Smell Her On You: Nirvana, *Nevermind*, and the Death of the Ego
„I will arrest myself, I will arm myself.”
– Kurt Cobain, Polly
I. The Album That Arrived
I am going to try, here, to write down what Nevermind did to me and to a generation. I am going to try to do it without the romanticism and without the nostalgia and without the music-critic jargon, because all three would be dishonest. I am going to try to use the language that the record itself used, plus a few thousand years of human wisdom that the record was unknowingly channeling, plus the memory of what it felt like to be fifteen years old and to be lying on the floor of a friend’s room with headphones clamped so tightly over the ears that the cartilage ached and to feel, for the first time in a conscious way, that there was something called the self, and that it was in trouble.
The album arrived in the German provinces in 1993. The album arrived in the German provinces in 1993 and the album did not stop arriving. The album is still arriving. The album is still arriving in every teenager who hears it for the first time, in every adult who hears it again after twenty years of not hearing it, in every person who has ever been fifteen years old and felt something they could not name. The album is the record that did not stay on the shelf. The album is the record that did the work that no other record did. The album is Nevermind.
This is the third essay in a series on Nevermind on libertaria.blog. More essays on this album will follow in the coming days. This one is about the album as a whole. This one is about the metaphysics. This one is about the record that taught a generation that the screaming in the chorus was the same screaming the Vedantists had been doing for two and a half thousand years.
II. The Opening Track, or: The Borders of the Self
„True security, I can’t let you smother me.”
The first words on Nevermind are not a scream. They are sung. Almost whispered. Almost sung. Smells Like Teen Spirit opens in a mode that is the exact opposite of what the song becomes, and the gap between the two is the first of the record’s many deliberate lacerations. Kurt Cobain’s voice is tender. Hushed. Almost intimate. The lyric is a confession of claustrophobia: I can’t let you smother me. True security. Already, in the first seven words of the album, the central drama of the entire record has been named. The ego is afraid of being swallowed by the beloved. The ego is afraid of the dissolution of its own borders. And yet the ego knows – somewhere underneath the fear, in a part of the self that does not have language – that the dissolution is exactly what it most wants, exactly what it most cannot bear, and that this paradox is the price of being alive in a body that wants two opposite things at the same time.
This is not a teenage problem, although teenagers feel it most acutely. It is the problem. It is the problem that drove Arjuna to Krishna on the field of Kurukshetra. It is the problem that drove the Desert Fathers into the Egyptian desert. It is the problem the Bhagavad Gita addresses when it tells the warrior to act without attachment to the fruits of action, because attachment is the mechanism by which the ego builds its borders, and the borders are the prison. „You have the right to action alone, never to its fruits.” Krishna does not say this in the abstract. Krishna says it to a man who does not want to fight his own cousins and who is looking, desperately, for a doctrine that will let him keep his borders intact and still do what must be done.
Cobain was not a Vedantin. Cobain was a working-class kid from Aberdeen, Washington, who did not make it past high school and who, by his own account, read very little. He had, however, the thing that no amount of reading can give you and that no amount of ignorance can take away: he had heard it. The Vedanta is not, in the end, a doctrine. It is a hearing. It is what a nervous system tells a person, under sufficient pressure, in sufficiently clean prose. The Gita is the record of a man who heard it, written down by someone who could write. Nevermind is the record of a man who heard it, shouted it through a stack of Marshall amplifiers, and sold eleven million copies.
The ego thrives on maintaining its borders. True intimacy forces the terrifying question. Where do I end and where do you begin. This is the first movement of every spiritual crisis that has ever produced a scripture, and Cobain put it in the first seven seconds of the record, before the guitars have even come in, and the generation heard it and felt it and could not articulate it, because we did not have the vocabulary. We had, instead, beer, and cigarettes, and girls we could not talk to, and a Friday night, and a cassette player, and the first few notes of the loudest song of our lives.
III. The Possession That Always Fails
„I always wanted more than I could steal.”
You cannot possess what you fundamentally already are. The theft always fails. The line, sung almost under Cobain’s breath, halfway through the second verse of Smells Like Teen Spirit, is the most important line on the record. It is the line that converts the song from a teenage tantrum into a metaphysical statement. The tantrum remains – the tantrum is the surface, the tantrum is what the marketing department sold, the tantrum is what the magazine covers photographed – but underneath the tantrum, like groundwater underneath a parking lot, there is this line. I always wanted more than I could steal.
The ego divides reality into a bunch of things so that it can have the experience of lacking and gaining, of possessing and being dispossessed. The ego looks at the beauty in another person and tries to possess it. The possession fails. The theft fails. What remains is the hollow.
Now. Here is what I want you to understand about why this line, sung by a man who would be dead within three years, hit a generation so hard that we are still talking about it.
We were, all of us, fifteen. And the central romantic problem of being fifteen is precisely this problem. You find a girl. The girl has something you want. The something is not, in the end, the girl. The something is the dissolution of the self into the other. The something is the dissolution of the self that comes with being witnessed, with being seen, with being known. The ego wants this dissolution, and the ego is terrified of it, and the girl’s body is the location of the negotiation because no one has yet explained to us, in any vocabulary we can hear, that the girl is not the territory. The girl is the map. The territory is what the map points to.
Cobain sang this. Cobain sang it in the second person plural, on behalf of every fifteen-year-old in every provincial suburb of every decaying empire, and the song went to number one because the song was true and the truth of it was unbearable and we paid money to be told it. We paid money to be told it because the alternative was to be told, by every adult institution around us, that the song was about a tantrum, that the tantrum was about a girl, that the girl was the center of the universe, that the only valid response was to get over the girl and get on with the work and stop making such an embarrassing noise about it. The adult institutions were wrong. Cobain was right. We were not making a noise about a girl. We were making a noise about the impossibility of being a self that can love without possessing, and the impossibility of being a self that can be loved without being consumed, and the impossibility of being a self at all, and the Nevermind told us so and we were grateful and we are still grateful and we will be grateful until we die.
IV. The Woman Who Was, for One Evening, Not a Woman
There is a song on Nevermind called Lounge Act which is widely considered to be a minor track. The song is, in fact, the thesis of the album compressed into two minutes and forty-three seconds, and I want to take a minute with it before the analysis continues.
„I’ll arrest myself, I will arm myself.”
The song is about, on its surface, a relationship with a woman who is uncomfortable with her own visibility. The woman performs. She wants to be seen, but she cannot bear to be seen. She does, she says, all the things that she’d never do. The phrase is a confession of an entire life compressed into nine words: all the things that she’d never do. A life organized around the avoidance of authenticity. A life organized around the construction of a public self designed to protect a private self that has already gone underground. The narrator of the song, who is Cobain, who is every teenage boy who has ever stood in front of a girl and tried to think of something to say, responds: I’ll arrest myself. I will arm myself.
To arrest oneself. To put oneself under arrest. To voluntarily surrender oneself to the authorities of one’s own conscience. To turn one’s own interior inside out and place it under guard. To say to the beloved, even when the beloved is uncomfortable with the saying: here is what I actually am. Here is the wound. Here is the wound under the wound. Here is the shame I cannot name. Here I am.
This is not adolescent. This is the most countercultural act available to a human being in any century. It is the gesture of confession in the Desert tradition. It is the gesture of the bodhisattva vow. It is the gesture of the man who walks into the desert because he cannot bear to be in the city and yet cannot bear to be only in himself. The man arms himself, but the weapon he picks up is the refusal of the weapon. The man puts himself under arrest, but the arresting authority is not external and not internal either. The arresting authority is the love itself, looking back at him from the eyes of the woman who is uncomfortable with her own visibility.
The whole record is this. The whole record is this gesture repeated twelve times in twelve different keys, with twelve different sets of guitar distortion. The man under arrest. The man arming himself against his own desire to be seen. The man knowing that the only way out is through, and that through is unbearable, and that the bearings are already gone and the wave is already breaking and the only choice is to be in the wave or to be drowned by the refusal of the wave, and that drowning by refusal is the worse of the two.
V. The Young Man Who Wrote the Bible
Kurt Cobain was twenty-seven years old when he died. He was twenty-four when Nevermind was released. He was, at the time of the recording, in extreme physical pain from an undiagnosed stomach condition that would eventually kill him anyway, just slower than he chose. He was addicted to substances which he used to manage the pain and which made the pain worse. He was married to a woman whose public persona he could not reconcile with his private knowledge of her and with his private knowledge of himself. He was the father of an infant daughter whom he loved with a ferocity that he could not find a vocabulary for, in a world whose idea of masculine tenderness was constrained by everything he had been raised to be and that he had been raised to refuse. He was being eaten alive by the attention. He was being eaten alive by the recognition that the attention was never going to stop and that the only way out was to become, himself, a Caesar, and that he had spent his entire artistic life pretending to be against exactly that.
He was, in short, exactly the person one would expect to be the writer of the most accurate popular text on ego-death in the second half of the twentieth century. The young man who wrote the Gita was, by the time of his dialogue with Krishna, a man of fifty-ish, a king, a father, an accomplished general, a man facing the necessity of doing violence to his own family and looking for the doctrine that would let him do it and not be destroyed by having done it. The young man who wrote the New Testament, if you take the Christian claim seriously and not as metaphor, was a man of about thirty. The young man who wrote the Nevermind was a man of twenty-four. Three of the four major texts on ego-death available to the Western tradition were written by young men. I will leave the implications of this observation where they lie.
What I will say is that the record is, in places, pure theology, and that the theology is exact. The track Polly – a song about a rape victim, sung from the perspective of the rapist for reasons that only make sense if you understand the record as a sustained experiment in the dissolution of the moral ego – contains the line I will arrest myself, I will arm myself, which is also a line from Lounge Act, which is, if you have been listening correctly, the same song. The whole record is the same song. The whole record is the same gesture: I am a self, and the self is in trouble, and the trouble cannot be cured by being a louder self. The cure is the dissolution of the self. The cure is the thing that the self most fears. The cure is the death of the ego.
The teenager knows this. The teenage boy knows this because he is in the middle of it. He is in the middle of the dissolution because the dissolution is what puberty is. Puberty is not the growth of a beard. Puberty is the dismantling of the body that the child inhabited, by a body that the child did not consent to receive. Puberty is a forced ego-death at the level of the body, and the teenager cannot talk about it because the vocabulary has been taken from him, and so the teenager mumbles and screams and drinks and tries to die without dying, and Nevermind was the first record in the history of popular music to take the mumbling seriously. The first record to say: this is not noise. This is prayer.
VI. The Track That Was Not Played But Was Heard
There is a moment on the record, on the last track, Something in the Way, where the entire record stops. The song is an arrangement of one note, repeated. The note is the lowest note on the guitar. The note is dark. The note is patient. The note is the note of a man who has finally stopped trying to scream and has realized, with the patience of a man who knows he is dying, that the only sound left is the sound of not trying.
The lyric is: Underneath the bridge, the tarpaulin. Underneath the bridge, the tarpaulin. This is not a lyric. This is a sound. The sound is what Cobain heard when he was sixteen and living under a bridge, in the rain, in Aberdeen, after being thrown out of the house by his father. The teenage hobo under the bridge. The teenage hobo under the tarp. The teenage hobo under the bridge and tarp who was, even then, already writing the line. Underneath the bridge, the tarpaulin.
The audience heard it. We heard it in our basements and in our parents’ kitchens and on the parking lots of discotheques in provincial German suburbs and in the back seats of friends’ parents’ cars and on the bus to school and on the bus from school and in the hours between midnight and four in the morning when a teenager cannot sleep because the ego will not allow it and the only thing that will allow it is a cassette of an album that is, in the most literal sense of the word, the death of the ego.
VII. What the Friend Understood
I want to come back to a friend, because I do not think his reading was incidental. I think he is the lineage of the people who, between 1991 and now, kept this record alive in the absence of the man who made it. He said: the ego needs friction to know it exists. He said: if there is no conflict, if there’s no fear and no jealousy, then the narrative of the struggling me begins to evaporate. He said: fear is the mind’s addiction to chaos as the proof of its own life.
This is Vedanta. This is the Bhagavad Gita. This is Meister Eckhart. This is the Sermon on the Mount, read closely. This is the recognition that the self is most itself when it is least at war, and that the war is the addiction, and that the addiction is what is most rewarded in every civilization that has ever existed, and that the war was, in this particular record, finally named for what it was.
Cobain did not know he was writing Vedanta. Cobain was not even a particularly spiritual person, by the conventions of his tradition. What he was, was honest, and the honesty of his nervous system was such that the spiritual content arrived through him the way the music arrives through a guitar. He was a medium. The record is a message from a place he did not consciously access. The message is: the ego will kill you. The message is: the death of the ego is the only true cure. The message is: the death of the ego is not annihilation. The death of the ego is the discovery that the thing that was afraid to die was never, in fact, the thing that you are.
We heard it. We were fifteen. We had no vocabulary. We had only the headphones. We had only the Friday night. We had only the parking lot. We had only the desire to dissolve and the terror of dissolution and the first girl whose hand we could not hold without our whole body shaking. We heard it and we heard it and we heard it and we are still hearing it, and the hearing is the only thing that has ever kept us alive.
VIII. Why It Will Be the Greatest Record
There is a question I want to ask, out loud, in this essay, with the gravity that the question deserves. Why will this record be remembered when other records are forgotten?
The answer is not in the music, although the music is extraordinary. The answer is not in the lyrics, although the lyrics are unequaled. The answer is not in the cultural timing, although the timing was immaculate. The answer is that the record is true, and the truth it tells is irreversible. Not infallible, in the Catholic sense, and not the word of God. The record is the record of a man who had, by the time the record was recorded, almost entirely lost the capacity to lie to himself, and who, in the absence of the capacity to lie, said what was true, and what was true turned out to be what every fifteen-year-old was already secretly knowing and could not say.
It carries the static of its maker. The man was dying. The man was in physical pain from an undiagnosed stomach condition that would eventually kill him anyway, just slower than he chose. The man was addicted to substances he used to manage the pain and which made the pain worse. The howl carries the howler’s condition. The record is not exempt from the era’s marketing machinery because no record is exempt from the era’s marketing machinery. Eleven million copies were sold and a T-shirt industry was born within eighteen months, and the T-shirts carried the face of the man who had already begun to die, and the teenagers who wore the T-shirts bought the dissolution back, in cotton, the ego devouring the very thing that named its own undoing. The record tells the truth. The truth was then resold. These are not contradictions. They are the same mechanism viewed from two angles.
This is the standard for greatness in any art. Not the consensus of critics. Not the sales figures. Not the testimonial of the commentariat. The standard is whether the record tells the truth about the human condition in a way that no other record has managed. The standard is whether the record is read by the next generation and the generation after that and the generation after that, and whether it is recognized, every time, as something that the listener had been carrying unnamed and that the record has finally named.
Nevermind will be remembered when the discotheques of my youth are demolished and when the suburbs I grew up in are rezoned and when the cassette player I listened to the record on is in a landfill and when the girls whose hands I could not hold are themselves grandmothers, and the record will be remembered because it will still be telling the truth.
It will be remembered because the truth it carries did not expire when the T-shirts were sold and did not expire when the man died and did not expire when the format moved from cassette to compact disc to MP3 to streaming and will not expire when streaming is replaced by whatever comes after streaming. The teenager under the bridge under the tarpaulin is the teenager under the bridge under the tarpaulin. The girl whose perfume lingers on a lover’s clothing is the girl whose perfume lingers on a lover’s clothing. The scream in the chorus is the scream in the Vedanta.
The ego also bought the dissolution back, in cotton, on a monthly subscription, on a curated playlist, on a YouTube video that explains the dissolution to the next cohort. The mechanics of the resale will continue. The truth underneath the mechanics will continue. Both are part of what the record is. The record is the whole of it, and the whole of it is what persists.
Markus Maiwald grew up in the German provinces in the early 1990s. He was fifteen when he first heard Nevermind. He has never recovered. He writes occasionally for libertaria.blog, mostly on political philosophy and sovereignty. He almost never writes on music. A series of essays on Nevermind is being published on libertaria.blog in the coming days.