Come as You Were
by Simon Stephenson

Hearing the new Nirvana song, "You Know You're Right," on the radio recently, I was taken completely by surprise. The sound of that familiar voice singing an unfamiliar song made me feel like a teenager again, a 13-year-old boy seeing the video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for the first time, my mouth falling open to a wide gape.

When I first encountered Nirvana, I knew neither that the group came from Seattle nor that I was watching the first single to be taken from its second album, Nevermind. The song's title, a tongue-in-cheek reference to an American brand of deodorant, flew straight over my head. The lyrics were largely unintelligible and the one phrase I could make out, "Here we are now, entertain us," I entirely misinterpreted, mistaking a throwaway greeting Kurt Cobain made when arriving at a party for a rallying clarion against teenage ennui.

But it did not matter. The overall sentiment was clear enough, and the imagery in the video underlined it with a black magic-marker pen. Janitors in tutus, a dingy high-school pep-rally led by pompom girls who looked like they'd been imported from the Third Reich School of Cheerleading: it was American Beauty-style adolescence a decade before anybody had heard of Sam Mendes. Juliana Hatfield sung that listening to Nirvana made her "wanna go fuck shit up." Though you didn't quite phrase it like that when your mother asked you why you liked this new band so much, if you were 13 or 14 you understood exactly what the erstwhile Lemonhead meant.

Will we ever again be as excited about a band as we were when we were teenagers? Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 when he first heard Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" has described that song's first snare shot as "sounding like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind." My mother still talks wistfully of John Lennon's harmonica at the beginning of "Love Me Do." For many of my generation, the staccato chords that start "Smells Like Teen Spirit" marked a similar epiphany.

Our teenage years are our hardest, a tightrope across the ravine of adolescence that stretches out to a distant and uncertain future. In "The Virgin Suicides," Jeffrey Eugenides' wonderful novel about growing up in 1970s Michigan, a doctor tells Cecilia Lisbon, who has just tried to kill herself, that she had no business doing so as she is "not old enough to know how bad life gets."

"Obviously doctor," replies Cecilia, "you've never been a thirteen year old girl."

The psychiatrist recommends more interaction with her peers and, a hundred pages later, Cecilia succeeds where she previously failed. Though adolescent psychiatry has evolved to a stage where it can offer explanations for the profound Schadenfreude experienced by teens — complex biopscyhological theories involving both the actions of hormones and the renegotiation of social roles — it has yet to develop any therapy as potent or as instantaneous as music — that is, music played loudly enough to simultaneously drown out the television coming from downstairs, the complaints of siblings and the memories of the day's traumas at school. Perhaps Cecilia Lisbon should have been prescribed half an hour of loud rock music, to be taken aurally each evening after dinner.

And so we write the name of our favorite band on our notepads and the desk at the back of the physics classroom, decorate our bedrooms with the band's posters, memorize lyrics and study liner notes with a scholarly attention. In our tribal teenage society, the bands we like are much more than merely a question of taste, quickly coming to define who we are to a greater extent than the company we keep, the clothes we wear or even the things we say. It is telling that the worst punishment Mrs. Lisbon inflicts on her wayward teenage daughter, Lux, is not removing her from school, but the burning of her record collection.

At a now defunct indie record store in Edinburgh, we Nirvana fans congregated to spend our pocket money on the band's T-shirts. That they all came with outrageous backprints was part of the attraction: Mine proclaimed me to be a "Fudge-packing, crack-smoking satan-worshipping motherfucker." Something of a tall order for a suburban Edinburgh schoolboy; I nonetheless wore the T-shirt with a considerable degree of pride.

For a while, Nirvana could do no wrong. Nevermind contained 12 other songs, many of them better than that first single, and then there was the was the band's first album still waiting to be discovered. If Nevermind made you want to fuck shit up, Bleach made you want to drop a nuclear bomb on it. The lyrics to the third song, "School," ran "Won't you believe it, it's just my luck... no recess!" Though apparently written about the nepotistic Seattle music scene, we, needless to say, interpreted it literally, Cobain's plaintive vocal a seemingly perfect paean to the anguish of a double maths lesson.

Incesticide followed in late 1992, a somewhat hurriedly assembled collection of B-sides and live favorites. A playful but spiky record, it perfectly captured both the band's raw energy and their oft-overlooked sense of humor. For Scottish teenagers who occasionally felt horribly far away from the center of their universe — which, obviously, was Seattle — there was the added bonus that the record contained two cover versions of songs by local boy Eugene Kelly's Vaselines.

The cracks only really began to appear with Nirvana's fourth album, In Utero, ominously recorded under the alias of Sid Vicious' real name as The Simon Ritchie Project. The group had never been controversy-free before, of course, but for every foreboding lyric or tabloid heroin scandal there had been a triumphant performance at Reading Festival or press release joking that Kurt Cobain was going to call the next Nirvana record I Hate Myself And I Want to Die.

Some saw the record, with its gruesome medical imagery and willfully obtuse feedback numbers, as a deliberate attempt to alienate a section of the fan base. Regardless of whether this is true — Cobain was often vocal in his complaints about the fact that the band were now liked by "the people who used to beat me up in high school" — the record was, for many, something of a disappointment. The old brilliance surfaced only in tantalizing glimpses, but when it did occur, on such songs as "Dumb" and "All Apologies," it was often accompanied by a hitherto unexpected sense of melody. The band's subsequent Unplugged session saw them develop further in this direction, even going so far as to employ a cello player, a move that would have been unthinkable at the time of Bleach.

When the European tour was announced, we kids in Scotland swiftly forgot any misgivings we might have had about In Utero. Nirvana were coming! Here! It seemed too good to be true, and even when we had the tickets safely in our sweaty hands, we found ourselves staring at each other in disbelief. We had been too young and unhip the first time Nirvana visited these shores, playing shows that have already passed into legend, but now we were going to get the chance to actually see our idols in the flesh.

Only, of course, we didn't.

Where were you when you heard Kurt Cobain killed himself? I was at home in Edinburgh, a gray and hungover afternoon shortly before standard grades, a quite miserable enough time in any teenager's life. But for us it was not a JFK moment. It was more than that.

Because when JFK died, it was a crime against a whole country and the world quickly united in grief. This, on the other hand, seemed so horribly personal. Nirvana was yours, your own very special thing, a secret society you belonged to. And the terrible irony was that the only person it seemed who might have been able to help you make sense of such a thing was the very person whose death you were now mourning.

We lit candles and built shrines in our bedrooms from pictures, lyrics and the concert tickets that we would never use. In Seattle, Courtney Love gave away all of Kurt's T-shirts to crying fans; as a gesture of solidarity, we did not take off our swear-word T-shirts for weeks. The only thing that really helped, however, was to listen to the music and we did so, all the time, though the lyrics now seemed pregnant with warnings — In Utero itself played like a suicide note. Why, we asked ourselves and each other, didn't somebody do something?

Years later, I finally made it to Seattle. Predictably, there was nothing left to see. Places I once read about every week in the NME and Melody Maker were shadows of their former selves. The Sit and Spin, Seattle's number one laundromat-cum-music venue, was closed for repairs. At Sub Pop, spiritual home of grunge, the walls were adorned with pictures of indie bands from my adopted home town of Glasgow. The Paramount Theatre, where Nirvana celebrated Nevermind's success with a Halloween homecoming show (the storming version of "Negative Creep" on live album From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah comes from the soundboard at this show) was playing host to blink-182, spiritual heirs of the misogynistic metal dinosaurs Nirvana had blown out of the water years before.

Worst of all, there was absolutely nowhere for a pilgrim to pay his respects to his teenage hero. In "The Virgin Suicides," the local priest bends the rules to allow Cecilia Lisbon to be buried on consecrated ground. No such favors were granted to Kurt Cobain: fearing a Pere Lachaise-style influx of fans, no cemetery would accept his remains and his ashes had to be scattered at a secret location.

In Seattle that day, it seemed like Nirvana was finally over. What had once moved us so powerfully would become a footnote in the history of 20th century popular music. Kurt Cobain's suicide would fade to nothing more than the backdrop for a Nick Hornby book, an intrusive Nick Broomfield documentary, a PDF file of a heartbreaking letter, downloadable from the Internet, that ends in the words "Peace, love, empathy." I realized guiltily that, for my own part, I seldom listened to any of the records anymore except Unplugged. Even the rude T-shirt had gotten lost somewhere along the way.

Then, some months ago, I saw a kid outside the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, and he was wearing that same T-shirt. Soon I began to see more of them and today they are everywhere once again. At first I almost smiled at the wearers, thinking them members of my own tribe, recalling the way you used to acknowledge complete strangers who wore a badge or a patch that identified them as a fellow fan. Quickly, though, I realized these kids would have been toddlers when Nevermind came out, and wore the T-shirts in the same retro way that I myself once wore a John Lennon T-shirt. Further, I remembered that I am now in my mid-20s, no longer wear patches or badges, and must look to them like that entirely alien species, a grown-up.

I wonder if these kids are as excited about this new record as I am? Though it is hard for me to conceive, I suspect they might even be more so — never before have they experienced the thrill of a new Nirvana record.

When I wore my John Lennon T-shirt my mother used to joke that I should find a band of my own to like — eventually, of course, I found Nirvana. But if I happen to meet any of these kids as I queue to buy my copy of the new greatest hits album, I will say no such thing to them. For who can fault them for choosing to follow Nirvana when their only other options seem to be Slipknot and their ill-bred ilk or the latest cloned-for-television "American Idol" pop product?

Maybe in six months or a year another band will come along for them, a magnificent life-changing band that speaks to them about what it means to be a teenager at this precise moment, and says these things in a language that only they can understand. For the meantime, though, there is Nirvana, and what could be a more fitting memorial to Kurt Cobain than a barrage of distorted semi-tone chords and a familiar voice once more blasting its way out of teenage bedrooms around the world?

E-mail Simon Stephenson at writesimon@hotmail.com.