27 September 2021. Grunge | Merkel
Nevermind at 30: looking back at Angela Merkel through cartoonists’ eyes
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. (For the next few weeks this might be four days a week while I do a course: we’ll see how it goes). Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Nevermind at 30
It’s the 30th anniversary of release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, album, which is, 30 million sales later, the kind of data point that makes Gen Xers feel old. So of course, there’s been lots of 30-years on retrospective assessments, and, of course, the release of special editions in 5-CD or 8-LP packages, which I’m sure will thrill the ghost of Kurt Cobain.
(I’m going to pass here on the legal case involving the man who was photographed as a baby for the cover).
(Australian cyclist Pete Stokes has recreated the cover of Nevermind via the GPS app Strava)
The best of those assessments that I found—because it came from a fan, took an international perspective, and talked about social and political context—was on the BBC’s site. At the time Nevermind came out, says the author, Arwa Haider, she was “a young music obsessive”.
I was thrilled by Nevermind's sounds, but as a young music obsessive (who also happened to be a Muslim female Iraqi Brit), I felt sidelined by the press coverage around the record, and Seattle's burgeoning "grunge" scene; mainstream perspectives seemed overwhelmingly blokey, homogenously white and insular – at odds with Nirvana themselves, particularly their culturally inquisitive, masculine/feminine frontman Kurt Cobain.
(And quite a lot of the 30th anniversary coverage seems to fit that blokey white description, at least on a rapid scan).
One of the people she speaks to is an Iranian-American woman, Mahdis Keshavarz, who was, in the 1990s booking indie gigs at the Old Fire House Teen Centre in Redmond, near Seattle, where Nirvana was based. It was a city initiative where youth were enabled to reclaim and run community space. She was familiar with Nirvana, having been given a tape by a schoolfriend (and tapes pop up a lot in these stories):
"We were so righteous in our punk rock-ness; the music was special, but it was also a philosophy: wanting to be radical feminists, carving out a space for ourselves in a time that was so predominantly male, also teaching men how to be feminists and allies. Kurt was one of them."
So, at least in that Seattle community, the appearance of Nevermind on a major label seemed like a sell-out; there was some anger. In Brazil, Moyses Pinto says that Nevermind was the moment when global culture and youth culture aligned—in this respect, the major label probably helped:
"We had punks in Brazil, but almost a decade after their peak in the UK and US – and there was '80s pop culture and mainstream arena bands," says Neto. "But the impact of Nirvana and MTV made it synchronised; a new youth – including me – began to hear the same music, and wear the same styles; there was a cultural homogeneity probably never experienced before. Grunge culture became dominant very quickly; all that had been 'cool' suddenly became ugly and exaggerated, and Kurt was the symbol of transgression."
In Japan, the music journalist Hiroki Shintari noted the vulnerability of Cobain’s lyrics:
(W)hat I admired was the innate pop sensibility that cuts through the musical style and the irony of these songs about Kurt Cobain's discomfort; his alienation from the mainstream ended up being shared by millions of people, thanks to that sensibility... I remember the thrill of hearing such a raw and vulnerable male voice on mainstream radio and MTV. Kurt sang: 'Never met a wise man/ If so, it's a woman'... That in itself was phenomenal."
As it happens, Japanese Gen Xers were fairly prosperous in the 1990s—in some ways the record had more impact later, when the Japanese economy stalled. There’s a tribute version of Nevermind—the same tracks, in the same order—by Japanese bands, released in 2012.
In the immediate aftermath of apartheid in South Africa, musician Mpumi Mcata had just left high school:
"As a black boy growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, it's safe to say that what Nirvana were proposing was not what you'd expect to hear anywhere near me – but it cut through: the raw energy, the honesty," says Mcata. "Nirvana's general 'Come as You Are' ethos definitely resonated with me; it came across as simply doing what they wanted to do, or just what they could.
There are other voices in here as well—from Poland and Turkey—but maybe the last word here should go to another Brazilian, Rogerio Maia Garcia. He notes that the legacy of the record can’t be separated from Cobain’s suicide three years later at the age of 27:
"I later realised that his voice expressed a sad violence and emptiness over life experiences; songs like Lithium took a new perspective. I think Nevermind expressed the feelings and fears that any teen goes through, from my generation in Brazil to now."
And maybe that’s also part of Nevermind’s enduring success: like Peter Pan, it tells the story of a boy who never quite managed to grow into adulthood.
#2: Merkel’s career through cartoonists’ eyes
Of course the world is queuing up to assess the decade and a half that Angela Merkel has spent as German Chancellor, which ended with the German elections at the weekend. I’m not going to add to that noise here.
Instead I’m going to point to a piece in The Guardian which asked its two main political cartoonists, Steve Bell and Martin Rowson, to reflect on drawing her for all of that time.
There insights here both into the way that political cartoonists approach their subjects, and also into the politics of those subjects. Bell says it took him a while to get a handle on how to draw her:
She turned out to be interesting rather than easy, with large, generous features, hooded, quite kindly eyes with splendid bags under them, a prominent, rounded chin, and jowls to die for. One has to be very careful while drawing her that she does not come out looking like Kenneth Clarke. I must confess now that I’ve always found her hugely attractive – unlike Clarke – and her features always put me in mind of a particular old friend.
((C) Steve Bell/ The Guardian.)
If her worst hour was the assault on Greece after the election of the Syriza government, her best, in Bell’s view, was her response to the 2015 refugee crisis:
For me, Merkel’s finest hour, after her extremely guarded response to Cameron’s feeble attempts to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s membership of the European Union, came in response to the terrible refugee crisis of 2015 to 2016. Instead of closing the borders, she offered to receive one million new migrants. Though laudable, as a conservative politician this caused her severe electoral problems and a challenge from the far right at home.
For Martin Rowson, “she’s obviously the MGM cartoon dog Droopy’s long-lost twin sister. So her defining feature for me has always been the dolorous countenance of her face in repose.”
This influenced how he drew her—and how he perceived her on the international stage.
As she endured in office, I caught a definite whiff of long-suffering discomfort coming off her as she stood uneasily next to cavalcades of clowns and crooks at international summits, or in any meeting with any representative of the British government over the past 11 years. She tried her not-very-good best to disguise the general air of toe-curling embarrassment choking the atmosphere in the room, all of which was etched so eloquently on her expressionless face.
j2t#175
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