Love With A Capital L

A journey towards living an inspired life of love in the modern world

Tag: Nirvana

Kurt Cobain — August 8, 2020

Kurt Cobain

/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I am feeling better, the darkness is lifting, so I could finally get back to depressing Netflix (or in this case, Amazon Prime) documentaries without tearing at the seams of my mental health. Saturday, it was Soaked In Bleach, an account of the death of Kurt Cobain.

2 things about this. 1. I didn’t sleep Friday night, so I watched this in the middle of the night while 2 wild cats in my driveway screamed and moaned. It was an awful, but somehow perfectly fitting soundtrack.

And 2. I told my oldest son about this film. He has “Come As You Are” as his ringtone because it’s the music of the best scene in Captain Marvel, and this beautiful boy of mine (who has been hearing about Nirvana and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Nevermind since he was in the womb), flesh of my flesh, asks me, “Who’s he? Is he a singer?” I am the worst father in America.

So. The voice of my generation committed suicide in 1994, or at least that’s what we were told. This documentary cast doubt on that, instead exposing many of the whispered rumors we heard that it might’ve had more to do with his wife, Courtney Love, a broken marriage and mountains of money. And maybe it did. Maybe she was involved, maybe it was a gross miscarriage of justice. There is certainly more to the story than an addict and a shotgun. One thing that hasn’t changed is what he meant to me. Maybe because of that, I should be more outraged than I am.

What I do want to talk about, and what I’ll explain to my sweet boy after he listens to the entire Nirvana oeuvre, is that honesty matters.

In the Filthy Epstein doc, Bill Clinton denied that he was ever on the disgusting island, when he surely was. Now, maybe he didn’t ever partake in the sex trade that was going on, but if he didn’t, why would he lie? It’s the muddy waters of his character that make me very suspicious.

In the same fashion, probably Courtney Love didn’t murder her husband. But why the mountain of lies that surround her? Her deception make me very suspicious.

The lies about phone calls and island trips themselves obviously don’t directly correlate to sexual abuse and murder, but in real life, it doesn’t take evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to cast shadows and destroy trust. If she doesn’t come home and says she’s with her friend…but she’s not…that doesn’t mean she’s with him. But it sure doesn’t help, and that sort of disruption can take years and years to repair.

Life and relationships are hard enough. Every day can be very difficult and take such a toll, we simply don’t have the reservoir of energy to spend repairing a misstep of dishonesty. That’s what I’ll tell my boys. But they’re not great listeners yet, and I suppose if I had the choice, I’d rather they hear that little bit about lies than the lyrics to “Drain You.”

Smells Like Real Life — November 5, 2019

Smells Like Real Life

/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

Around the same time, also in 1991, a band from Seattle called Nirvana released an album that would change everything in music, fashion and culture as a whole. This album would also give me a space (even if it was only in my head and heart) and in doing so, make me not as much of a weirdo, not as much of a misfit.

While we were all trying to be perfect – and what I mean is that while we were all trying to show everyone we were perfect – here was a band and a singer who looked like we all felt. The music did, too. We were insecure and inadequate in a land of make believe and that made so many of us so angry. We were desperately searching for meaning and purpose (there just had to be more than hair spray and insincerity holding us together, didn’t there?) and not only were we not getting answers, our questions were being ignored.

Now. The song. The drums perfectly sounded like doors being kicked down, which of course, they were. Then, the voice of Kurt Cobain mumbled: “Load up on guns, bring your friends. It’s fun to lose and to pretend. She’s over-bored and self-assured.” Hello, hello, hello, how low. Then, our worlds collectively fell apart (or together) at the chorus: “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Here we are now, entertain us. I feel stupid and contagious. Here we are now, entertain us.”

We might talk about “here we are now, entertain us” as the anthem for a generation, and generations to come, but it’s that “stupid and contagious” line that broke my heart. You know when someone says something and you think, “how did they know?”

How could a guy in the Pacific Northwest know who I was and exactly what I was going through? He couldn’t, and that meant there were more like me, disaffected, lost, lonely, and that was unbelievably comforting. There were more like me, I wasn’t alone.

The song destroys all pretense and perfectly sums up the ache in us all and ends… wait’ll you hear this… “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” Whatever, nevermind!!!! Awesome. It’s angry, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, honest, cutting, and hilarious. It is overwhelmingly real.

People began dressing differently, doing (or not doing) their hair, speaking truth, showing their wounds and scars. We started to think about confessing that no, things might not be ok.

3 years later, in April of 1994, Kurt Cobain killed himself. Sigh.

But the world had changed, he shined a light into our souls and exposed us. The images and facades were hollow, the emperor had no clothes. So now what? We could start to find the clothes that did. We could be whatever we wanted, whatever we actually were. So who was I in 1991? Nobody knew. I sure didn’t. I had spent so long being what you wanted me to be that I hardly noticed who I truly was.

I didn’t know how or where to find out – only that it was absolutely necessary. One thing I knew for sure was that I wouldn’t find anything in Mariah Carey videos. Or the church.

Emotions — November 1, 2019

Emotions

/The Bridge Faith Community/Leave a comment

I gave a talk at a youth group near Gettysburg last Saturday. The church is fairly conservative (although it could be said that, to me, maybe every church is fairly conservative) and there was a very good chance that I would not play well there. I shared the message for their Sunday service several years ago and have not yet been invited back. The looks on the congregants faces told me as much, so the fact that I was not yet invited back was far less surprising than that I was for their youth group.

I was because I have very good friends who either persuaded everyone else who (hopefully) had forgotten the past or hidden my visit from them altogether. I didn’t ask which one.

My very good friend asked me to come and speak about music and faith. I said yes, of course, then asked “um, what kind of music?” Because the kind of talk I would give on Christian music might not be what she had in mind. And actually, what music I consider to be Christian might not be everyone’s, and we should probably know what definition we’re using to avoid the kind of misunderstandings I enjoy. She said whatever I wanted, and I asked her to pretty please repeat that. And she did. So, I said yes again.

Now, I think it would be fun to explore those songs and ideas here, in a short series based on that talk, called “It’s a Cold and It’s a Broken Hallelujah.”

The songs are: “Emotions,” by Mariah Carey. (So you know and can follow along as intended, we played the videos – easily found in a Google search. For this one, however, I offered to simply play the song because there was “a significant cleavage issue.” And there is.) “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” by Nirvana. “Help Is On The Way,” by Rise Against. (This one is the only one that the video is absolutely necessary.) And “Hallelujah,” the cover version by Jeff Buckley.

“Emotions” was a gigantic hit record in 1991. It was all of the words that begin with P: polished, produced, perfect. What an unbelievable showcase for that extraordinary instrument of hers, right?!! She looks and sounds absolutely beautiful. The video is exactly like the song, glossy and refined, as if a team of marketers created it in a laboratory for maximum exposure and sales figures.

The problem is that it’s called “Emotions,” and I don’t feel any at all. Except that she’s awesome, I suppose.

Pretending is the other P word that comes to mind with something like this. It’s like an advertisement for LIFE, or at least the life other people are living, that I could be living if only I…whatever. It brings to mind – and the reason I play it in discussions of spirituality – gauzy pictures of Christians with perfect teeth and plastic smiles. This was the perspective I had of people of faith for the first half of my life. To me, they all looked like Joel Osteen book jackets, all smiles and manicured nails. My life wasn’t all smiles and manicured nails. In fact, no life I knew was all smiles. Sometimes, there were tears and dirt and darkness and hairs wildly out of place.

When you’re upset and the wheels are falling off, a Christian, with their cliches and cheery platitudes and “God’s plan,” is often the very last person you’d like to see. The carefully crafted images of rounded edges and masks they wear usually just amplify their uncomfortability and insecurity.

Everything is fine, and if it’s not, shhh, we’ll just hide that behind the closet door and hope it goes away.

Phony (another ‘P!!’) That is what “Emotions” means to me.

I understand that this is not the most positive way to start a conversation, but it gets better. It has to.