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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