Skip to main content

"RAPE ME"

If you want to feel old (or young, depending on if you were born in 1993), Nirvana's last studio album, In Utero, is 20-years-old right around now.  I find this rather confusing, because in some ways, it seems like yesterday I first put it on - and was first repelled.  For few albums seemed so rebarbative at the time, on first listen.  Of course, eventually, this unlovely album has come to be seen a masterwork.

It really is probably the most important indie album an American band has ever created, and so cleverly fuses The Beatles, Pixies, and other, grunge ideals, that it becomes it own new style.  And it has never been bettered - never even really aped, to any extent, successfully.

There are several songs of genius on the album - tracks 3 through 7 are all classics; as well as tracks 9 and 12.  So, seven great, timeless songs, and five songs that disturb this excellence, aural challenges - and these other five are not so bad in themselves, either, in retrospect - just simply angrier, or louder, or more cacaphonic.  In Utero, with its scenes of violence, cancer, rape, revenge, anger, and madness - is also the album of lyric melody and lyric wit; it has stood the test of time; one wonders: are there any albums from 2013 that will, so confidently?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".