying my enjoyment of music that don't get tried often. What I came up with this time was "The 5." That's 5 items in a category, not ranked, but five items that make up the core of that topic. The initial idea is to be songs by bands, but it could end up being bands, lyrics, bandmembers, albums, riffs, in categories like years, genres, geography, scenes, or some other selection. But let's start off slow.
I picked 5 because that is objectively too few to be complete. It is prohibitively restrictive, and nobody is going to be happy with the result. I don't think there is a single thing worth discussing that can be summed up with fewer than 5 examples, and I want to pay special attention to what makes the cut and what doesn't. Because there will be room for argument, room for error, room for complaint. Or maybe it will end up just being so succinct that 5 will be enough. And I'm starting with Nirvana because in their few active years they produced so much that is so diverse and so ardently defended by its fans, and I'm cocky enough to think I know enough to distill it perfectly. Even though you could fill this list up with 5 tracks from Nevermind and be done.
1: "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Let's start with the obvious here. A few years ago I worked with a guy named Trevor, and we bonded over our love for Nirvana, but every time we would listen to Nevermind he would express his dislike for "Smells Like Teen Spirit." He liked every single other thing Nirvana ever recorded, but this tune was anathema to him. I called him out on hipster exclusionism, that he hated it because it was a "hit," and he denied it. He genuinely thought this song was in some way inferior to all of the rest of Nirvana's songs. Even, like, "Hairspray Queen."
So let's cut the bullshit and all acknowledge that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a genuinely amazing song in the context of being a pop single. It is the outsider breaking in. It is a nasty, skanky attitude dressed up with a shiny hook that melts and destroys everything else on the radio just by being next to it, it carries a sarcastic, revolutionary rhetoric, and is essentially poison, and yet by virtue of being catchy and memorable, is totally fit for public consumption. When you cut through the mythology of some kind of overnight rebellion in rock music, it holds up to the myth astonishingly well.
2: "Sliver"
A few years ago, Gaslight Anthem did a faithful cover of this song on their album Handwritten, and it came off about as well as Gus Van Sant's version of Psycho. They got all the notes right, and Brian Fallon's voice is kinda like Cobain's - he can even scram a bit! But it just felt like the cover your friend's band plays and highlights how badly Gaslight Anthem are not Nirvana. Even while being faithful, it lacks Cobain's childish impudence, sarcasm and charm, the idea of writing a punk song from the perspective of a bored whiny child. The nuance of the idea is just lost. If they had covered "In Bloom" or "Lithium," they could have done justice, but they picked something that was just beyond their grasp and really gives such a great insight as to why Nirvana is Nirvana.
3: "Polly (Unplugged)"
Their MTV Unplugged set will always be known as one of those amazing moments in rock history, and I could have selected any number of cuts, including several incredible covers and a number of amazing renditions of mostly lesser-known songs. It's up to you whether this version of "Polly" is better than the original, or whether it was one of the best songs of the night, but I think it bridges between the two at the place where Cobain was a writer and artist, and not just a noisemaker.
4: "Serve the Servants"
Here's the curveball. I think everyone's got their own favourite Nirvana deep cuts and there are a lot of options here. As the opening track for In Utero, "Serve" does a lot to displace the perceived notion of Nirvana as a glossy put-on, punk-metal imitators getting rich off fake angst. Or at least, it directly addresses it in the lyrics, "Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I'm bored and old." I think this is one of the most formidable songs Kurt wrote and sets the stage for the very challenging In Utero album as a whole. The strange thing about this choice, I guess is that in a weird grungey way, "Serve the Servants" is perfectly catchy and hooky, but that does nothing to dull its message or impact. It's still full of sour, discordant notes.
5: "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"
It really couldn't have been anything else, could it? For the last act on their Unplugged show, Kurt & Co aligned themselves with Depression-era bluesman Lead Belly and it sounded like the most natural thing in the world, invoking a kind of eternal misery that carries down from generation to generation and lingers with us still. But attempts at profundity aside, it's an amazing fucking performance. This cover is kind of exactly what you want from this band.
So there's my attempt to put Nirvana into five very different songs from five different stages of their career. I'm not saying this is definitive, I'm saying it's not. You could build an entirely different set of five, or even two or three, out of great songs I left off.
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