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Kurt Cobain would rather die than sell out. Credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty
In the early afternoon of 18 November 1993, I was in the New York office of MTV’s programming director. At the end of our meeting an exec said, “Oh, would you like tickets to an Unplugged taping tonight?” Without even asking who was playing, I said “of course”, and it turned out that night’s band was Nirvana. My brain melted. Was this really happening?
MTV was still a thing back then. It was the twilight era of appointment TV viewing. People would say to themselves, “I am going to turn on my television and watch rock videos for an hour”, and proceed to do so. And MTV was central to the tone and feel of the early 1990s. Until the 1991 arrival of grunge, the world felt a bit as though culture had exhausted itself, and it was never again going to be possible for an era to feel like an era. The Eighties were the last era we were ever going to get. And then kaboom! The Nineties happened and it was like a drug kicking in.
Around 7pm two friends and I showed up at Sony studios over on the west side of Midtown to learn we would be in the fourth row directly in front of Kurt Cobain. We sat down and quickly noticed that there were five Sony staffers walking through the audience with men’s XXL black T-shirts: if you were wearing anything with visible branding on it, you had to wear one — but more terrifyingly, if they thought your outfit was too unhip, you had to wear one, too. Imagine the stress inside everybody’s heads as the shirt bearers drew nearer. Some guy with a tie had to wear one (I mean, what was he thinking?) but when they came to our row, we were declared hip enough and were spared The Shirt. Phew.
The room was tense and bristled with the sense of energy that comes from the realisation that you may well be attending your generation’s Woodstock. Everyone there knew they were going to see something that would and could never happen again. And by then pretty much everyone knew of Cobain’s drug issues and the discomfort he experienced being in any form of limelight. There was a very clear sense that Cobain was reaching a tipping point, and it couldn’t be good.
Cobain walked onstage in a peak-grunge sage green mohair-Lycra cardigan, old jeans and a T-shirt. As he and the other musicians came on, we could tell something was off. The vibe was like having friends arrive at your front door for dinner having had a screaming match in their car a minute before. There were no smiles or hellos, just the music. It was kind of brutal but it was totally on brand; if Cobain had smiled and done hellos, it probably would have wrecked the experience. Are there any sullen stars these days? I doubt it. Our culture of likes and likability is about as far away from the early 1990s as is possible.
For me the highlight was when the band played David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. Somewhere in the tenth to fifteenth seconds, my brain realised: Oh my God, they’re playing The Man Who Sold the World. I thought I was the only person on earth who loved that song! The evening’s final song, Where Did You Sleep Last Night was astonishing in a gut punch way — and then the show was over. Boom. Of course, everyone wanted an encore, but I could see Cobain near the studio’s exit door talking, in what appeared to be a very blunt manner, with MTV’s Director, and the moment I saw Cobain walk out that door, any possibility of an encore left with him.
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SubscribeThe 80s and 90s were awesome decades to be alive. MLKs mantra had embedded itself, no-one cared if you were gay, our favourite popstars were gay!! Women had proven themselves in the workplace and No meant No. We had globalisation AND national identity. No-one batted an eyelid if you were ‘different’, in fact to be different was good. Comedy reached a zenith of outrageousness because boundaries were still there to be pushed but we enjoyed it – the more outrageous the better because free speech meant something, offence was taken not given and everyone had the piss taken out of them. Yet we still had a sense of old fashioned values and etiquettes, manners, loved our nation and didn’t try to rewrite history. Immigration was OK but not overwhelming and the expectation was that immigrants integrated and wanted to be British. In those days students expected to live in shyteholes with mushrooms growing in the toilets and it was part of the experience. People had shared cultural experiences like ‘did you see Top of the Pops last night?’ Being a narcissist with a duck pout would be the most uncool thing ever. The only thing I prefer now is that you can’t smoke everywhere, I didn’t like stinking of ciggies all the time. I also quite like YouTube.
Great comment Cheryl (though I miss smoking in pubs even though i gave up many years ago).
I know I know, loads of people miss that – but I can’t help it, that’s the one big thing I don’t miss. The stink of ciggies on all my clothes and making me cough and my eyes water – nah. People who wanna smoke go fill your boots, I’m not one for banning stuff as a general principle but just not in my face in an enclosed space, I guess that’s my philosophy on that. I know that might make me a bit of a pansy, sorry.
The 70’s were much the same. Great time to be a teenager.
Personally I’d make the effort to smoke in pubs, restaurants and public transport at every opportunity, as my rebellion against overweening state control on spurious public health grounds.
Alas I’ve given up.
I was born in 71 so the late 70s I remember – as a mixture of not having a lot, graffiti, strikes, power cuts, and FANTASTIC MUSIC. The 80s had all the great music AND we had our first family holiday, a half decent car, double glazing and a sense of fun and optimism. Big plusses imho 🙂
I also felt there was a respect for truth sadly missing now. Will future historians label the present period ‘the age of post-truth’, SAD. Probably the advertising industry to blame as their lies conditioned the “masses’ to expect lies, lies and more lies.
The thing I remember really changing my perspective on things in a negative way was the Salman Rushdie Affair in 1989, it profoundly affected me because I could not understand why the West didn’t loudly and proudly tell the Ayatollah and his thugs to F off and how DARE you threaten a novelist in the West…. it made me very worried for the direction we were going if we just capitulate like that – and in the fullness of time that sense of unease has unfortunately been proven correct…
I agree; my kids enjoyed them nearly as much as I enjoyed the 60s!
Well-observed comments, Mrs or Miss Jones. (What did I say?).
“Yet we still had a sense of old fashioned values and etiquettes, manners, loved our nation and didn’t try to rewrite history.”
Folk still watched in the 1990s a big screen, in each other’s company, so both the very young and ancient were well aware of the daring exploits in all manner of etiquettes and social observations by one Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. But just by mere watching and mentioning such a well-written light comedy in a brisk conversation with a neighbour or friend the next day (Your “Did see see last night …? Wasn’t it a gas?”) is telling in and of itself of having “a sense of” the shared values of a nation. Today, cosying up in each other’s company to watch a light comedy (that also had its touch of the more daring sides of the British character) is seen as old-fashioned and anti-modernist. Light comedy is seen as twee (not that ‘twee’ is a trendy word).
But I have to say that it’s in pushing the boundaries of light comedy that seems to be of the type that pushes boundaries today. Take your ayatollah sort, that you refer to later down in another well-observed event at the dawn of the 90s. It might be too much of a quirky dream for Keeping Up Appearances to be broadcast (with subtitles or dubbing) on Afghan or Iranian or Saudi TV or Pakistani TV. But is it possible that Keeping Up Appearances has been shown on Indian TV? Unvarnished? Where a huge continent-sized nation has to have some sort of assimilation between so many different outlooks and religious tastes? Where English is widely spoken? Where Bollywood is to the fore? And would the one or two imports of a British comedy such as KUAs, had the extremist sort stumbled upon it when flicking through the channels, have, or at least among some of the people in with him, have induced such a type or types to hover a few moments over this light comedy and glean some sense of the value of Britons acting to mere make life a little cheerful?
That unlikely scenario of delighting a hard man with light comedy may have been possible in the 3-TV channel Britain of the 70s and early 1980s. Indeed, fleeing Iranian refugees in 1981 may have got solace out of watching The Muppet Show on TV back then. It seems a trite observation, but what could have been more symbolic of freedom than turning on the television in your dank British bedsit and watching the theme tune to The Muppet Show blast into view? In the Silent era, for example, it was nearly all comedy — and traditional, very conservative immigrants’ children, among them many Jewish, observed it all, in the USA, and they and their parents all assimilated into the American dream. Was that comedy of Chaplin and Keaton so outrageous that it offended people? It was radical, transformative rather, but always the fun was too much for the offence-takers, if there had been any, to gain any currency.
I don’t know how much offending the sensibilities it would be were the antics of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy shown today on a screen in a hospital clinic’s or airport lounge’s waiting room. But everybody now has his or her head buried in a tiny screen. But at least cheer up the kids patiently waiting. The children of many and different cultures!
Oh how the West has shot itself in the foot! Like one of those Keystone cops.
Do you recall the controversy about The Life Of Brian? In 1979? Probably you heard about it. Comedy had reached its zenith of outrage alright. And then ten years later, as you later noted, the ayatollahs of this world reached their zenith of outrage over a mere novel. (That too I knew then was going to evolve into much bigger nastier stuff).
Many of the folks at home whose values you may not have shared, even if you acknowledge that you SENSE them, were offended by that Monty Python crudity on the times of Jesus. No, they did not have to watch it, that’s correct. But in recognising our shared values and inheritance (a Judeo-Christian civilisation, ultimately), they, the offended, could glean the terrifying future for Britain. People, in 1979, who were old enough to have personal memories of the Edwardian era, who were even born when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and who sent their children to Sunday School, must have worried about the direction of British society, and the future of their children’s children, when they read about a comedy like The Life Of Brian. They had every right to … say something. Today, such criticism against the zeitgeist would be shouted down. Too backward! Too old-fashioned! Too empire-ish! Shouted down to enable an untrammelled match into a wonderfully outrageous future.
But the more we do that, the more we lose sight of the mere task of giving cheer unto the world.
All the technology of today, so little cheer.
At the same time as The Life Of Brian, there was another movie made, in fact in 1977, about Jesus himself: Jesus Of Nazareth. Franco Zeffirelli directed. Robert Powell starred in the main role. He had also directed the excellent Romeo And Juliet in 1969.
But talk about chalk and cheese in terms of the difference in values! Was the farcical comedy of Life of Brian, in the light of the transgression, or outrage, worth the hurt feelings and anxiety induced?
Was not Jesus Of Nazareth necessary? Did that movie reflect the values of Britain? Of the British? A Christian nation?
With The Life Of Brian, the goodwill of the British people was exploited in the name of outrageous, immature comedy. I’m happy to say that. I’m even happier to discuss it. But I would not be happy to be told that my views are offensive to the many who see “old-fashioned values” as hate or offensive to them. To date, no Life Of Brian 2 has been made. They can make it if they want to.
The aim in life should be to make all people laugh heartedly. It should not be about pushing boundaries. The freedom of speech then looks after itself. As a result of that, boundaries may be explored, but not pushed against. Achieve that and then we’ll be happy in that society and its values. After all, what happens when boundaries are broken? Hell may well break loose.
The 1990s were a great decade to be a teenager and young tween. I lived in Amsterdam at the time, enjoying a life of unbridled hedonism. When 9/11 happened I knew that that special period of time was over. We are now living not in the Roaring 20s but in the Boring 20s. I feel sorry for today’s young who are being subjected to climate alarmism, sexual identity disorder, and accusations of unearned privilege.
>> I feel sorry for today’s young who are being subjected to climate alarmism, sexual identity disorder, and accusations of unearned privilege
I get the sense that the tide is going out on these things. Fashions come and go and I think the woke fashion and the global warming panic are on the way out.
You’re probably right; I can’t see this level of faux outrage and morality being maintained much longer. I’m hoping the trucker’s revolt is a sign of the changing times. Depending on which media sources you read, they are either disgruntled truckers, or a right-wing cabal of Neo-fasc*st ideologues seeking to advance Donald Trump’s global agenda on to the unsuspecting masses.
Because they are pushing it to such extremes even those who normally accept whatever they are told and don’t question much are going ‘Huh? Hang on a minute that makes ZERO sense..’
“We are now living not in the Roaring 20s but in the Boring 20s.”
How little you know of the Present, the World, and History…..
We are in 1932 right now, not 1922……. The ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’, the Great Depression (about to break on the world), The loss of freedoms, The Hyperinflation, The Global Elites building for their attempt at Global Domination, Yeats is better now, than Cobain…
“and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Another cheerful post Galeti – but how about useful plans to mitigate the above eg buy silver coins etc. Where is the UNherd economist we so urgently need – or are you the de facto. Come on Unherd !!
…noticed in Freddy’s interview with the Canadian finance guy about covid, Freddy was apologetic about addressing the ‘markets’. I agree economics it’s the biggest gap in Unherd’s coverage.
And a world of ‘post truth’ – even more debilitating than the above ie less hope
My experience of the 90s was as glorious as this piece relates. I think it was the last decade and we the last generation (unless the next one saves us) where context, irony and an an appreciation of the ‘live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse’ aesthetic was still a thing. It strikes me that millennials and Gen Z are largely humourless, po-faced, safety obsessed, undersexed moralists who are more uptight than the Victorians and out to erase anything spontaneous, interesting and funny from the culture.
…it’s what happens when the ladies do truly takeover everything. But don’t worry, the dramatic college falloff amongst men, maybe a sign that a rebirth is on the horizon.
But reverence for an era of past music tends to align with your age. So Coupland reveres the Nineties, with some good supporting stories. But older people, like myself, revere the late sixties/early seventies (Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, The Who etc.)
But we are in agreement that modern music is mostly commercialised trash.
“But we are in agreement that modern music is mostly commercialised trash.”
I thought that in the 1960s.
I always enjoy Douglas Copeland’s writing, but was distracted by the colour of the cardigan.
So pleased that the chartreuse green in the top picture found its way to sage green in the next picture.
It was a good article but i got all hung up on the lack of capital G in the word “Gesamtkunstwerk”.
I know that says more about me…
And me
Always- it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Depends on your wealth, age, health, relationship with loved ones doesn’t it? If you had ill health in the nineties, for example, it wasn’t a great decade obviously. Never believe false nostalgia and remember there isn’t a ‘we’ that had ‘a great time’. Just a myth. Our brains make up stories we tell ourselves. We create our own myths and you have to work hard to stop turning into that grumpy moron at the bar…’ of course years ago you could…(fill in the rest)’.
I have lived in every decade since the 60s. I don’t speak for you or anyone else, but for me the 80s was momentous. We had Thatcher and ‘You-Turn if you want to,the lady’s not for turning’ and Regan ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’. When was the last time you heard a leader utter such memorable and meaningful statements? Britain, the sick man of Europe, boomed, the USSR did indeed fall, as did the Berlin Wall. Never before or since have I known such a sense of hope and freedom in the Western World, and that is most defintiely, for me, not a myth or made up story. I don’t know if I’ll feel that again in my lifetime.
The 90s started ok, but then Clinton and Blair appeared to begin the new rule by Global Elite and the tyranny of Diversity and Identity politics that builds its own walls to happiness and freedom.
By all sorts of objective and subjective yardsticks, I am much better off now than I was in the 80s save for one thing. Back then the world was openning up, now it is closing down in all sorts of ways. Back then it was about what to make of the opportunities. I look forward today and plan how I’m going to make the best of the very rocky lockdown man-made road we are now just begining to experience and understand.
Regards
NHP
The 80s were awesome for all the reasons you list. Zoomers today are obsessed with the period, the music, the clothes. It was my favorite era of my adult life.
And this writer seems to be celebrating a time, the 90s, when youth culture turned from social issues to ‘having a good time’.
This was the portal to the self centred, look at my pout, 2000s.
Yes there was such a sense of optimism and energy. The West and its principles ruled the world, had made it a better place, everyone in the world wanted a part of it. The music, movies and culture were so inventive and fun, we had a sense of identity and comfort in our place. It was something to be proud of that communism had been defeated and freedom was a birthright. I loved it.
Agreed – if i was 20yo right now I would be living in a camper truck/boat and feeling pretty depressed about the world . Major bummer for the young. Most jobs are BS etc etc
To each their own, but personally, I’m with you. The ’80s were awesome, and the ’90s were such a letdown by comparison. That seemed to be the decade when people (yes, those people) began taking things too seriously. To me, Nirvana were–and remain–the very poster children of that mentality. In the ’80s music was just fun. The hair bands, the genuine metal bands, pop–you were just supposed to enjoy the music, you weren’t supposed to take the artists seriously nor consider the music important. If you were the type who did take it seriously, you did so because it was good and fun, not out of a sense of obligation or because it was saying things that certain people insisted needed to be said.
From my perspective, it seemed that in the ’90s you weren’t supposed to have fun anymore. Music should be depressing. Anyone smiling in a music video was clearly a dinosaur and deserving of some vaguely sarcastic comment. And it seemed MTV was leading the pack in promoting this change, at least from the music perspective. To me the ’90s seemed like a re-run of the ’60s, when musicians overrated themselves and wanted to lecture us or show us how we were supposed to be.
The ’90s weren’t without their moments. The Super Nintendo, PC games coming into their stride, 14.4 internet. No, scratch that last one, but it was a necessary stepping stone to the present. But if I could select any decade to repeat, it would have to be the ’80s. The fact that I was young and had no major responsibilities couldn’t possibly play a role in my view of it.
I loved the 90s but looking back I can see how it represented the end of one era and the beginning of another – and here we are……..
You clearly missed the dance scene. That was where all the fun was. What I particularly liked about it was that the music you listened to, you generally had no idea who wrote it because it couldn’t really be performed, as such, in the same way that traditional bands, on a stage, would.
It’s also true that a dimension of vacuity emerged too: DJ’s suddently became wealthy and famous, and for what? Playing other people’s music on a stage and apparently displaying their talent in how they mixed one track into another – a skill that takes about 20mins to learn. Musical talent not required.
For me the 90’s was when a new wave of optimism seemed to infect most people. I think the backdrop to this must ultimately have been the fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War: hundreds of millions of us were relieved all at once of the fear of nuclear war. Some of us, I do accept, responded to this by finding someting else to worry about (this is why global warming became the New Apocalypse in my view), but most of us just partied as far as I could tell.
One reason I preferred the 90’s to the 80’s is that the 90’s was when the hard work of the 80’s started to pay off. I’ve always been a Thatcher admirer and will always be, but the truth is that the decade in which she fixed the UK was cathartic, transformational and very often not all that pleasant.
It wasn’t until the 1990s, remember, that inflation finally came under control, and real wages started to rise generally (even then there remained large parts of the North where it never happened). I know that New Labour arrived in 1997, but the truth is that economically they were indistinguishable from Ken Clarke’s economic plans for the first four years, so in the UK the 90’s were a Tory economy boom all the way, and it was brilliant to live through.
In my opinion, 90s nostalgia has aged like a fine pair of JNCO jeans.
Written in the panting, fan hysteria, breathlessness, of a 60’s Beatles crazed teen girl. Do middle aged men really sound like this? I guess they do – weird world.
“MTV was still a thing back then. It was the twilight era of appointment TV viewing. * MTV was central to the tone and feel of the early 1990s.”
But when I think of MTV I always go back to the Archetype of the time. The Roman Empire was founded by Romulus and Remus, twins of a Daughter of Kings and a Vestal Virgin, abandoned to the wilds and raised by a wolf, giving them Nobility, heroic courage, and ferocity….
Wile the exact same conceit existed in the 1990s during the heyday of MTV: ‘Beavis and Buthead’. Twins of a crack using drunk, abandoned to a ragged sofa, and raised by a TV always tuned to MTV, giving them creepy personalities, stupidity, and weirdness….
And what a fitting contrast the pairs of boys made of their times….. capturing the Zeitgeist perfectly…..
Beavis and Butthead were meant to be FUNNY. They weren’t meant to be a political statement ffs. I can’t believe you were around in the 90s, you have disapproving 00s Millennial – or disapproving Mary Whitehouse – written all over your comment
Yeah I couldn’t stand B&B, I think (though it’s difficult to discern from his reasoning) for the reasons given by Galeti.
They weren’t funny, they stayed on a single predictable track of humour, and their apparent rebelliousness and pragmatic submission was rather shallow. And this was a political statement, as almost all art is, in illustrating the descent of American youth into a drug induced, navel gazing, good time haze. These people have grown up and birthed the current crop of the woke as a result.
My thought exactly-they were a loathsome pair designed as a critique of the new crop of ‘idjits’ springing from the loins of homo sapiens…
“But the Nineties actually came in two halves: the first half were the dark nineties, and the second half was the happy Nineties: Spice Girls! Windows 95!”
I’m so glad someone else sees it this way. My life seemed to go off like a firework in 1995, leaving me with the impression that I’d finally worked out what life is actually supposed to be like. Life hadn’t been bad before that or anything, just that everything seemed to come together for me in the mid 1990s and the thrill lasted until the early 2000s.
9/11 of course marks the end of one era and the beginning of another for Americans more than other people, but of course it is a milestone event for the rest of us too. In the UK though, culturally, I mark the end of the 1990s vibe with the arrival of Big Brother and reality TV. I’m not saying that these things were causal per se, more that they were harbingers of a newer age of more cynical, meaner and less optimistic attitudes. I personally cannot watch people making fools of themselves on reality TV, and think it was cruel and horrid that they were used for the entertainment of the rest of us this way: we stopped pointing at circus freaks long ago yet this is the same thing in modern form.
Anyway, in the 1990s I got into clubbing quite a lot having always hated nightclubs before, and I recall an article in (I think) Mixmag that explained what was special about the 1990s dance scene: we all went out to places as the crowd, but instead applauding people on the stage, the crowd itself was the star. And it was true, for a while at least. And for me it’s a parallel of the final sentence in the article above: I think we had something in the 1990s which we lost, we didn’t replace it with something better, and that makes me sad for those that won’t ever experience it.