Is he still on Twitter? Maybe as a writer he should consider what it looks like when you whine over and over again that you're going to quit and then stick around.
"Remember what you felt before the internet installed a permanent self-surveillance system in your brain that subjected all those feelings to cross-examination."
For real. I think every single one of us misses those days.
That's why I like country music--No one has a permanent self-surveillance system about liking Johnny Cash. (maybe the surveillance doesn't know about him and Billy Graham).
The older I get, the more I realize that rumination on oneself is not a fundamentally healthy activity. To quote the Dowager Countess, "No life appears rewarding if you think about it too much."
A little rumination every now and then is fine, but the poison is in the dose. Nowadays, the internet is constantly yelling at you to "do better." And it's overwhelming.
Agreed, and I will clarify that I think self-awareness is a good and even necessary thing. Smartphones and social media push us towards self-absorption, which is corrosive and ultimately self-defeating.
This is where I hit diminishing returns with therapy -- it just made me focus more on myself and my problems. At some point the best thing to do about distressing emotions is to ignore them and focus on something outside yourself, whether that's helping other people, learning stuff, making stuff, etc.
Of course it can be hard to find the energy to do that when you are severely depressed, which is where therapy and medication can help. But we as a society spend way too much time trying to convince people to start these interventions and way too little talking about when and how to stop. Not everything needs to be "processed", not everyone needs to be in therapy forever, sometimes you just have to steer away from the parts of your life that are upsetting and towards the parts that are happy, and there's not really anyone else who can do that for you.
This is also the sentence that really sticks out of the essay to me. Great sentence. Interesting thought. The concept that people are subject to a permanent self-surveillance system is fascinating. I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for myself. I wonder how the other over 60s feel about it?
Is it my age, my personality, or simply my lack of need for social media in the places and doses that leaves me free of this.
To screen /edit/censor words or phrases you don't think appropriate is where I'm gonna go with this article. That's what struck me. Letting big brother deside what can be written what can be said what can be sung. No way Jose . We are not living in a democracy where free speach is denied. No filters please from government or social media companies....I'll be the filter......thanks
In 1993 when “I Hate Myself and Want to Die" was released, for example-- Toby Keith's, "Should've Been a Cowboy" became the most played song on country charts in the 1990s..
I've always thought the main appeal of Nirvana outside of very simple, extremely catchy songs was that they gave voice to feelings like this in a way that vast majority of pop art did not. The late 80s/early 90s was just as awash in fluffy, slickly produced pop music. Even metal, once a vehicle for emotions polite society mostly preferred to ignore, had turned into arena party rock. Arena party rock was fine, I've even learned to enjoy it as an adult, but it most certainly didn't represent what Nirvana did.
And it goes without saying that these feelings are extremely common given that Nirvana was one of the most successful rock bands in history. It worked even better because it always felt like Cobain really meant it, it wasn't just an act, wasn't some crass marketing scheme, that the music was him just giving voice to how he actually felt.
My husband is a few years older than me, 49 and he came to age as Nirvana was hitting the mainstream. The way he describes how earth shattering it was for him to hear music that expressed his pain and anger as a young man is really telling.
I think music today is closer to something like the 1950s, with pop singers , swing, and big bands dominating the charts. A fundamentally conservative ethos, at least in the cultural sense, everything carefully tailored to not alienate or offend potential customers. Not exactly that, trap music doesn't fit neatly into that characterization, but it's relatively close.
I was a teen in the early 80s listening to music in my room when my usually less-political-than-my-father, non-white mother abruptly opened my door to announce that whenever she could understand the lyrics to pop songs on the radio, she worried about the nation.
There are still great bands and songs out there - they just take more time to find. Especially since the record store as a gathering place has greatly diminished (if not fully disappeared.). Pandora and Apple Music have helped me find newer artists that bring it when it brings up songs “similar” to ones I’m listening to.
Oh for sure, I don't want this to turn into a "music is bad these days" conversation. I'm strictly talking about pop music, in which rock music (especially of the sort Nirvana played) no longer has even a minor place. Rock/Punk/Metal has gone back underground, which is both better and worse. I actually think it's been a banner year for extreme metal, death metal in particular, but I have an eclectic taste in music. These bands are operating completely outside the boundaries of good taste, let alone mainstream sensibility though.
I don’t have a room so dark in my head, wish you didn’t either. I appreciate the courage with which you live your live, I hope you can find meaning beyond this life.
While I think that Swiftie tier poptimism no doubt has center stage in the American cultural landscape, I think that there is a good deal of extremely popular teenage angst music as well.
Sure Taylor Swift has 100+ million listeners on Spotify, but Lil Peep, JuiceWRLD and XXXTentacion have all been dead for years, yet each still have 15m, 30m and 37m listeners respectively.
Platforms like Soundcloud have let a lot of teenagers unleash a lot of classic angst, despair and rage. I-hate-myself-and-I-want-to-die music doesn't get the same level of attention that it did at grunge peak, but it's close. Close enough, I think, that it could conceivably reclaim the throne in the next couple years.
I'm not a huge fan of Nirvana, but I will acknowledge that Kurt Cobain seemed like a legitimately miserable and angry person in severe psychic distress, and that this was abundantly obvious for years prior to his suicide.
I'd tend to give more benefit of the doubt when the person in question a.) had substance abuse problems b.) wrote consistently about those addictions c.) died as a result of those additions.
Plus the whole getting "I'm sad" tattooed on the face and the like. Of course it could be a part of carefully crafted persona. But when a person has a sad catalog, dresses sad, says they're sad, and has a raging drug habit, I tend to think that they might actually just be sad.
I spent a year listening to Taylor Swift music with a traumatized daughter who was recovering from a two year abusive relationship. The music really helped her process the situation.
I often believe the reason that modern teenagers threaten suicide so much is because we've drilled suicide into their heads and its the only way they can express their normal emotions.
At any rate, I can be extremely happy and still listen to Elliot Smith and allow myself to feel all the emotions, I highly recommend young people start listening to sad music and never stop. It doesn't have to be all sad but man, sad music speaks to your soul on a deeply personal level.
I really like this piece; it's a thoughtful articulation of what I think Freud was trying to get at with his idea of thanatos as one of the two basic human motives. But I can't help but note one thing: I just fundamentally disagree with you that it is impossible to suffer nobly. I have seen people do it (check out Nick Cave, for example), and I am trying to do it myself, albeit with varying degrees of success. Sometimes you fail to recognize our human capacity to transcend ourselves, even if only for moments at a time.
Funny, only the night before last I was gushing about "Everytime" and how underrated it is. Has another pop singer in her prime ever released such a starkly morbid single?
Reading her recent book it's also obvious that she was really feeling pretty terrible during the time it was released (well and a lot before and since). It has an authenticity that most of us, if anyone, had any idea about at the time.
Amazing. I've also muttered this phrase under my breath since I was a teenage boy in the 90s - at least daily for a while. Far less often now, but it still comes to mind occasionally. I knew it was a Nirvana song, but somehow never bothered to listen to it until now - the song is besides the point.
I'll have to re-read the article once I can move past my astonishment that I'm not the only person on earth who's grabbed onto this obscure-ish song title and held is close as a bad-day mantra for 25+ years.
The music angle is great as an entry point for discussion, as the comments already show. Having awoken to pop music at the exact moment punk/ new wave sprouted - and a bit later by a couple years than many of my peers - the vibe was different and as outward as inward in its POV. Nirvana was still always off, but contempt for vapid AOR, corp-rock, disco and lite pop was a major element that appealed to the typical fan. It didn’t take long for romantic self- destruction to insert itself into the picture (think Sid Vicious). And that was quite sobering. Reggaeton and its life-affirming qualities were an alternative. And I got into Toots and the Maytals. Years later my son turned 20 and we got a few seconds to dance onstage at a small venue next to Toots. That was 14 years ago and COVID has taken Toots Hibbert (& John Prine, damnit) but I’ll die grateful for that moment.
"You like one thing or one set of things and it leads you to other things and in time your tastes develop and you move on from what you liked."
I read a good paper a few years back arguing that THIS is the real message of Nietzsche's call for "amor fati." It is not, as commonly suggested, a call to live a life that is so bursting at the seams with rich and interesting experiences that we couldn't possibly wish it any different. It is a recognition that if we truly respect the perspective we have at the moment, then we couldn't possibly wish our fates to be any different, because it would not have led us to where we currently are. So that a commitment to loving one's fate is loving the path we've already traveled.
Yes, it was from Alexander Nehamas's "Nietzsche: Life as Literature." Chapter 5, to be exact. I usually don't love secondary sources, but Nietzsche is so darn slippery (mostly on purpose), and I thought this was good.
For me it's "slit your wrists and kill yourself." I think I picked it up in university when I was having a bad time. I still say it ten years later. For the life of me I cannot find the recovery, nor beauty, not stoicism in it, nor understand why anyone would set it to music or find it endearing. It is something that I deeply wish I did not have.
(Note I am not at imminent risk of suicide, self-harm, etc.)
I find Stephen King's bibliography extremely variable in quality and his social media presence absolutely insufferable.
King's greatest talent is as a movie scenarist.
So he's the Disney of horror writers?
It's called the "lowest common denominator" for a reason.
Is he still on Twitter? Maybe as a writer he should consider what it looks like when you whine over and over again that you're going to quit and then stick around.
"Remember what you felt before the internet installed a permanent self-surveillance system in your brain that subjected all those feelings to cross-examination."
For real. I think every single one of us misses those days.
That's why I like country music--No one has a permanent self-surveillance system about liking Johnny Cash. (maybe the surveillance doesn't know about him and Billy Graham).
The older I get, the more I realize that rumination on oneself is not a fundamentally healthy activity. To quote the Dowager Countess, "No life appears rewarding if you think about it too much."
A little rumination every now and then is fine, but the poison is in the dose. Nowadays, the internet is constantly yelling at you to "do better." And it's overwhelming.
Agreed, and I will clarify that I think self-awareness is a good and even necessary thing. Smartphones and social media push us towards self-absorption, which is corrosive and ultimately self-defeating.
This is where I hit diminishing returns with therapy -- it just made me focus more on myself and my problems. At some point the best thing to do about distressing emotions is to ignore them and focus on something outside yourself, whether that's helping other people, learning stuff, making stuff, etc.
Of course it can be hard to find the energy to do that when you are severely depressed, which is where therapy and medication can help. But we as a society spend way too much time trying to convince people to start these interventions and way too little talking about when and how to stop. Not everything needs to be "processed", not everyone needs to be in therapy forever, sometimes you just have to steer away from the parts of your life that are upsetting and towards the parts that are happy, and there's not really anyone else who can do that for you.
This is also the sentence that really sticks out of the essay to me. Great sentence. Interesting thought. The concept that people are subject to a permanent self-surveillance system is fascinating. I think it's true for a lot of people, but not for myself. I wonder how the other over 60s feel about it?
Is it my age, my personality, or simply my lack of need for social media in the places and doses that leaves me free of this.
To screen /edit/censor words or phrases you don't think appropriate is where I'm gonna go with this article. That's what struck me. Letting big brother deside what can be written what can be said what can be sung. No way Jose . We are not living in a democracy where free speach is denied. No filters please from government or social media companies....I'll be the filter......thanks
By turns morbid and hopeful. A perfect essay to wake up to on a cold Monday in December.
There is a parallel universe of U.S. music.
In 1993 when “I Hate Myself and Want to Die" was released, for example-- Toby Keith's, "Should've Been a Cowboy" became the most played song on country charts in the 1990s..
It is still played at Oklahoma games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIq1LvzSLsk
I've always thought the main appeal of Nirvana outside of very simple, extremely catchy songs was that they gave voice to feelings like this in a way that vast majority of pop art did not. The late 80s/early 90s was just as awash in fluffy, slickly produced pop music. Even metal, once a vehicle for emotions polite society mostly preferred to ignore, had turned into arena party rock. Arena party rock was fine, I've even learned to enjoy it as an adult, but it most certainly didn't represent what Nirvana did.
And it goes without saying that these feelings are extremely common given that Nirvana was one of the most successful rock bands in history. It worked even better because it always felt like Cobain really meant it, it wasn't just an act, wasn't some crass marketing scheme, that the music was him just giving voice to how he actually felt.
My husband is a few years older than me, 49 and he came to age as Nirvana was hitting the mainstream. The way he describes how earth shattering it was for him to hear music that expressed his pain and anger as a young man is really telling.
Well also, Nirvana rocks. Like, really rocks.
I listen to the radio these days and I'm sad that rock is effectively dead. Yeah, I know I sound like an old codger.
I think music today is closer to something like the 1950s, with pop singers , swing, and big bands dominating the charts. A fundamentally conservative ethos, at least in the cultural sense, everything carefully tailored to not alienate or offend potential customers. Not exactly that, trap music doesn't fit neatly into that characterization, but it's relatively close.
Totally. I also think there is an bigger emphasis on dancing, rather than the music itself, which... OK. I'll allow it.
I was a teen in the early 80s listening to music in my room when my usually less-political-than-my-father, non-white mother abruptly opened my door to announce that whenever she could understand the lyrics to pop songs on the radio, she worried about the nation.
There are still great bands and songs out there - they just take more time to find. Especially since the record store as a gathering place has greatly diminished (if not fully disappeared.). Pandora and Apple Music have helped me find newer artists that bring it when it brings up songs “similar” to ones I’m listening to.
Oh for sure, I don't want this to turn into a "music is bad these days" conversation. I'm strictly talking about pop music, in which rock music (especially of the sort Nirvana played) no longer has even a minor place. Rock/Punk/Metal has gone back underground, which is both better and worse. I actually think it's been a banner year for extreme metal, death metal in particular, but I have an eclectic taste in music. These bands are operating completely outside the boundaries of good taste, let alone mainstream sensibility though.
Yeah. Alice in Chains tackles a lot of the same territory and are still going, a niche group followed by a few of us old white guys.
The most annoying comment ever, sorry, but: I love them and I’m no old white guy 🙂
I don’t have a room so dark in my head, wish you didn’t either. I appreciate the courage with which you live your live, I hope you can find meaning beyond this life.
While I think that Swiftie tier poptimism no doubt has center stage in the American cultural landscape, I think that there is a good deal of extremely popular teenage angst music as well.
Sure Taylor Swift has 100+ million listeners on Spotify, but Lil Peep, JuiceWRLD and XXXTentacion have all been dead for years, yet each still have 15m, 30m and 37m listeners respectively.
Platforms like Soundcloud have let a lot of teenagers unleash a lot of classic angst, despair and rage. I-hate-myself-and-I-want-to-die music doesn't get the same level of attention that it did at grunge peak, but it's close. Close enough, I think, that it could conceivably reclaim the throne in the next couple years.
I'm not a huge fan of Nirvana, but I will acknowledge that Kurt Cobain seemed like a legitimately miserable and angry person in severe psychic distress, and that this was abundantly obvious for years prior to his suicide.
These emo rappers, by contrast, always seem(ed) so inauthentic to me. Lil Peep's brother acknowledged that his whole sadboi thing was a bit of a stage persona (https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/lil-peep-death-brother-accident-8039448/).
Maybe.
I'd tend to give more benefit of the doubt when the person in question a.) had substance abuse problems b.) wrote consistently about those addictions c.) died as a result of those additions.
Plus the whole getting "I'm sad" tattooed on the face and the like. Of course it could be a part of carefully crafted persona. But when a person has a sad catalog, dresses sad, says they're sad, and has a raging drug habit, I tend to think that they might actually just be sad.
I spent a year listening to Taylor Swift music with a traumatized daughter who was recovering from a two year abusive relationship. The music really helped her process the situation.
I often believe the reason that modern teenagers threaten suicide so much is because we've drilled suicide into their heads and its the only way they can express their normal emotions.
At any rate, I can be extremely happy and still listen to Elliot Smith and allow myself to feel all the emotions, I highly recommend young people start listening to sad music and never stop. It doesn't have to be all sad but man, sad music speaks to your soul on a deeply personal level.
Late to the party I know, but hey I'm a new subscriber!
I've always lived this weird juxtaposition of being an almost annoyingly positive and happy person that listens to mostly really sad music!
Youth, the endearing idiot! Yes, this is wonderful, it makes me smile upon all history.
I really like this piece; it's a thoughtful articulation of what I think Freud was trying to get at with his idea of thanatos as one of the two basic human motives. But I can't help but note one thing: I just fundamentally disagree with you that it is impossible to suffer nobly. I have seen people do it (check out Nick Cave, for example), and I am trying to do it myself, albeit with varying degrees of success. Sometimes you fail to recognize our human capacity to transcend ourselves, even if only for moments at a time.
Funny, only the night before last I was gushing about "Everytime" and how underrated it is. Has another pop singer in her prime ever released such a starkly morbid single?
Reading her recent book it's also obvious that she was really feeling pretty terrible during the time it was released (well and a lot before and since). It has an authenticity that most of us, if anyone, had any idea about at the time.
Amazing. I've also muttered this phrase under my breath since I was a teenage boy in the 90s - at least daily for a while. Far less often now, but it still comes to mind occasionally. I knew it was a Nirvana song, but somehow never bothered to listen to it until now - the song is besides the point.
I'll have to re-read the article once I can move past my astonishment that I'm not the only person on earth who's grabbed onto this obscure-ish song title and held is close as a bad-day mantra for 25+ years.
The music angle is great as an entry point for discussion, as the comments already show. Having awoken to pop music at the exact moment punk/ new wave sprouted - and a bit later by a couple years than many of my peers - the vibe was different and as outward as inward in its POV. Nirvana was still always off, but contempt for vapid AOR, corp-rock, disco and lite pop was a major element that appealed to the typical fan. It didn’t take long for romantic self- destruction to insert itself into the picture (think Sid Vicious). And that was quite sobering. Reggaeton and its life-affirming qualities were an alternative. And I got into Toots and the Maytals. Years later my son turned 20 and we got a few seconds to dance onstage at a small venue next to Toots. That was 14 years ago and COVID has taken Toots Hibbert (& John Prine, damnit) but I’ll die grateful for that moment.
I stand autocorrected: reggae not “-ton”, etc
"You like one thing or one set of things and it leads you to other things and in time your tastes develop and you move on from what you liked."
I read a good paper a few years back arguing that THIS is the real message of Nietzsche's call for "amor fati." It is not, as commonly suggested, a call to live a life that is so bursting at the seams with rich and interesting experiences that we couldn't possibly wish it any different. It is a recognition that if we truly respect the perspective we have at the moment, then we couldn't possibly wish our fates to be any different, because it would not have led us to where we currently are. So that a commitment to loving one's fate is loving the path we've already traveled.
Curious if you remember where you read that?
Yes, it was from Alexander Nehamas's "Nietzsche: Life as Literature." Chapter 5, to be exact. I usually don't love secondary sources, but Nietzsche is so darn slippery (mostly on purpose), and I thought this was good.
Awesome! Thank you so much — will look for it!
For me it's "slit your wrists and kill yourself." I think I picked it up in university when I was having a bad time. I still say it ten years later. For the life of me I cannot find the recovery, nor beauty, not stoicism in it, nor understand why anyone would set it to music or find it endearing. It is something that I deeply wish I did not have.
(Note I am not at imminent risk of suicide, self-harm, etc.)