Cover: Charles Bradley, "Stay Away"

Charles Bradley spent years as a James Brown impersonator ("Black Velvet,") toiling in obscurity before being discovered in Brooklyn and signed to the Daptone label, who are bringing the Stax sound into the 21st century. He released his first album in 2011 at age 63. Dude's got some pipes. But the last thing I would have expected to see included on his debut album was a cover of a comparatively obscure Nirvana song.

I mean, look at the clash of styles. The other cover he chose for this set was the lyrically straightforward and directly sentimental "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young. Great tune, and the combo makes a ton of sense. But by imbuing Kurt's free-associated, oblique and angsty lyrics with a blaxploitation groove lends it an added level of danger, a certain mystique -- not that Nirvana's music is lacking danger and mystery. Her, it drones and echoes out: Stay / Stay away! Instead of a petulant "get back," is becomes a real serious warning. I don't know where the idea for this came from, but it is right.

The 5: Nirvana

Let's have an argument.

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.

Now Listening: Bleach

This is my attempt to reconcile my newfound powers of streaming, my desire to write about the music I listen to, and my need to listen to something about a squajillion times before I feel like I can put down my opinions on it. Maybe this format will take off, maybe it won't, but this will be where I write about something, more or less in the moments that I'm listening to it: transient thoughts, but not concrete or final enough to merit a "review."

I've been listening to Nirvana's Bleach all evening. I've always been a huge Nirvana fan, of course, and yet I'm still hesitant to move in beyond the edges of their music. First there's the hits and monumental cuts. Then there's the cuts I really like: "Drain You," "School," "On a Plain," "Been a Son," "Love Buzz," "Breed," "Dumb," "Serve the Servants" to a lesser extent. "Sliver," if it's not considered in the first category. That's more or less by design: the deeper you go, the more abrasive and deliberately unpleasant the music gets: harder, more raw, less pleasurable for its own sake. For the faithful only. There are bits like this on Nevermind, too, and In Utero is practically made of it. Some would probably say that's the BEST thing about Nirvana, and they're allowed to.

I like a lot of songs on Bleach, but it is justly dismissed compared to the other two real Nirvana albums: hell, it could even be the case that Incesticide has more juice on it. I think the distinction Bleach has is that it's the first one, the first piece of Nirvana on record, and it absolutely does not represent what's to come for that band. They sound very undistinguished: raw, and competent, and like they've got something but haven't quite figured out how to show it. Showing it was always the big issue with Nirvana: how, how much, to what end. Easier to make a big noise and scare off people. Coming at the beginning of the discography, even with the benefit of hindsight, you're still squinting a bit to see Nirvana in that mess: it's there, in "About a Girl," and even "Floyd the Barber" and "Mr. Moustache" and all over. But mostly it sounds loud and hard and fast-slow. It's too human to be metal, too sludgy and un-pointed to be punk, so without the context of the grudge revolution, I can see how it was dismissed even by a lot of the small audience it did have in 1989: there must've been more eyebrow-raising acts on the Subpop label at the time. It's a not-great album by a great band that isn't "there" yet.

Cover: Nirvana, "Lithium"

Not to be missed is this dreamlike cover of Nirvana's "Lithium" as performed by the British psychedelia group of the same name. It's appropriately heavenly and deranged, a really great look at the material that stands on its own while enhancing the original.

Cover: Nirvana, "Here She Comes Now"

Like pretty much any band that doesn't suck, Nirvana has a bit of a Velvet Underground influence. They do this song honor by making it both rough and pretty, in that Nirvana way. It begins as clean, bright power pop, then escalates into a very characteristic Cobain vocal workout as the guitars pound harder and harder, where the original got jammy and jazzy. The Velvets make for some good cover material, their songs being so deep in the DNA of all that follows that it's easy to pick them up and put them back together in a new style that doesn't damage the original. They're that strong.

Cover: Nirvana, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"

Had I realized sooner that the anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death fell on a Tuesday, I'd have saved some of those covers I've already posted for today, because you know I'm all about timeliness (which is why I keep posting videos from a 17-years-dead grunge act covering songs from before he was born.)

A friend of mine is obsessed with that look he gives just before the last note.

Cover: Nirvana, "Love Buzz"

The original recording of "Love Buzz" is a decent-enough song... an appropriately-buzzy, slinky, funky, psychedelic song that sounds a whole lot like Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." The translation into Nirvana's version is like a template of nearly every Cobain song: the riff gets magnified, the vocals go from quiet moaning to louder-than-human wailing. When he asks "can you feel my love buzz?" it's so menacing, you don't want to. The guitars are just this side of mindless metallic showmanship, but you'd never accuse Cobain of being Kip Winger... he plays it good and sloppy because that serves the song way better, until he smashes it, then picks it back up and makes it wail for mercy. There's not a lot of love in the Cobain songbook. Maybe he covered songs like these because he just didn't see himself having much to say on the matter.

They released the Live at Reading CD/DVD in 2009, and it's one of the few non-Aerosmith live albums I've got. If you're a fan of the band and you don't have it, there's something wrong with you. Sadly, this track is the one they left out of the CD.

Cover: Paul Anka, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Undergoing the opposite process to my below post is Paul Anka doing Nirvana. One one level you could argue that re-enacting a popular song of underground culture and rebellion (which of course became the icon of that culture's mass reproduction) as a Jazz standard completely drains out its meaning, but on the other hand... I think Kurt Cobain (who had a sense of humour about himself, sometimes) would've found it hilarious, especially given his well-known resentment of that song's popularity. I like the idea of the song's popularity leading to it being canonized by the guy that wrote "My Way." And to be honest, the song doesn't sound bad at all with the trumpets and bongos and stuff. "Here we are now, entertain us" is a pretty adaptable phrase, as it turns out.

Nirvana: Heart-Shaped Box

Happy Valentine's Day everybody.