Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Brad Buchanan's avatar

Great piece! I missed that Nirvana "performance," somehow, but your reference has inspired some poetry:

Nirvana on Top of the Pops

forbidden from playing

their instruments

three free-spirited

kids from Seattle

burlesque the motions

of being rock stars

pretend to perform

their biggest hit

but in the wrong voice

in open protest

before a hyped-up audience

who only ask

for a pretext to dance

and clap in rhythm

for the cameras

as the singer misremembers

his no longer

subversive words

“load up on drugs

and kill your friends

it’s fun to lose

and to defend”

is now the message

behind the madness

that this methodical

falseness demands

he threatens to swallow

the microphone

the only one live

on the phony stage

in the phony BBC studio

in the crooning tone

of a different icon

to show them all

how low

the business of music

has sunk

how low

the once-spontaneous

communion

between poet

and expectant world

Expand full comment
Carl Wilson's avatar

This was so interesting! Thank you for reporting on this story from the youtube guitar trenches. But Andrew, "An electric guitar running through a tube amp cranked until it breaks up and distorts" has not been "the organising principle of the vast majority of all popular music" for at least 25 years, and actually probably *never was the "vast majority." Even when rock was dominant, there was always lots and lots of dance and easy-listening music etc etc that was not "organized" around electric guitars, even if it might have had electric guitars on it. And rock has not been dominant since the 1990s. An unusually careless statement coming from you.

Expand full comment
2 more comments...

No posts