13 March 1992
After reading an article on modern music in International Newsweek (a total rag), I wrote the following letter to Dan:
I read an article which was trying to explain modern music (notably Nirvana) to the "rock-n-roll" generation and talked about the obsession with process – i.e. the sound of the bow running across the strings is more important than the note it makes (or as important), etc. The article called this an obsession with "surfaces" but I call it process because I don’t think it’s about surfaces, really. The article also said that, at least for people who like the music – no, even for people who don’t – the power of it is that you don’t just hear it, you sort of feel it in your gut. Part of the reason for all this, it said, was all the new technology available that makes it possible to be obsessed with process (my words), but part of it is "us" (our generation, babe) creating our cultural expression. Unlike the nock-n-rollers we don’t have an option of straight-out polemic – we can’t just blindly maintain reactionary liberalism (if you know what I mean). All kinds of contradictory viewpoints have been shoved at us and we have the unique experience of not being able to take anything for granted (not even our own rebellion) – we have to sort through it all. And before that we have to find a way to take it all in without going totally bonkers. Of course I’m going much more in depth on this than the article, which was in Newsweek, after all, but nonetheless had some interesting parts. I most of all liked the part where it says that the creative use of static or feedback or grain (for image) or whatever, isn’t a cop-out or a gimmick, it isn’t meaningless – it means everything because it tries to (incorporate all meanings) use everything. Well, really I guess the article itself didn’t express it very well, but I made a lot of sense out of it for myself. Maybe I’m not remembering it fully, but I think it could have been better. For example I think that what that last part means to me is that using grain and static and white noise, not just straight but incorporating it into your own creation, is taking this overload of information we’ve been given and trying to fit it into our conception of the world – even if we can’t get it to make "sense," at least we can make it ours and even make it beautiful, in a sense, and vital and even, maybe, somehow beneficial after all the rest. It’s like the difference between constructive disorder and, if not destructive, then at least stagnant and outmoded order – from chaos comes a lot of incredible and great things if you work with it. Well, you know all this, I’m just excited because, even though this article wasn’t very good, it did inspire me to think about this stuff in this way and help me begin to answer the question I had about where I fit in to my culture – by helping me make the connection between the theoretical stuff we’ve been exploring and loving for so long with the reality of how I feel in the world and what I like that I’ve seen or heard.
[The condition I describe here, I think, is a large part of the phenomenon that later led to my generation being dubbed Generation X, after a fabulous book by Douglas Coupland].