Nevermind, Girls

I just realized today that I have probably always thought never mind was one word because of Nirvana. I'm currently listening to their 1991 release, Nevermind, which I have never actually listened to in its entirety. The only Nirvana album I'm actually quite familiar with is Nirvana, a compilation of their greatest hits or best known songs or something, four of which come from Nevermind. I think I listened to it in junior high when I vaguely cared about music (and then in high school I got distracted by theatre or something).

A thunderstorm is currently raging outside my bedroom, rain banging on the windows and sliding down blurry glass. Thunder is rumbling aggressively across the empty fields of Illinois, and I saw a few cracks of lightning earlier. It's a good afternoon for reading, and I just finished a second read of Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a book I last read in the summer of 2009 (which, I think, is when I read everything he'd ever written with the exception of his one novel that I read last summer). This time through, I thought more and more about my affinity for 80s rock music - or, more specifically, metal. This genre is slangily and less-than-lovingly referred to as cock rock. The point, which I can't really argue with, is that all the music, and more importantly, the persona, the aesthetic of metal was about getting girls. Lots and lots of girls. Motley Crue in fact released an album entitled Girls, Girls, Girls. (The title song is still played on classic rock stations - at least the ones that lean more towards Van Halen and less towards Bruce Springsteen.)

Anyone who's met me knows I'm a feminist. I don't even really actively try to be, I just am. In the meeting I had with faculty after my first directing project, one of my teachers said it was definitely a "feminist take" on the play. I didn't do that on purpose, it just happened. So logic would dictate that I wouldn't be so into a genre that is almost exclusively about the masculine power to attract sexy playmates (and doing drugs).

But it's my favorite kind of music.

Klosterman argues that metal wasn't really about the song lyrics but the attitude. And while that may still have been about masculine power and attracting fuck buddies, it was also about being loud and fast and 100% whatever you were. Glam metal was the height of the constructed artistic image, but whatever a band was, if they were successful, it was because they were completely and utterly their aesthetic. And in the 80s, fans tended to hate it when their favorite bands strayed from whatever the expected image was. All this tangent is to say is I like loud, I like fast, and I'm all about being 100% whatever you are. That may seem a little off coming from someone who calls herself an actor/designer/director (not always in that order) but I'm 100% invested in doing anything that fulfills me artistically and allows me to create a gift for the audience, as big and bold as possible. I haven't figured out how to totally succeed yet, but I try as best I can.

I don't know much about music. I haven't taken any classes or studied music theory. All I really know about music I've learned from reading Klosterman's books and talking to my musically-oriented friends. Not much of it ever seems to stick, but I know what I like, even if I can't very articulately explain why. Recently I've done a lot of driving by myself in our 1996 used car which got renovated with a pretty decent sound system before we bought it. All week I've been listening to rock music really loudly. Louder than I ever can in my house or my dorm room or when I have headphones actually in my ears, because I sort of need my hearing. Car listening is awesome though, because you can feel the music while cruising down the highway. I don't think you're supposed to amp up the bass when listening to hard rock, but I do, because I went to a high school that only listened to R&B and rap, and I need bass in my system. Music sounds completely different when it's really loud. And I don't just mean it sounds louder. It sounds fiercer, stronger, meaner, more serious.

For the last several years, I've much preferred listening to music from before I was born to anything from the last decade. The first nine most-played songs on my iTunes are all 80s gems, starting with "Cum on Feel the Noize," "Any Way You Want It," and "Talk Dirty to Me." I'm unsure how "Don't Stop Believing" is only at number six. In any case, my musical tastes create the interesting game any time we're on a road trip of trying to find a good rock station as we drive across the country and in and out of range of major cities. Once you get out of range of Chicago, it's hard to find a good station anywhere in Indiana, eastern Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Georgia, or northern Florida. There's actually a good rock station that broadcasts out of somewhere near my grandma's house in southern Florida. Stations out of Cleveland and Akron, OH are not bad. The entirety of PA is a disaster because of mountains; we have to find a new station every twenty minutes, inevitably as soon as a Bon Jovi song comes on (which is almost always "Living on a Prayer" or "Wanted Dead or Alive"). Around home we've got the Drive, which is alright, but on the lighter side of "classic rock," and the Loop, which is my station of choice now that Jack FM is gone. Jack played almost exclusively songs I know and love, so of course it became an oldies station sometime between January and March. The Loop plays a fair amount of early 70s stuff I don't know, but also a lot of Pink Floyd, Van Halen, and Poison, so I don't complain.

At some point this all might have been leading to some philosophical point, given that Nirvana isn't even a metal band, but I got distracted by the rain for a while and forgot where I was going. In fact I think I might have even intended to talk about my brother's graduation (another post, I suppose), but maybe I just really wanted to talk about rock music. Probably. My love of major league baseball, specifically the White Sox, and my affinity for glam rock are the only things even slightly out of line with the rest of my personality. And I'll grant that the glam part makes sense. I blame Hedwig, but what else is new?