Although I’m not sure which one it’s unfair to. I feel sorry for both of them. I can see it both ways. That’s my problem.
5A Before he was a generational voice and flannel advocate, Cobain was a pretend roadie for the Melvins, a band who used to penalize festival audiences by crushing them with avalanches of tuneless, high-volume feedback. I experienced this at Ozzfest in 1998, inside the Akron Rubber Bowl, under a 102-degree sun; the sound of dying rabbits might not have been preferable, but it could not have been any worse. Still, it’s easy to understand why someone like Cobain (or anyone else) would be drawn to the Melvins: They are more honest than virtually any band I can think of.
“I know what rock ’n’ roll is about,” Melvins guitarist King Buzzo once said in an interview for Croatian television. “Most of it’s a bunch of greedy, drug-taking monsters. Whoremongering drug addicts that are probably no good for anybody, generally speaking.”
This is the mentality the young Cobain hoped to emulate. It was an aesthetic that ultimately proved impossible to adopt, simply because Nirvana got too big to make such contempt sincere. But Cobain still wanted to think this way about “mainstream rock,” and he wanted his audience to think this way, too. He wanted to play music for people who had King Buzzo’s world-view. He wanted to make Nirvana culture a hermetic culture; he wanted it to be insular and manageable and uncompromised. His strategy was to destroy a sector of his audience by making a record that a person who thought like King Buzzo would appreciate but a person who thought like Billy Corgan would find boring. And this was never going to work. It was never going to work because the sector of the audience Cobain hoped to alienate did not really care what In Utero sounded like. What Cobain failed to accept is that there is nothing that “sounds mainstream” to mainstream listeners. Music critics have an inflexible description of what mainstream music sounds like, but music consumers do not; to the consumer, the definition of mainstream is whatever everyone else is listening to. In 1993, “mainstream rock” was Nirvana, regardless of their style or intention. The sonic dimensions were a minor detail. Had In Utero sounded like Stoner Witch, it still would have gone multiplatinum.
Conversely, the Branch Davidians were able to construct a hermetic culture: In 1955, they were able to contract a smaller sect of hard-core cultists from the Seventh-Day Adventists, and Koresh splintered that population into an even smaller group of “Seven Seals” scholars during the 1980s. What Koresh did accept (but failed to fully grasp) was that there is something called “living mainstream,” and that all mainstream livers are unyielding about what that concept is supposed to denote. Anyone who chooses to live in a manner that contradicts this concept is never going to get sympathy from anyone. This is not to say that average people will want you to die for having radical views, nor does it mean that living in a fucked-up compound with fifteen wives is merely “different” than living in a three-bedroom house in suburban Houston. But it does mean that if the government needlessly decides to attack your home with tanks, the rest of the world is going to assume you must have deserved it. If you openly admit that you’re waiting for the world to end in fire, no one will take your side when somebody makes that happen. They will insist you should be happy about getting your wish. And maybe that’s true; maybe what happened to the Branch Davidians on April 19 only proved their vision was always correct. They insulated their doomsday society enough to make it the totality of their world, and that world was, in fact, coming to an end.
So in this one way, I suppose, Cobain and Koresh are very different. The former failed at his attempt to separate his true followers from the rest of America, and he destroyed himself for that failure. The latter was destroyed by others for succeeding at the same goal.
It’s fascinating and stupid to watch adults destroy things on purpose.
1B When Nirvana toured England in the fall of 1990, people told them not to demolish themselves. Melvins drummer Dale Crover was serving as the band’s temporary percussionist (this was before Dave Grohl joined the band), and he made Nirvana sign a contract that barred any member of the band from jumping into his drum kit or smashing equipment onstage. Crover’s argument, in short, was that destroying one’s own set was fucking boring. The group complied.
When Nirvana made In Utero in spring of ’93, everyone they knew told them not to demolish themselves. All they had to do was make a record. Any record would do. Whatever they produced would be exactly what the world wanted. But that was only true as long as nobody believed they cared; the reason America loved Nirvana was because they were convinced that Nirvana did not need their love. And that was not the case. Nirvana did need love, and that was Kurt Cobain’s shame. So how do you make a record for people who want you to prove that you don’t care how much they enjoy it? By making it sound “bad.” You make it sound a little great, but you also make it sound a little bad. Because then everyone is happy, except for the alleged genius writing all the songs.
The world was ending. It was. It was ending in dissonance and it was ending in fire, and the vocals would be low in the mix. Besides, there is nothing worse than calling someone a cult leader. People like that don’t deserve to live.
Q: Do you have any celebrity friends?
A: Not really. I’ve met a few semi-famous people, but nobody outstanding.
Q: Like who?
A: I met Delta Burke at a charity event. I met Jesse Eisenberg in Jamaica. I used to know a guy who looked like James iha, but I suppose that doesn’t count. I also met M. Night Shyamalan.
Q: What was that like?
A: Pretty interesting. He’s actually a white guy from Canada.
Q: He is?
A: yeah. That’s the twist ending.
Tomorrow Rarely Knows
1 It was the 1990s and I was twenty, so we had arguments like this: What, ultimately, is more plausible—time travel, or the invention of a liquid metal with the capacity to think? You will not be surprised that Terminator 2 was central to this dialogue. There were a lot of debates over this movie. The details of the narrative never made sense. Why, for example, did Edward Furlong tell Arnold that he should quip, “Hasta la vista, baby,” whenever he killed people? Wasn’t this kid supposed to like Use Your Illusion II more than Lō-c-ed After Dark? It was a problem. But not as much of a problem as the concept of humans (and machines) moving through time, even when compared to the likelihood of a pool of sentient mercury that could morph itself into a cop or a steel spike or a brick wall or an actor who would eventually disappoint watchers of The X-Files. My thesis at the time (and to this day) was that the impossibility of time travel is a cornerstone of reality: We cannot move forward or backward through time, even if the principles of general relativity and time dilation suggest that this is possible. Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water). My sense of the world tells me otherwise. I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed. So even though the prospect of liquid thinking metal is insane and idiotic, it’s still more viable than time travel. I don’t know if the thinking metal of tomorrow will have the potential to find employment as Linda Hamilton’s assassin, but I do know that those liquid-metal killing machines will be locked into whatever moment they happen to inhabit.
It would be wonderful if someone proved me wrong about this. Wonderful. Wonderful, and sad.
2 I read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine in 1984. It became my favorite novel for the next two years, but solely for textual reasons: I saw no metaphorical meaning in the narrative. It was nothing except plot, because I was a fucking sixth grader. I reread The Time Machine as a thirty
-six-year-old in 2008, and it was (predictably) a wholly different novel that now seemed fixated on archaic views about labor relations and class dynamics, narrated by a protagonist who is completely unlikable. This is a trend with much of Wells’s sci-fi writing from this period; I reread The Invisible Man around the same time, a book that now seems maniacally preoccupied with illustrating how the invisible man was an asshole.
Part of the weirdness surrounding my reinvestigation of The Time Machine was because my paperback copy included a new afterword (written by Paul Youngquist) that described Wells as an egomaniac who attacked every person and entity he encountered throughout his entire lifetime, often contradicting whatever previous attack he had made only days before. He publicly responded to all perceived slights levied against him, constantly sparring with his nemesis Henry James and once sending an angry, scatological letter to George Orwell (written after Orwell had seemingly given him a compliment). He really hated Winston Churchill, too. H. G. Wells managed to write four million words of fiction and eight million words of journalism over the course of his lifetime, but modern audiences remember him exclusively for his first four sci-fi novels (and they don’t remember him that fondly). He is not a canonical writer and maybe not even a great one. However, his influence remains massive. Like the tone of Keith Richards’s guitar or Snidely Whiplash’s mustache, Wells galvanized a universal cliché—and that is just about the rarest thing any artist can do.
The cliché that Wells popularized was not the fictional notion of time travel, because that had been around since the sixteenth century (the oldest instance is probably a 1733 Irish novel by Samuel Madden called Memoirs of the Twentieth Century). Mark Twain reversed the premise in 1889’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There’s even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports. But in all of those examples, time travel just sort of happens inexplicably—a person exists in one moment, and then they’re transposed to another. The meaningful cliché Wells introduced was the machine, and that changed everything. Prior to the advent of Wells’s imaginary instrument, traveling through time generally meant the central character was lost in time, which wasn’t dramatically different from being lost geographically. But a machine gave the protagonist agency. The time traveler was now moving forward or backward on purpose; consequently, the time traveler now needed a motive for doing so. And that question, I suspect, is the core reason why narratives about time travel are almost always interesting, no matter how often the same basic story is retold and repackaged: If time travel was possible, why would we want to do it?
Now, I will concede that there’s an inherent goofballedness in debating the ethics of an action that is impossible. It probably isn’t that different than trying to figure out if leprechauns have high cholesterol. But all philosophical questions are ultimately like this—by necessity, they deal with hypotheticals that are unfeasible. Real-world problems are inevitably too unique and too situational; people will always see any real-world problem through the prism of their own personal experience. The only massive ideas everyone can discuss rationally are big ideas that don’t specifically apply to anyone, which is why a debate over the ethics of time travel is worthwhile: No one has any personal investment whatsoever. It’s only theoretical. Which means no one has any reason to lie.
2A Fictionalized motives for time travel generally operate like this: Characters go back in time to fix a mistake or change the conditions of the present (this is like Back to the Future). Characters go forward in time for personal gain (this is like the gambling subplot1 of Back to the Future Part II). Jack the Ripper used H. G. Wells’s time machine to kill citizens of the seventies in Time After Time, but this was an isolated (and poorly acted) rampage. Obviously, there is always the issue of scientific inquiry with any movement through time, but that motive matters less; if a time traveler’s purpose is simply to learn things that are unknown, it doesn’t make moving through time any different than exploring Skull Island or going to Mars. My interest is in the explicit benefits of being transported to a different moment in existence—what that would mean morally and how the traveler’s goals (whatever they may be) could be implemented successfully.
Here’s a question I like to ask people when I’m ⅝ drunk: Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen-year-old version of you. However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds. As such, there’s no way you will be able to explain who you are, where or when you’re calling from, or what any of this lunacy is supposed to signify. You will only be able to give the younger version of yourself a fleeting, abstract message of unclear origin.
What would you say to yourself during these fifteen seconds?
From a sociological standpoint, what I find most interesting about this query is the way it inevitably splits between gender lines: Women usually advise themselves not to do something they now regret (i.e., “Don’t sleep with Corey McDonald, no matter how much he pressures you”), while men almost always instruct themselves to do something they failed to attempt (i.e., “Punch Corey McDonald in the face, you gutless coward”). But from a more practical standpoint, the thing I’ve come to realize is that virtually no one has any idea how to utilize such an opportunity, even if it were possible. If you can’t directly explain that you’re talking from the future, any prescient message becomes worthless. All advice comes across like a drunk dialer reading a fortune cookie. One person answered my question by claiming he would tell the 1985 incarnation of himself to “Invest in Google.” That sounds smart, but I can’t imagine a phrase that would have been more useless to me as a teenager in 1985. I would have spent the entire evening wondering how it would be possible to invest money into the number 1 with one hundred zeros behind it.
It doesn’t matter what you can do if you don’t know why you’re doing it.
2B I’ve now typed fifteen hundred words about time travel, which means I’ve reached the point where everything becomes a problem for everybody.
This is the point where we need to address the philosophical dilemmas embedded in any casual discussions about time travel, real or imagined. And there are a lot of them. And I don’t understand about 64 percent of them. And the 36 percent I do understand are pretty elementary to everyone, including the substantial chunk of consumers who are very high and watching Anna Faris movies while they read this. But here we go! I will start with the most unavoidable eight:
1. If you change any detail about the past, you might accidentally destroy everything in present-day existence. This is why every movie about time travel makes a big, obvious point about not bringing anything from the present back in time, often illustrated by forcing the fictionalized time traveler to travel nude. If you went back to 60,000 BC with a tool box and absentmindedly left the vise grip behind, it’s entirely possible that the world would technologically advance at an exponential rate and destroy itself by the sixteenth century.2 Or so I’m told.
2. If you went back in time to accomplish a specific goal (and you succeeded at this goal), there would be no reason for you to have traveled back in time in the first place. Let’s say you built a time machine in order to murder the proverbial “Baby Hitler” in 1889. Committing that murder would mean the Holocaust never happened. And that would mean you’d have no motive for going back in time in the first place, because the tyrannical Adolf Hitler—the one you despise— would not exist. In other words, any goal achieved through time travel would eliminate the necessity for the traveler to travel. In his fictional (and pathologically grotesque) oral history Rant, author Chuck Palahniuk refers to this impasse as the Godfather Paradox: “The idea that if one could travel backward in time, one could kill one’s own ancestor, eliminating the possibility said time traveler would ever be born—and thus could never have lived to travel bac
k and commit the murder.” The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously (sort of how Richard Linklater describes The Wizard of Oz to an uninterested cab driver in the opening sequence of Slacker). However, this solution is actually more insane than the original problem. The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heart-throb Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault. More important, his decision to die early stops his adolescence from becoming symbolized by the music of Tears for Fears.
3. A loop in time eliminates the origin of things that already exist. This is something called “the Bootstrap Paradox” (in reference to the Robert Heinlein story “By His Bootstraps”). It’s probably best described by David Toomey, the author of a book called The New Time Travelers (a principal influence on season five of Lost). Toomey uses Hamlet as an example: Let’s suppose Toomey finds a copy of Hamlet in a used-book store, builds a time machine, travels back to 1601, and gives the book to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare then copies the play in his own handwriting and claims he made it up. It’s recopied and republished countless times for hundreds of years, eventually ending up in the bookstore where Toomey shops. So who wrote the play? Shakespeare didn’t. Another example occurs near the end of Back to the Future: Michael J. Fox performs “Johnny B. Goode” at the school dance and the tune is transmitted over the telephone to Chuck Berry3 (who presumably stole it). In this reality, where does the song come from? Who deserves the song-writing royalties?