30 Years, 30 Days: Day 14, 1993

Playing a bit of catch up tonight, so you all get two entries on the early 90s. This coming weekend is also full of shows and travelling, so I'll be just as behind in no time, don't you worry.

1993 marks the first entry where I will actually write at length about Nirvana. And the reason I waited is because In Utero is the first Nirvana album that I actually experienced right when it happened. The previous year was spent hearing all the hype and buzz and devouring all three records already out. In Utero is the Nirvana record that feels more like mine than the others because I was in middle school, barely a teenager, and this music is pretty much laboratory designed for that exact demographic.

If Nevermind is the commercial, shiny success in their catalog, In Utero is the record that sounds the most like a heavy, pop-oriented loud band. Gritty and rough around the edges, it was a surprise even to me that they could sound this dirty, having only really been aware of them for about a year. At 12 or 13, you really just react to loud music rather than pick it apart to see how it ticks. I know I did. I loved things loud, the louder the better. But also having come from a world of song structure and melody and hooks, Nirvana worked for me because they had all these things. This record contains some of the more out of control, punk-oriented moments ("Scentless Apprentice", "Very Ape", "Tourettes"), but also some of the humbler, toned down moments that offer a glimpse into how good a songwriter Cobain was at the time, and a indication as to his sadly unreached potential. "Pennyroyal Tea" and "All Apologies" are great songs because their roughly-sung melodies and slightly muted sound show that the intenstiy is still there without the screaming, grinding guitars and Grohl going all nuts on the kit.

This will forever be my favorite Nirvana record, as I'm sure it's a lot of other people's as well. It's the one I feel could have been released years later, in a different musical climate, and still done just as well. All the elements are truly starting to come together, and it's bittersweet because even when I listen to it now, I get a little sad that it's the best it will ever be.

As for Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, there's not much more I can say about the band that I didn't already go into in my bit about Gish on Day 12. This was the last studio album I ever really liked by them, and I know that they broadened their sound and got even huger as time went on, but that doesn't matter to me. I responded well to Siamese Dream, and to really no other Pumpkins since then.

To me, it's that continuation of the "loud-quiet" formula that still gets me. The opening of "Cherub Rock" still gets me every time: it starts pretty mid volume, almost a little jangly and you think, "Oh, good, some mid-tempo guitar rock." Then the rest of the layers of guitar cut in and the drums get all punchy and it erupts into a sonic wall of rock music. Songs like "Rocket", "Geek USA" and "Silverfuck" are great examples of what happens when a band takes the My Bloody Valentine approach to guitar layers and makes it a little more accessible. And songs like "Luna" and "Soma" are delicately hushed songs that show the other side of the Pumpkins, and it's a great side, a side of restraint and control to make something equally as powerful. And while I don't respond to this in quite the same way as I did at 13, I still get a lot of joy out of this record. That fuzzy guitar sound that they defined just never sounds the same played by anyone else.

And keeping in my theme of women in rock that I've touched on in previous entries, we have Liz Phair's first album, Exile In Guyville. I will admit, my biggest attraction to Liz Phair was that she cussed like a sailor and made no apologies about it. It was enticing to hear a young woman adopt what is stereotypically considered a man's role of rock musician, and take part in the great tradition of poetic profanity. She had a filthy mouth, and I loved it. Not even necessarily in a sexual sense, but in a powerful sense, in that she immediately grasped my attention with her music and her wry and matter-of-fact lyrics. She spoke frankly about her own sexuality and lovers, and not in an exploitative way, but in the same way that it gets portrayed by any male singer.

Phair was the beginning of my understanding of feminism in an equality sense. I didn't realize it at the time, and wouldn't really realize how my listening to many powerful women songwriters would shape my general attitude towards women (being raised by a fiercely independent and capable mother had a lot to do with that, too). But the seeds were planted, and I never viewed women in rock as a novelty or a ploy, even though they've been used for that purpose time and time again. It taught me to seek out the truly unique voices, and to take what I could from their stories and songs. I'm not saying I'm better than anyone because I embrace feminism and its ideals, but that powerful music by powerful women has definitely shaped my view not only of music, but of all of culture and society.

We'll close tonight with The Juliet Letters, an absolutely stellar record from Elvis Costello, backed up by the Brodsky Quartet, an honest-to-God string quartet. I didn't discover this record until early college, after I had digested a huge amount of Costello's catalog. It was so fresh and new to hear him writing songs not backed up by a rock band but by "classical" instrumentation. The songs rose and fell with a different kind of energy and flow then anything else I had heard him do. And rather than writing lyrics and melody in a classical style, you could hear how any one of the songs on the record could be performed in a rock setting. I really got to focus on his lyrics and attention to melody and arrangement in ways that often got overshadowed on his rock records by the band and the pop nature of it all.

And it's fantastic. It's very dramatic sounding, and Costello works with the new ensemble in a way that doesn't just seem like his way of trying to sell some records to a different genre audience, but because he truly loves the quartet and wants to work with them. I almost never think of this record when I compile a favorites list of Costello, but I always think of it when I think of an artist truly stepping into new territory and not trying to simply increase his profile. Instead, Costello strives to make a record separate from his Attractions persona, and he succeeds beautifully.

Whew. Two entries back to back in tiring, but I hope we're on our way to getting back on schedule.

-Dan