Happy Friday! Come on down to the Panda Party and help us get through another Friday during this holiday season with some tunes. 'tis the season for coworkers to show up hungover more regularly and end of the year best-of lists. I'm always tempted to make my own, but the guys at Sound Opinions had a pretty damn solid one, so I'm linking theirs instead. Both had #1 bands that I saw at SXSW and was duly impressed by and do, in fact, think had records that qualify as #1. So here's a sample, but come in to Panda Party, and share your own.
It's Friday, and it's been a crazy week for feminists especially, so we really need a Panda Party. Show up! Play tunes! Make the work day more pleasant going into the weekend! Bitch about politics in chat! Do your thing! At the Panda Party! Here is a post-punk girl band I like, because they really like the bass guitar!
I'm leaving for Missouri late this afternoon for Skepticon, but until then, I'm totally down to Panda Party. For a lot of us, it's been an emotionally wrenching week as things escalate with Occupy Wall St., so we need to listen to some tunes and have a little Friday fun to get ready for the weekend more than ever. So hop on in to Panda Party. In honor of my trip to Missouri, a song by St. Louis native Ann Peebles:
I really appreciated the humor and insight of this piece from Cord Jefferson on how he got it into his head that Community is a popular show, and so, even though he had never seen it, was as surprised as anyone at its sudden hiatus and no doubt cancellation. He points out that his online networks were positively obsessive about Community, giving him the impression that it's a big hit show, when it was turning over bad ratings for a network sitcom. He proposes a couple of reasons this might be that don't make sense at all---floating improbable reasons such as torrenting and there being some people who don't use the internet much but who watch TV---before settling on what I think is the sole reason that this happened to him:
While technology allows us to access news and opinions from hundreds of millions of diverse people around the world, the reality is that we cull our Twitter and Tumblr groups to match our sensibilities, just as we do with our offline friends. Many of the people I intentionally follow online like Community, and I made the mistake of assuming that my Twitter and Tumblr associates were a cross-section of America. Offline I'd never dare think that what my friends and I like is representative of everyone else's preferences. But on the internet, we've convinced ourselves we're seeing the world, while actually seeing tiny subcultures we've created around the same biases and preferences we have offline.
That last bit caused a small butthurt reaction in me---who are you calling "we", dude?---but I squelched because my life resolution is not to imitate the tedious culture of butthurtness of the internet that makes it hard to sift out legitimate criticism. It's clear that "we" is a rhetorical device, and a useful one at that, because he's probably right that this wasn't a minor brainfart of his, but a human tendency. I'd also point out that Cord may not make this assumption based off his real life friends, but that's more common than you'd think, as well. It's the "everyone else is just like me (and my friends)" phenomenon. I see it a lot when I'm blogging. I could write something like, "Women are generally socialized to be excessively apologetic", and I'm going to get a bunch of comments from women protesting, saying, "But I'm not!", not considering the possibility slightly that they could be an outlier. I can't really account for how hard it is for people in general to gauge where their tendencies or opinions fit on a spectrum, but it is a real phenomenon, and I can see how the internet makes it worse.
So I'm pretty sure I'm somewhat unusual in that I didn't really relate to this piece, not because it isn't true---it is!---but because I'm probably a weirdo. I not only don't think my tastes are an indicator of broader American tastes, I'm fairly convinced that if I like something, the majority of Americans don't. I call it the "mediocrity rules" phenomenon, after the kickass Le Tigre song that perfectly describes it, right down to the incuriosity and outright fear of difference that keeps most people preferring the safe and uninteresting to the daring and truly creative. There are exceptions to every rule, but in general, being truly interesting requires taking risks, and most people are risk-averse, especially when it comes to entertainment, which they look to as a way to soothe instead of challenge themselves. I mean, I look to it to be soothing, too, but since I have a weird personality, pablum gives me gas, so it's not soothing at all. I'm not alone in this, but those of us who enjoy a little riskiness in our entertainment are simply less common than those who don't.
This is how it just is, and until a few years ago, this was never presented to me as a problem, not really. I mean, I had a kid snarl at me in high school that I was a "New Waver", which didn't hurt my feelings so much as make me wonder how someone who was probably born in '79 or '80 and found anything that had even a whiff of hipness to it alienating learned that term and used it in 1994. But in recent years, I've felt a shift in the zeitgeist. It's just a hunch, but it feels like the belief that mediocrity, by dint of being "populist", is somehow more pure and honorable for it. Terms like "elitist", "snob", and the dreaded "hipster" are flung around with zeal. I suppose that was always true, but now people who do that aren't just implying that you're a weirdo for having certain tastes, but that you're somehow morally inferior because you aren't one with the people or some such crap like that. It seems that mediocrity is literally beginning to rule. This Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal piece on excreable Lana Del Rey is a good example; it's all sneer at "hipsters" for disliking Del Ray for being "inauthentic", as if there's a monolithic hipster view of authenticity and monolithic hipster hatred of pop music, both of which are easily disproved by a trot through the various rock clubs of Williamsburg that feature more than their fair share of gleeful love of pop-ness as a concept. Could it just be that Del Rey sucks? Not all pop music sucks; I hardly imagine you'll meet many hipsters who denounce Prince simply because he's pop. It is true that there's a streak in indie rock of mistaking quiet for quality and earthy for deep, but it's a little more complex of a problem than simple rejection of anything "pop", nor is it a monolithic tendency. Some music snobs (*cough*) dislike that trend strongly, but we're not going to conflate it with old-fashioned elitism, which still has value. If anything, a lot of it is less elitist, more like making indie music for people who stopped caring when they had kids. Elevating something as better for garnering mass appeal by being mediocre pablum isn't any better than disliking something just because it's popular, and it may be worse in a way because you have to endure a lot of stuff that just sucks.
Or maybe I'm overreacting to a tendency that's simply common on the internet, where a few loudmouths who have a vendetta against the risky, the cool, and the bohemian have had an outsized effect on the conversation and caused everyone to tiptoe around the commonly accepted idea that white bread is an insult for a reason.
Anywhere, here's hoping that "Community", a show that has really been fun to watch take a number of risks without a net, at least gets to finish out this season in style instead of simply being yanked without any kind of closure, as Britta might say.
Whatever intrepid Tumblr maven is behind The Kitten Covers is now my new hero. They should come party with us in the Panda Party. For those who haven't come yet, Panda Party is our once-a-week jam where we let the steam out at Turntable by playing songs, usually adhering to an hourly theme. It's a great way to welcome the weekend.
As is this Tumblr. Just for doing shit like this:
I'm going to have to make up a theme to celebrate the awesomeness of this.
This kitten really has a great Joan Jett impression:
Unilever accompanied roughly 100 males (identical studies were later carried out across other European countries, North America, and Latin America) ages 15 to 50 to the pubs until three or four in the morning and (soberly, while secretly taking copious notes) watched them in action. After poring over their pages and pages of notes, via a process known in the industry as "segmentation," the Unilever team isolated six psychological profiles of the male animal -- and the potential Axe user: the Predator, the Natural Talent, the Marriage-Material Guy, Always the Friend, the Insecure Novice, and the Enthusiastic Novice......
So with the Insecure Novice as the primary target, Axe came up with a series of 30-second TV commercials that preyed on what its research had revealed to be the ultimate male fantasy: to be irresistible to not just one but several sexy women.
Axe may have been trying to rope all sorts of insecure dudes, but what they ended up getting, as you can imagine, are Nice Guys®. After all, insecure guys who are actually nice and/or intelligent don't see women primarily as unfortunate obstacles between them and vaginas. The Axe customer views women in the same way they view that really unpleasant level in a video game that you have to finish to get to the fun level, and so they're constantly looking for cheat codes. The notion that flirting, dating, even---god forbid---getting to know a woman could be pleasant in and of itself is something they simply can't fathom. And so as ludicrous as Axe's claims were that their product was essentially a cheat code that made it possible for men to skip the process of speaking to women, flirting with women, and being charming to women, douchebags believed it. They needed to believe it. And Axe paid the price.
However, the brand's early success soon began to backfire. The problem was, the ads had worked too well in persuading the Insecure Novices and Enthusiastic Novices to buy the product. Geeks and dorks everywhere were now buying Axe by the caseload, and it was hurting the brand's image. Eventually (in the United States, at least), to most high-school and college-age males, Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers and, not surprisingly, sales took a huge hit.
Anyone who has ever blogged about Axe's stupid commercials can attest to this. Posting on it inevitably draws comments from douchebags who swear it works, because of pheromones or whatnot. You would think their own personal experience would dissuade them of this notion, but no.
So, in honor of the douchebags and assholes, Panda Party!
Turntable has graciously created new, horror movie-related avatars for users, so there's no excuse now for there not to be a Halloween theme for the Panda Party. So bring your freakiest, scariest, weirdest, most costume-oriented songs to Panda Party, and let's party, y'all! We'll still be doing hourly themes, but all of them will relate to what is easily the best holiday of the year, Halloween.
In the comments below, I say spit it out: what's your costume this year? What's your plans for Halloween, or its unofficial grown-up date it's being honored, Saturday night?
I'm going to be traveling today, so I'll be in and out of Panda Party. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a Panda Party! The great thing about Panda Party is that it's grown into its own sub-community of Pandagon, which is exactly what I hoped for. A video to kick it off:
Shouldn't have too many problems updating the blog, but there will probably be some blips this next week. That's because, after today, I'll be traveling in West Texas to visit my folks, spending time in the one area that I don't think has much in the way of songs written about it---the Midland/Odessa area. (Though the fictional Dillion, TX from "Friday Night Lights" is based on it.) Then on to Lubbock, which has one of my most favorite recent country-western songs written about it.
I think it's interesting/telling that in the past decade plus's celebration of "bluegrass" and "alt country", the Dixie Chicks have been larger ignored, though they have such marvelous instrumentalists.
I will try to pay attention to the local media there to get a general idea of how they're seeing things in West Texas and the Panhandle. Meanwhile, we're gonna Panda Party, amirite? Y'all will have to fill me in on how the last Panda Party went, since I wasn't able to make it. But I should be in there most of today, and am frankly looking forward to it, since I haven't had a lot of opportunity to listen to music this week.
More importantly, Is This It remains (takes deep breath, steels self for commenter rage) the single best album released in the past 10 years.
Being contrary and citing the existence of haters doesn't actually make your opinions more interesting. With this defense of The Strokes, it basically makes you sound like someone who reads a lot of mainstream music magazines but never actually listens to music. But hell, even if you require a record to be a mainstream breakout hit in order to consider it the best album of the past decade, there's an easy contender that makes the whole Strokes apologia sound exactly as sad and troll-y as it is: White Blood Cells by the White Stripes, which also came out in 2001. Oh yeah, remember them? I think you should put "Fell In Love With A Girl" on and then read this line, while cackling evilly:
Beneath the shaggy haircuts and puppy-dog eyes there lurked an idea for a crisper, more melodic rock album that would radically update the sound of its forebears—one that, crucially, went against the overproduced schlock then infesting the charts.
Yeah. Because really, the White Stripes were like Lady Gaga or something. Sure.
I thought it would be fun to just start listing rock albums from the past decade that are exponentially better than This Is It, just because what else can you do in the face of epic trollery like this?
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell
Sleater-Kinney, The Woods
Le Tigre, This Island
The New Pornographers, Electric Version
The Gossip, Standing in the Way of Control
TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
The Dandy Warhols, Welcome to the Monkey House
LCD Soundsystem: Honestly, all three records---LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver, This Is Happening---are classics
The Dum Dum Girls, I Will Be
Cansei de Ser Sexy, Cansei de Ser Sexy
The Dirtbombs, Ultraglide in Black
Wild Flag, Wild Flag: it just came out, but it's clearly better than the fucking Strokes, both in terms of rocking and in terms of not-sucking
The Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong
Neko Case, both Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone
I could keep going, but you get the picture. And I'm trying to stick to stuff I think is just straight-up classic; not even talking about stuff I just really like for my own purposes but falls short of being one of the Big Records Everyone Should Own.
One thing that I think is worth noting that The Strokes have that none of these other bands I've listed have: a line-up composed strictly of straight, white men. Perhaps that's why it's easier to imagine they're the Greatest Band of the Past Decade, since they fit the image many people have in their heads about what a great band should look like. But what's been cool about rock music in the past decade is that strict rules about who gets to really be an awesome rock musician have been dismantled, put through the shredder and pissed all over. And I, for one, am thrilled.
I'm driving upstate for a wedding today, so I can't host the Panda Party. But that doesn't mean there can't be a ! I'm just going to leave room info blank of themes and leave it to majority rule to figure out what the themes will be. Have fun, everyone! I'll be back next week.
Meanwhile, here's a song:
Songs with obvious sexual metaphors are always encouraged at Panda Party.
Today's Panda Party is dedicated to Slutwalk, which is coming to NYC tomorrow at noon at Union Square in Manhattan. I really like these pictures from Slutwalk in Argentina, where they call it Marcha de las Putas.
What I don't get about all the confusion about the Slutwalk methods and message in the U.S. is examples like this: Slutwalk's sense of humor and message is so obvious, so straightforward that it crosses borders without much struggle. If read the satellite list at the original, Toronto Slutwalk, you'll see that the march has expanded beyond culturally similar, English-speaking countries, but that's jumpinng language barriers with relative ease. This is because the message is actually simple and what women have been dying to say. This is a protest march that fits the "yes means yes" mentality. This is women saying, "I have every right to say yes to sex with who I want, to wearing what I want, to going to parties, to getting my education, to working in a male-dominated environment, to having interests that threaten anxious men's ideas of masculinity, to being butch or to be femme, to being single, to being out at late hours, to having a job that may not be so great but pays the bills, to being a sex worker, to having a less than virginal past, etc. None of these things mean you have a right to rape or sexually abuse me."
This year hasn't been a good one for that message. This year was practically designed to remind people of how rape isn't taken seriously by authorities and/or by the public if the victim is considered less than "worthy" for any of the above reasons. People still believe that the price of admission to a party, a boy's club, a sexually active life, a miniskirt is being groped, cat-called and raped.
I was just reading another example of this problem this morning, as Rebecca Watson came out about all the abuse that she's faced over Elevatorgate. Elevatorgate is a perfect example of the problem here; Rebecca made what should have been an uncontroversial point about how, because a woman enters a male-dominated space like atheist/skeptic circles doesn't mean she's an object whose personal space and privacy can be violated by anyone who wants to do it. Her critics disagree, and feel that simply being a female skeptic means that you have to forsake your right to dignity, safety, and quite possibly to declining sexual invitations that aren't going to be enjoyable for you. For her simple request that men not corner her in elevators and make her worry that she's about to be violently assaulted, she's been called the usual names. The message from these men are clear; women in the atheist/skeptic community have two choices, to either tolerate sexual harassment in silence or to leave the community. They believe the price of admission to what they believe it their club---after all, they're men!---is to be reduced to an object whose feelings about sexual interactions are irrelevant.
So I'm marching for people like Rebecca, whose sexuality is used as a weapon against her to silence her voice and keep all the plum spaces male-only. I'm marching for women like Nafissatou Diallo, who prosecutors still believe was raped but whose case was dropped because we really do hold rape cases to a much higher standard of proof than pretty much any other crime. I'm marching for the victim of the NYPD rape cops, who saw her abusers walk free in no small part because the jury just couldn't get past their disapproval that she had been drinking so much that night (I'd bet most of them have done the same a couple times in their lives). I marching for myself, and in memory for all the stupid names the rapist called me and weak excuses that he came up with for why he decided it was okay to crawl in bed with a sleeping woman who had absolutely not invited him. I'm marching for women whose access to the sidewalks is restricted by catcalls, who avoid taking the jobs they want because they know the men in those environments will react with sexualized hostility, who endure groping and catcalls at school as the "price" they pay just trying to get an education, who have to spend much of a night out monitoring each other's safety because men will corner your or slip drugs into your drinks, who try to make a living in the hard world of sex work and who know if they get raped, they have no recourse, who can't escape abusive marriages because people are so worried about wondering what's wrong with you that you married an abuser they forget to ask what's wrong with him that he hits and rapes you.
But first we party at the Panda Party. Because hey, part of the whole point is that we should have fun without being guilted, abused, or shamed for it. One half of Slutwalk is to say that we shouldn't be forced to suffer, and the other half is to say that we should be allowed to be free to do our thing.
Gargh! I tried, I really did, to read this piece at Salon by Toure lamenting the end of monoculture while keeping my annoyance at "good old days" thinking to a minimum. After all, one could easily write the "in many ways, things are much better, but a small, nostalgic part of me still misses monoculture". I wanted to read a piece like that, but this piece is just wasn't that one. My warning signals flared early in, reading this paragraph:
The epic, collective roar -- you know, the kind that followed "Thriller," "Nevermind," "Purple Rain," "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," and other albums so gigantic you don't even need to name the artist -- just doesn't happen today. Those Moments made you part of a large tribe linked by sounds that spoke to who you are or who you wanted to be. Today there's no Moments, just moments. They're smaller, less intense, shorter in duration and shared by fewer people. The Balkanization of pop culture, the overthrow of the monopoly on distribution, and the fracturing of the collective attention into a million pieces has made it impossible for us to coalesce around one album en masse. We no longer live in a monoculture. We can't even agree to hate the same thing anymore, as we did with disco in the 1970s.
Two things:
1) "We" didn't agree to hate disco. I would have forgiven this statement in an otherwise historically astute article, but when someone is being nostalgic, I'm usually all the more on guard for minimizing of some of the uglier episodes of the past. Toure links the Disco Demolition, which actually wasn't a cute little incident of the collective "we" agreeing to anything, but in retrospect reads more like a bunch of drunk straight and mostly white guys throwing a fit over music that flooded the top 40 airwaves with the voices of women of color and the culture heavily influenced by gay men. Plus, the belief that disco was stomped permanently into the ground is simply false; it was already in the process of morphing for reasons beyond just outside pressure: technological changes were synthesizing the sound, hip-hop and punk were breathing a different kind of energy into the New York music scene that birthed disco, and a lot of DJs were getting interested in different kinds of music. Dance music is often more in thrall to rapidly changing trends than different kinds of music for reasons too complex to address here.
2) He's got his thumb on the scale with those four albums. From what I can find online, "Thriller" sold 27 million copies, "Purple Rain" 13 million copies, "Nevermind" 10 million copies. "It Takes A Nation" is a classic record by any measure, but the best estimated I could find was sales of over a million, but short of 2 million. Including it probably wouldn't have bothered me, if he hadn't already been cherry-picking the big records for stuff that's indisputably awesome. All four of those are nearly-flawless records that are truly beloved by people who know music. But "It Takes A Nation" wasn't nearly as ubiquituous as some other albums Toure could have mentioned if he was describing albums that touched everyone, whether they liked it or not: "Rumours" by Fleetwood Mac, "The Bodyguard" soundtrack, "Pieces of You" by Jewel, "Ten" by Pearl Jam. Now, I'm a fan of a lot of "Rumours", but clearly, the skipping of records like this---all of which sold more than "Nevermind", and way more than "It Takes a Nation of Millions"---indicates an agenda instead of an honest assessment of monoculture.
Now for my cards: I think that while there are some benefits to having huge albums that everyone loves all at once, I generally think that the end of monoculture is a good thing. As Marc has frequently noted to me, and I agree, it's better for a lot of smaller artists to make a reasonable living than a handful of big ones to get really rich while everyone else's shit just gathers dust. But there's more than musicians on my mind. I don't think monoculture is good for audiences. An honest assessment of monoculture shows that the majority of major sellers are not peculiar geniuses with a vision like Prince, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, or Chuck D. (Notice that they're all men, which is something I'll return to soon.) A lot of the time it's just pablum that sells heavily because it happened to come out at the right time or was aggressively marketed and just inoffensive enough to enough people that they mindlessly bought it because they don't care much about music but they hear that one song on the radio all the time. What we have now is a situation where there are fewer big league artists, but on the flip side, people in the underground are getting more of an airing than they would have in the past, thanks to the internet. And I think Toure has a sour attitude about it that isn't fitting the occasion:
Now there's the potential to be exposed to more music. But where there used to be a finite number of gatekeepers, now there's way too many: anyone with a blog. This is great for the individual listener who's willing to sift through the chatter to find new bands.
For those of us who have sift-willingness, this era is one where the workload has gone down dramatically. You think reading music blogs and digging through recommendation services is a lot work? Try finding out about underground music through word of mouth. I was lucky; I lived in Austin in my college years and on, so I lived in a zone where zines fell into my hands and I could walk into clubs with a "surprise me" attitude towards bands and I had cool friends who would clue me into new stuff. And even then, I still had way less access than I do now to cool new stuff. A lot of the time, you pretty much had to be in a scene to know the best music in it, and often by the time an underground band had gained a national audience, they had fallen apart because the need to make a decent living prevented them from holding a band together. Because the work load of sifting through new music has gone down dramatically, you're seeing a lot more budding music fans than you would have in the old days. Granted, the number of casual music fans who buy one record every year or two might be declining, so what? They often don't even notice that they don't listen to new music anymore, because they're happy with the stuff they already have.
And here's the thing: in the more fractured, microtargeted environment, people who often loved music but felt a bit adrift from what music culture they were exposed to now have an opportunity to find a real community and a deeper connection to the music. For instance, are you a feminist who wants feminist-minded music but you don't like stuff that's overly cute or folk music? In our era of microaudiences, you're in luck! If you liked Le Tigre, you had a few internet clicks until you were listening to Peaches and The Gossip. What's easy to forget is that monoculture is very alienating for people who don't relate to it. Some of us reacted by moving to cool cities and engaging in what is now called "hipster" culture, but for people who didn't have that opportunity, they were shit out of luck. If you didn't have a record store in your town that let you listen to records or an underground rock station, you were truly shit out of luck. I realize for kids these days it might be hard to understand, but literally, I remember the entire process of getting Le Tigre's first album. It only happened because I had, for lack of a better word, immense hipster privilege. I was driving along in my car, listening to 91.7, which only happened because I lived in a city that could sustain a public radio station that played underground rock and because I had the knowledge that it was there and that a show that played the best of that stuff was on air. They mentioned that Kathleen Hanna had a new band, and again, I was a Bikini Kill fan only because I had learned about Riot Grrrl through zines and other underground-ish publications, so I was poised to listen. That afternoon, I went to a local, independent record store that let me listen to the whole thing---seriously, even in those days, when there were more record stores, that resource was not available in most places. I bought it and grabbed some fliers for local shows on my way out. All stuff the majority of people have no access to, including people who would really benefit from it. Now all those people who have the interest but not the same access I would have had then can just download a similar album, or buy it through the mail after previewing it on the label's website.
One thing Toure also neglects to mention is that monoculture created massive hostility in underground music circles. Because monoculture was so alienating to people who sought out subcultures, they in turn would become almost addicted to their subculture and hyper-rejecting of anything that wasn't it. I've noticed in recent years that this attitude is fading. I go to music clubs that are very much "indie rock" and they'll be playing all sorts of shit that would have never passed muster in the 90s, including Michael Jackson and Fleetwood Mac, and people's reaction is to be pretty happy about it. Now that Big Music isn't perceived as an obstacle to Music I Like, the distinction between underground and over-ground is dissolving. For instance, I can be in a room in Turntable where people are mostly playing a bunch of teeny bands of the sort Toure complains about, and if I choose to drop something off Kanye West's new record, instead of sneers, I get happy little animated nods. Nowadays, people are more comfortable with the idea that good is good, and that drawing lines in the sand and rejecting entire genres out of hand because they're mainstream is silly. The mainstream oppresses the underground less, so the underground is happy to embrace the mainstream.
Plus, what the hell is with this particular passage?
He's right -- stars don't just naturally ascend. There's no meritocracy in music. Audiences don't find great bands because their songs are undeniable. The infrastructure of the music business -- the managers, the marketers, the radio programmers, the DJs, the A&Rs, the chief execs -- all those people are necessary to help put talented artists on a platform large enough that they'll be seen by a mass audience. But the music biz is slowly crumbling. It has lost its way and its mojo. When businesses have their back to the wall, they're less likely to take chances on kids proposing some sort of revolution -- even though that may be exactly what they need to do.
I'm skeptical of the idea that we need a corporate machine pushing a single artist to have a "revolution". One reason music fans soured on the corporate stranglehold on music is that they tried to undermine any revolution their artists actually tried to start. Instead of looking to one band to save us all, how about we start looking at music as a great art form which we can manipulate to save ourselves?
By the way, am I the only person who kind of thinks Das Racist is overrated?
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's seminal album Nevermind. The record had a tremendous impact on teenagers across the country, including myself, because it was not only a great record but because it was a peek into another world, a hip urban underground where being a feminist could actually be cool. So I have a piece up in The Daily Beast about just that, how Nirvana was so pro-feminist and how this subversion has effects that are more far-reaching than their actual sound turned out to be. In the years since Cobain's death, I feel like dudely rock fans have laid claim to Nirvana's legacy in a way that doesn't comport with how Nirvana actually was. I hope this article can be a corrective. Sadly, hostile dudes who want to cast Cobain in their own sexist image are already showing up in comments, so if you feel a need to keep up the corrective, feel free to pop into comments.
As usual with Fridays, we're doing a Panda Party! Hourly themes, good tunes, good people, good times. I imagine Panda Party will have some way of honoring this anniversary that is simultaneously making me happy and making me feel old. So come on over---the party is beginning to rise high in rankings with the number of people that are showing up. If you don't know how Turntable works, here's their FAQ.
In the meantime, a couple of videos:
One thing that most people forgot within seconds of Cobain's suicide is that he was a cut-up. This comes across in their video for "In Bloom". (People still remember this about Dave Grohl, due to the fact he's still around being goofy in public.)
General thoughts and reminiscences welcome in comments!
I really appreciated the humor and insight of this piece from 
Gargh! I tried, I really did, to read 
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's seminal album Nevermind. The record had a tremendous impact on teenagers across the country, including myself, because it was not only a great record but because it was a peek into another world, a hip urban underground where being a feminist could actually be cool. So I have a piece up in The Daily Beast about just that,