The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana Michael Azerrad (HarperOne, 2023)

    Although you and I might be familiar with the main beats of the NIRVANA story, we can still learn from this version of the book because it brings to the table nearly 30 years’ worth of additional analysis and perspective. I did not read the original version of this book. Those new elements are interwoven with the original text and set in a contrasting font, so the whole thing reads fluidly. There are some spreads where all the text is precisely that new writing and it serves to give a fuller context for the events in the original narrative. For example, Azerrad claimed in the initial version that no NIRVANA songs end with a fade-out and the annotation reminds us that “Negative Creep” ends with one. This fact isn’t important in itself, but by calling attention to the mistake, it gives the reader a moment to reconsider the initial claim—how cool of an idea it is for all of a band’s songs to end so emphatically.

    On a related note (i.e., complete tangent), the best thing about WOUND UP is that all their songs begin without stick clicks but with all instruments and vocals hitting at once. That is fucking cool. Props to Mike from The CATBURGLARS (I think it was him) for pointing that out on the Chicago Hardcore message board years ago. Another cool tangent this book led me down was the January 1994 interview Nardwuar did with Kurt. It’s interesting to see a young Nardwuar for sure, but the fact that he mentions the fucking NEOS at one point is utterly mind-blowing. It’s taken for granted at this point that Nardwuar is talented at asking these kinds of questions about band members’ influences and past experiences, and of course, there’s nothing of the sound of The NEOS in NIRVANA’s music, but it’s still incredible that he brings up that band in this interview.

    Reading through some of the smaller moments in the text also gave me the space to recall memories of my experience with NIRVANA before I’d actually started listening to them. A few months after Kurt died, a couple kids at my school had come up with a song about it to the tune of the Notre Dame fight song. The first line was “Cheer cheer for old Kurt Cobain / he shot himself while high on cocaine.” It sucks that there’s no such thing as an Internet search for my memories because I wish I could remember more of the song. My first experience with them as a fan and not just someone who was vaguely aware of them is from reading glossy magazines like Hit Parader or Circus and some probably European import that was a special issue all about them. I say probably Euro because there were guillemets instead of quotation marks.

    Though this is the definitive history of the band, there are moments of true insight to go along with the day-by-day descriptions of the band’s life. Even better, these insights travel beyond the band to help us understand what we might like about music more generally. Consider his recent analysis of their most famous song: “When Kurt sings ‘a denial, a denial,’ what does that mean exactly, or have to do with anything? We don’t know but we feel it really deeply. And that’s because of the way words—not just their meaning but their sound and their melody—go with what’s happening musically at that moment. Kurt did this all the time. It’s one of the reasons his songs are so powerful” (p. 345). He gets at the idea that lyrics don’t need to be particularly meaningful to be powerful. It’s kinda like how I pump my fist and sing along when Alec MacKaye sings “permission granted / permission denied” on the HAMMERED HULLS record. Kurt absolutely had a way with words and not in the deep-insight-on-current-affairs way or even the trenchant-insight-about-human-foibles way either. He knew how to put cool sounding words and chords together and that was enough, until it wasn’t.

(This review originally appeared in issue #3 of the zine Anxiety's False Promise, published in March 2024.)

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All Her Fault (Megan Gallagher, Peacock, 2025)

    When a young adolescent plays contact or collision sports, there is a risk of serious injury or death. Boys playing middle school football or girls playing travel soccer are liable to get concussions that will result in life-long disabling conditions. In such cases, who is most responsible for the injury? The child may feel the need to “play through the pain” to support their team, so if they continue to play and then get hurt, it must be the player’s fault. Another kid may have caused the injury, so it must be the opponent’s fault. The coach may not have benched a player who had already taken a few hard hits or falls, so it’s the coaching staff’s fault. Parents or guardians signed their child up for the league, so it must be their fault. The league or organization didn’t have concussion or injury protocols, so it must be the organization’s fault. The equipment manufacturer did not create products safe enough for children to use, so it must be the company’s fault. Pro sports broadcasts often replay sequences that lead to injury or otherwise valorize “tough” playmaking, so it’s the broadcasters’ and big leagues’ faults.

    There are many parties to consider blaming when things go wrong. In All Her Fault, Megan Gallagher’s mystery series about a missing five-year-old boy, the pronoun in the show’s title can apply to a number of the characters who might be most responsible for Milo Irvine’s kidnapping. See, he’s just a little guy at daycare. One day, he’s supposed to go home with his buddy Jacob Kaminski, and his nanny, Carrie Finch, so the boys can have a playdate the Kaminski household while all of the parents are working. These are busy, dual-income, high-striving suburban parents on Chicago’s North Shore, you see, so the families don’t know each other or each other’s nannies very well. Turns out that the playdate with Jacob never happened and the address that Marissa Irvine has in her phone from the Kaminski’s nanny is incorrect. She meets a flummoxed Esther Bauer at the house, who tries to talk her through the difficult situation of realizing a child his missing. No one can reach Carrie and neither of Jacob’s parents had ever set up the playdate in the first place. Oh, and the Irvine’s usual nanny, Ana Garcia, is off that week and will be leaving the country the next day…

    So, whose fault is it? Ana, for taking a week off and conveniently planning to leave the country? Jacob’s mom, Jenny, for hiring a nanny without doing a robust enough background check? Marissa Irvine, for scheduling a playdate via text with someone she’s never contacted through that number and whose house she’s never visited? Carrie Finch for apparently kidnapping Milo and dropping off the face of the planet? The daycare, for not having stricter pick-up protocols for parents? There are many women who might be to blame here.

    As the plot unfolds and the mystery deepens, we meet even more characters who could possibly be responsible for Milo’s abduction. One close associate of the family has a gambling addiction and may need the quick money that a ransom payment could provide. Another family member struggles with prescription pill abuse and could be chasing the money needed for another fix. Some of the parents are as awful and entitled as the most privileged people you could imagine, so maybe they resent Milo’s parents for the pettiest of reasons. (One of these reasons is that as a mom of an only child, certain moms such as Marissa and Jenny must have more time to give through volunteering for school fundraisers and events.) Maybe the parents are just faking it for attention, or even a book deal. After all, they are wildly successful people who know movers and shakers in the publishing industry who could get them a lucrative contract. Thankfully, not all of these people are women or femme-presenting, so the her in the show’s title does not seem as prescriptive and limiting as it might at first. Men and society blame women enough as it is.

    The mystery of Milo’s disappearance and its eventual resolution involves parsing who knew or did what and when. There are many cases of lies of omission. Characters sometimes conceal what they know, even when questioned by a sympathetically cast lead detective who does not have the moral code he initially seems to possess. They aren’t deliberately telling an untruth, which is lying by commission. They are simply leaving out key details in their responses while not saying anything factually inaccurate. Part of it is a little sneaky, but as with most understandings in human interaction, the import of a small detail might not seem as significant the first time we consider it. It’s rewarding to see Detective Alcaras pursue these leads and details to learn information the audience might already know, or might be learning along with him. He provides helpful think-alouds with his detective buddy to keep us in the loop. As with any good mystery or gossip story, we enjoy trying to guess where these leads and clues will take us and deciding whom to trust.

    A key element of the series is that these characters are busy with demanding jobs in publishing, wealth management, finance, teaching, and plenty of other jobs that seem to require in-person labor. They’re busy. The dads leverage that busyness or their business to beg out of responsibilities for childcare. A tale as old as time. If I were married to a man who would text and call me about the location of our child’s water bottle when I was trying to close a book deal with an important client, I would divorce him via Bitmoji in no time flat. Yes, this bumbling intrusion happens, and no, it’s not the deal-breaker that it should have been. If they’re not inept and passive aggressive, the high-achieving dads in this show must act as “protector” over their house, their wife, their siblings, their employees to maintain control of everything they touch. If you’re thinking this dynamic would result in gaslighting, you are absolutely correct. I can’t tell if it’s a weird streaming / buffering glitch or something with a green screen (if they even used it), but there were multiple episodes where it looked like the backgrounds were a mirage. One scene I chalked up to the steam rising from a teakettle between the characters, but the other scenes had no reason for this strange, wobbly background distortion to appear. It’s probably just digital artifacts from something in the way the show was filmed, but it still added to the atmosphere like the crackles and pops on a beloved album pressed to vinyl.

    Given that the characters are so wealthy and powerful, it is worth considering how they use their money and power. A missing white child from an affluent area is a surefire way to get attention from the media. Leading up to the hiccup at a press conference where reporters accuse the Irvines of faking their son’s kidnapping, they take pains to present themselves as sympathetic. They know that their existing social media photos of drunken nights out or of lavish lifestyles will not endear them to the public. Their campaign to find Milo also involves a canvassing effort in the city. The level of organization needed for this undertaking seems huge, but all we see is a quick conversation between Marissa and her friend and colleague Colin Dobbs. He tells her he’ll take care of it and then hundreds of people show up. The labor that makes that whole effort happen is completely invisible to the viewer in the same way it is to the characters. In a later episode the missing rungs of the social ladder are apparent through two wildly different outcomes of drug distribution charges. A character who has little and is desperate for money to support a family gets arrested and imprisoned, while a well-to-do son of a private school dean can make a deal with someone who needs something from the school in order to get this fortunate son’s record expunged expediently. It’s not just that the rich avoid a consequence; their second chance comes at the expense of the career and integrity of a person in a lower social class. There’s a lot going on with this show!

    If this review seems rushed, that’s because it is. Mrs. Tall Rob and I started watching last Wednesday. We got through one episode that night, another Friday, five more on Saturday, and finished it on Sunday afternoon. We usually pace ourselves with our television watching, but that all went out the window with All Her Fault. The premise is great and the many twists and turns and reveals (especially inter-family squabbling) make it a blast to watch. Even better, it contains a feminist critique of capitalism in that women receive blame for problems that are beyond their control (and are usually the fault of a mediocre white dude). Women are needed to be the care-giver and expected to be a provider while also managing their adult spouse’s social calendars, health needs, and emotional problems. The idea of “having it all” comes at a steep cost because even though one woman is not responsible for society’s shortcomings—or even her own—we’ll still think it is all her fault.

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Shifting Earth (Cecil Castellucci, Flavia Bondi, & Fabiana Mascolo; Dark Horse Comics; 2022)

    That feeling of being marketed to is gross. The feeling of “discovering” a book because you read about it on social media or through a friend’s recommendation in real life can’t be beat. It’s the latter that brought Shifting Earth into my life. A reposted Bluesky comment from Shifting Earth’s author, Cecil Castellucci, drew me in.

    In the post on October 25th, she wrote, “It’s my birthday! I’d like world peace, a functioning democracy, and to continue to be a working writer! So my big wish is that you buy, borrow, or boost one of my books today!” One of the books along with the image was Shifting Earth. I placed a hold on it at the library and waited a little while for it to come in. (All the others were already checked out, system-wide!)

    You might glean from the title of the book that we are dealing with parallel worlds and you would be correct. In addition to that, there are parallel narratives. Not all of these elements are immediately apparent from the start, which gives you a chance to deal with some disorientation as you get going.

    Calling Maeve Lindholm the protagonist feels strange with all those competing plot lines, but she’s who we meet first, so let’s go with it. She’s a scientist who is trying to preserve plant life and seeds in the event of inevitable climate disaster. Sound familiar? She’s widowed (or at least her partner is dead) and she has a rival who works on similar grounds but from a corporate or industry perspective. There’s plenty of tension between their competing desires for each other and for their visions of different futures.

    In a clever use of panels and gutters, the literal parallel story of astronomy researcher Zuzi Reed unfolds. She is trying to get attention and funding from an academy that seems more interested in terrestrial matters than those of different planets. The refrain of “let’s solve the problems of Earth before we explore the stars” that can stand in the way of making any kind of progress on any planet. Her partner is a geologist who is supportive of Zuzi’s work at the expense of using some of her own project’s funding.

    Things turn upside down for everyone when a coronal mass ejection sends Maeve to an actual parallel world where a man who appears to be her deceased ex-lover is still alive. He plays an important role in a world that is structured around an entirely different set of values. Maeve sees “steam-powered walkways, solar panels, rainwater recycling, green architecture… the green dream realized” (p. 35). For all its benefits, there are some glaring drawbacks that its residents aren’t able to comprehend. In a bit of explanation that sounds similar to The Community in Lois Lowry’s The Giver, it is important for people in this parallel society to be “of use,” otherwise, well… It’s said that animals who are of no use are “sacrificed and returned,” which is why there are livestock corpses floating in a river. Gruesome, indeed.

    To help Maeve better understand the world she’s entered, Ben (not Ben) takes Maeve to a play that retells the creation myth of the sun and twin moons of his world. This scene is only a spread long, but it does something really cool—it makes the parallel world seem more real by giving it a unique history and mythology. The costumes and speech patterns (represented via distinctly different lettering by Steve Wands) reveal that a lot of care went into what is only a small bit of in-universe explanation of “how things work” for Maeve. It provides a sense of wonder that a simple, illustrated dialogue exchange between the Maeve and Ben (not Ben) would  not have achieved. Better still, it ends with a box of inner dialogue that sums up the story-within-the-story and the nature of storytelling itself quite well. “We all make up stories to make sense of the world. Like the one I’m telling you now” (p. 74). Now that I’ve read Castellucci’s Shifting Earth, I’m eager to read Soupy Leaves Home and The Plain Janes, as well as some of their other made up stories that help make sense of our shared world.

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PULP More. (Rough Trade, 2025)

    If you’ve never listened to PULP, I feel sorry for you. Give “Spike Island” a listen to see what you’re getting into. Jarvis Cocker tells us, “I was born to perform / It’s a calling / I exist to do this / shouting and pointing,” which could have been a lyric to any PULP song over the past 40-or-so years. The upbeat, danceable groove they lock into feels just like it did in the end of the last century. The vinyl sounds fine, though I didn’t spring for the 2xLP on 45 RPM. The mini’ed images on the cover look to be the four core band members in black and white from the “Different Class” cover, while the back has a fuller complement of PULP in a slightly larger scale. You’re not surprised they put a lot of care into the design of the album.

    In September 2024, Mrs. Tall Rob and I saw PULP at the Aragon in Chicago. It was their first time in the city in nearly 30 years. They were without Russell Senior and Steve Mackey (RIP). They were playing a slightly bigger club than the Brixton Academy, but we’d be fools to miss them. The set was as magical and wonderful as ever, but snuck in there was a new song, “Spike Island.” Jarvis introduced it as being possibly part of a new album. Being at a gig is not always the best time to hear a new song from a band as lushly arranged as PULP, but I wasn’t about to turn up my nose at the new sonic offering. It didn’t sound too different from the rest of the set, for better or worse.

    We’d seen them on the 2011 reunion tour in Brixton as part of our honeymoon and the show was excellent. They had done a summer of European festival gigs and closed out the year with two shows at clubs in London. Notably, they said the reunion was only a tour and not an indication of a new creative instinct brewing within the remaining members. That’s fine. I got to see a band I’d only learned about in 2007 in a small club. I never thought I’d have a chance to see them. No new music? Fine!

    It’s kind of wild that this record exists. The past few years have seen new albums from British bands such as The CURE and IRON MAIDEN that also formed in the 1970s. Those two bands’ most recent efforts came at a slow, but expected pace. Neither of those bands had broken up or gone on hiatus. PULP, on the other hand, has been on and off the reunion cycle since their long hiatus in 2001, and have only released a single track, “After You” in 2012. As a leftover from the “We Love Life” sessions, it seemed like that would be it for Jarvis Cocker et al.

    We all should be so glad that “After You” wasn’t the last we’d heard from them. The promo material with the record explains that it’s been nearly 24 years since the last PULP album. Given the hiatus and other projects they’d been involved in, it really was a surprise to find out they had an album’s worth of material to share. Jarvis explains that it is “the shortest amount of time a PULP album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen.” That is a really cool way of putting it. They’d had the time off to let some old ideas simmer and new ones bubble up; the result is as delectable as anything they served up at the height of their notoriety.

    Do you remember the first time? Do I need to tell you what PULP sounds like? (Are you sure?) This album works as an entry point if you’re not familiar. They hit all the usual defining features of their sound: powerful, disco-y arrangements that make you want to shake your moneymaker; too, too close to the mic spoken word parts; lyrical concepts and phrasings that are just on the right side of being too clever for their own good; and songs about sex.

    If you’re lucky, you get all of those in a single song, such as “My Sex.” I laughed in spite of myself at the line “I haven’t got an agenda / I haven’t even got a gender.” That’s just the kind of cleverness I mean. In the next song, you’ve got the line that “without love / you’re just jerking off inside someone else.” There you go. A disgusting way of phrasing of an idea that is fundamental to a healthy relationship. You really do have “Got to Have Love.”

    (As a treat, Jarvis will “spell it for you, yeah, it goes L-O-V-E,” so you’ll have a pleasant memory of “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.” toward the end of the song.)

    There’s times when I don’t want to listen to “We Love Life” because the ornate instrumentation is too much for me. The velvet-gloved slap of “Different Class” is unbeatable. Moments like “Farmers Market” recall the excesses of “We Love Life,” yet the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There are many parts and many contributions to this record. Pictured in the insert are Jarvis Cocker, Nick Banks, Mark Webber, and Candida Doyle. There are no songs with just the four of them; Andrew McKinney plays bass in place of the late Steve Mackey. At a minimum, there are credits for strings, percussion, and electronics on the songs. So, nothing entirely unexpected, and that’s fine by me. There’s a taste of some of the darkness of “This is Hardcore” on “The Hymn of the North,” which has a recurring chord progression that evokes plenty of sadness. That feeling goes over the top with the eventual imploring request to “please stay in touch with me / in this contactless society.” Feeling bad can feel so good. The whole b-side to the record feels like a journey through the phases of a relationship, from that moment when “Something Changed” to the eventual result of “Babies” who will grow into adults who leave home to start it all again.

    As the liner notes indicate, “This is best that we can do.” and there’s no shame in trying when you know you’ve given your all.

    Let’s finish with the observation that “We Love Life” ended with “Sunrise” and “More” ends with “A Sunset.”

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