Feel the Pain - Christianity Today

The following companion to “The Gospel for Generation X,” in this issue, is a departure from normal LEADERSHIP fare. The narrative (originally published in Utne Reader, an “alternative” magazine) describes the extreme lifestyle of a small segment of the buster generation. Though a little raw in places, the account captures the psychological and spiritual despair of grunge culture.

I came face to face with the essence of grunge culture last summer, when I was out in Seattle interviewing street punks.

I was hanging out with a runaway anarchist named Jackie and his street friend Anthony when we decided to go party with their friends from the band Suffocated. We took a shortcut to their house on the outskirts of the U district, tramping through the woods and under the bridge where the “trolls” (street kids) slept when they didn’t have a squat to crash, then circling around the back of Safeway to scavenge for moldy sandwiches in the dumpster.

Suffocated’s lead guitarist received us nonchalantly, nodding at the 40-ouncers we’d picked up with Jackie and Anthony’s panhandled change. Anthony said he wanted to try his new piercing needle and disappeared into the bathroom upstairs. [Piercing needles are used to pierce ears, noses, tongues, cheeks, and other sensitive parts of the body.] He said he liked the experience of pain.

So Jackie and I sat there in the living room, watching the band members scarf down lines of speed and bong hits amid a blistering blur of crustcore and metal. At the end of the tape, the guitarist dug out a new one.

“Mind if we listen to Nirvana?” he asked, almost apologetically, like he was ‘fessing to being a Bon Jovi fan.

“Sure,” Jackie shrugged, but I just smiled. These were Kurt Cobain’s people, the forgotten white trash he celebrated. If I’d asked them up front, they would have said they hated Nirvana for the same sellout reasons that Cobain hated himself. Yet even among this jaded crowd, Cobain’s anguished wail offered a refuge of authentic despair.

CHILDHOOD DENIED

Courtney Love [Kurt Cobain’s wife] said, “Every kid in America who’s been abused loves Kurt Cobain’s music.” In fact, Nirvana made abuse his generation’s defining metaphor. The hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was an anthem of powerless rage and betrayal. It was a resounding —- you to the boomers and all the false expectations they saddled us with about rock ‘n’ roll revolution. And it made psychological damage–with all its concurrent themes of child abuse, drug addiction, suicide, and neglect–a basis for social identity.

Like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” which tells the story of an alienated kid who blows his head off in school, Nirvana’s “Teen Spirit,” and indeed all of grunge culture, is rooted in the feeling of damage. Coming out of the get-ahead ’80s, it’s easy to understand the appeal. Being damaged is a hedge against the illusory promises of consumer culture. For grunge’s primary audience, white male teens, damage offers a defense against the claims of gangsta rappers and punk rock feminists. It’s a great equalizer at a time when multiculturalism seems to have devolved into competing schools of victimization. Grunge appeals to white kids because it tells them that they’re not responsible for the evils of racism and injustices, that they are victims, too.

The empowered feeling you get from listening to these songs lies in unearthing that essential nugget of shame. It’s like going to a 12-step meeting. You stand up, announce the wrongs done to you as a child, your response (drugs, suicide attempts). Simply identifying and acknowledging your damage is empowering, because society seems to deny you the right to feel damaged.

What’s frustrating is how the politics of the music remains so acutely personal. When the Sex Pistols screamed “No Future,” they were condemning a society that gave young people no hope, no prospects for change. Yet underlying that nihilistic message was a vital rage at all the politicians and people in power who, they felt, had restricted their prospects. In other words, punk knew who the enemy was.

By contrast, grunge music seems more muddled. It’s as if kids don’t know who to blame: their parents, the media, the schools–or themselves. Even Cobain doubted the privilege of his despair. “I’m a product of a spoiled America,” he once said. “Think of how much worse my family life could be if I grew up in a depression or something. There are so many worse things than a divorce. I’ve just been brooding and bellyaching about something I couldn’t have, which is a family, a solid family unit, for too long.”

In fact, the dissolution of the American family has exerted a tremendous torque on the members of Cobain’s generation. And while they may not be growing up in the midst of the Great Depression, with the official unemployment rate for young people hovering at 13.2 percent, kids have reason to complain. The dwindling timber economy of Cobain’s hometown, Aberdeen, Washington, was certainly no picnic. Yet Cobain and his fellow grunge balladeers never really aspire to protest, preferring to remain mired in their own sense of inadequacy.

Indeed, grunge expresses this generation’s almost willful refusal to reach for larger truths. Instead, it engages in a kind of mournful nostalgia for a childhood without violation. Grunge sees the lie of consumer culture but still yearns for the manufactured suburban bliss of Leave It to Beaver and Mayberry R.F.D. (two of Cobain’s favorite shows). It’s an odd yet poignant stance, given rock’s traditional aversion to the constraints of the nuclear family. “Daddy didn’t give attention/To the fact that Mommy didn’t care,” Eddy Vedder anguishes. Grunge is music for kids who grew up too fast. They keep reaching back for a childhood denied.

DUMB OR HAPPY?

The contrast between Cobain’s self-deprecation and his fans’ adulation was jarring when I saw Nirvana play New York’s Coliseum during their last concert tour. As the roadies wheeled out the hermaphroditic figurines and fiberglass trees for the In Utero stage set, I was struck by the band’s unwillingness to indulge the audience’s yearning for spectacle. Despite the corporate veneer of a big band setup, these hulking plastic dummies with their exposed innards had a kind of malevolent camp, like a twisted take on the witch’s forest on H.R. Pufnstuff.

The crowd let out a dull roar as Dave Grohl’s rapid-fire drumroll launched the band into the opening chords of “Breed.” But Cobain steadfastly refused to play the role of a revered rock star, insulting his fans with sloppy chords and (apparently) drug-addled stupor. The overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly suburban crowd didn’t seem to care. They sang along blithely to “Polly,” a song about a girl being molested, and pogoed to “Rape Me,” Cobain’s angst-filled response to commercial fame.

The saddest moment came when the band played “Dumb”: “I think I’m dumb, or maybe just happy. Think I’m just happy … ” Cobain droned, underscoring the terribleness of not knowing the difference. The crowd stilled, grew listless, then restless, but Cobain kept intoning, “I think I’m dumb, I think I’m dumb.” And for the first time it wasn’t his audience’s stupidity that he was railing at but his own, the horror of finding out that this was all his art could attract–people who stare back sheepishly, or worse, reverently, at your rage. He’d succeeded beyond his wildest dreams of combining punk and pop and created a Frankenstein that by its success seems to invalidate the thrust of its rebellion. You could hear him wanting to scoop it down the garbage disposal, nuke it in the microwave, except he couldn’t. It just kept mutating into some yet more profitable venture.

What Cobain’s suicide in April and the whole trajectory of his band’s success prove is the inability of youth to own their own rebellion. The loop taken by a new musical style from the underground to the mainstream is now so compressed that there’s no moment of freedom and chaos when a counterculture can take root. Even anti-corporatism can be rerouted into a marketing ploy. MTV makes fun of itself in order to ingratiate itself with its audience, but it’s still one big extended commercial.

“There is no youth culture. It’s like we’ve been robbed of culture,” a street punk named Bones told me last summer as we were hopping freight trains through the South. A skinny 19-year-old with droopy brown eyes, he had covered his body with a lattice-work of tattoos tracing the different stages of his youth: skinhead, heroin addict, born-again Christian, skatepunk, acidhead, sous-chef. His latest “tat” was an almost photographic image of an Iraqi woman weeping over a skull.

Yet what struck me most was the battered Sesame Street Ernie doll that he’d sewn on the top of his backpack. It was meant to be goofy. But a flea-ridden high school dropout on food stamps tramping through the train yards with this remnant of his childhood was a little like thrusting a stuffed animal into a propeller blade.

Nirvana’s formula of Beatle-esque pop juxtaposed with bursts of harsh heavy metal captures the same dissonance. It recapitulates the violation of childhood innocence, the ultimate betrayal kids see in commercial culture, which promises Brady Bunch lives and gave them single-parent homes. The fact that this generation bought the Brady Bunch myth in the first place is testament to the totalitarian nature of commodity culture. Their dreams and desires have been manufactured and controlled at such an early age, they lack a clear sense of authentic experience. Perhaps that’s why the theme of child abuse is so engaging. It’s a visceral pain that adults produce but don’t control.

And it’s an accusation. In kids’ eyes, it’s the adults of America who are truly damaged. Their children are just collateral damage.

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Sarah Ferguson is a contributor to the Village Voice and is working on a book about street youth.

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