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Hail divinest melancholy,
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight.
—John Milton, "Il Penseroso "
Southern novelist Walker Percy was fond of describing the prophetic vocation of the artist as something akin to the role of a canary in a coalmine. If the canary squawks and dies, it's time to get out of there. Something's gone horribly wrong. All is not well. Are we listening?
In those bygone days when Guns N' Roses and Michael Jackson's Dangerous topped the Billboard album charts, pop music was in a rather sorry state. (I'll leave it to the reader to assess whether or not the earliest nineties exceed the age of Britney Spears for overall lameness.) U2 and REM had survived the eighties, certainly, but alternative rock (Black Flag, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, the Pixies) and its articulation of youthful (and mostly suburban) angst had yet to find a lasting home on the radio or MTV. All of this changed when Nirvana's Nevermind dethroned Michael Jackson as top of the pops, and with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in our heads, few would regard Axl Rose with much seriousness ever again.
Almost simultaneously, Pearl Jam's Ten entered the picture with the power of a Van Halen that mattered. Both hailing from a long active, under-the-radar Seattle music scene, Nirvana and Pearl Jam would eventually be joined by Soundgarden as the primary elements of an odd cultural moment the market would christen "grunge."
To be sure, few self-respecting musicians (or fans) would ever self-apply a label like grunge. And according to the affections of many partisans, I'm already in hot water for having mentioned Pearl Jam and Nirvana in the same sentence. But both tribes persist among thirtysomethings as well as post-Columbine youth throughout the Western world, the grunge label is useful shorthand, and the conjunction of a Nirvana greatest-hits package with the new Pearl Jam recording, Riot Act—not to mention the publication of Kurt Cobain's journals—offers a fitting occasion to examine an enduring cultural legacy.
Apart from the oversized flannel shirts, wool hats, and perhaps overly self-consciously bedraggled accoutrements, the music sought to imaginatively identify and forcibly uproot the seeds of dysfunction that are perhaps especially evident in American homes and schools. Deadbeat parents had never taken quite so powerful a beating on mainstream radio, and it's important to note that while the lyrics often take the form of angry lamentation, it's mostly undergirded by a hope for reconciliation and a determination to live life differently. (Contrasted, say, with Marshall Mathers' songs of matricide).
Admittedly, when most versions of success and prosperity appear morally bankrupt and devastatingly artificial, knowing how to embody an alternative to the surrounding madness can leave the artist (and the audience) in something of a bind. "I hope I die before I become Pete Townsend," Cobain once wrote. And an aversion to the trappings of celebrity culture marks all things even remotely grunge. Before accepting "Nirvana" as a commercially viable name, for instance, Cobain and bandmate Kris Novaselic performed under the name Fecal Matter. Ever the quintessence of many a Dylanesque paradox, for the Seattle scene, there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.
Unlike a good number of personalities covered on VH1's Behind the Music, the grunge era understood instinctively and in advance that no rock-and-roller can gain the world without risking the forfeiture of any and all soul. Dedicated to exposing the unmanageability of our everyday reality and decrying the hollowness with which family and peers speak and behave, the grunge vocation inevitably flirts with hypocrisy once the revolution gets televised. Cobain opened Nivana's final album with the observation that "Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I'm old and bored," and sought the company of elder Beat statesmen like William S. Burroughs. ("There's something wrong with that boy. He frowns for no good reason.")
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