Dragged on an Outing

"I'll start this off without any words"
- 'On A Plain'

Have you ever really thought about Nirvana?

Well, no. Why would you have to? They're so overexposed and inset, they've become cultural white noise. It's far from easy for anyone born around the late C20th to delimn them, to separate them out from the whole.

Some questions in philosophy get called "truth-inapt" (that is, of indeterminate reply, usually because the answer to them is not a proposition). The question of whether you like Nirvana reminds me a bit of this. You certainly can like them - and, boy, we seem to - but what good does it do you?

Notes from "Unplugged In New York, though:

- Cobain is actually a country singer. No, really - a mutated one, but still the indelible praise sticks. Where Country & Western's purpose is to glorify and dramatize the ordinary (and actively absurd) facets of Midwest America's experience, Nirvana demonize and delve under it. Often into things which are, too, ordinary, but unspoken, unspeakable. It is the dark side of bucolia.

. Frustration
. Having a prostitute for a partner
. Parents becoming factions for their children to choose between
. Children with cancer
. Frustration
. Resenting medication
. Resenting your daughter for not being a son.
. Frustration
. Frustration





- That said, don't let anyone try to tell you he was a genius lyricist or anything. There's also that pathetic thing they do ("In Bloom", "Smells Like") where they complain about the amount of people who will buy their music and about who will buy their music, i.e. booo rednex and jox. Here's a thought: Most people are misunderstood. An obsession with being "alternative" or more punk than whoever else can lead only one way; selling out of life, and did. The commercial / alternative distinction is ridiculous, based as it is in the idea of Authenticity.

This is a horrible idea of aesthetics:

But this is no more right, and this is maybe what killed the dumb bastard:

Some more caricature aesthetics graphs, cos they're fun:


- They really did prefigure/enable that mookish, solipsistic strain of rock which washed up on our eC21st adolescent shores, all piteous and gagging. The fixation on Being Rejected and of fantasising about a titanic, tragic romance stands.

	"MOOK (noun) 1: A male adolescent or young adult exhibiting an unpleasant, self-centered attitude, formed during a sheltered upbringing."

- But there's a real feminist lilt to them that's not so often emphasised, probably because of the misogyny that 'Polly' et al represent, as well as the general Nasty Metal air of most lyrics. But Cobain focalized women, and belted against the horrible things that men do to them remarkably often. Nirvana owe far more to riot grrl than to uniformly whitemale hardcore punk.

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"this song is weird, love song about eminem singed by dude,but neil is gay so it's understandible that he love guys"

Hee.

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There comes a time in every boy's life where he'll start to awaken and broaden and wonder what it will take to be himself. This time is immediatedly waited upon by a time where his Da prints out Kipling's "If" and buys him soft porn.

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"I hate the epidemic of vilifying chavs that's everywhere right now [2007]. Chavs are good, let's face it. They're unpretentious, listen to goood music and are about 500 times better than the Ordinary Boys fans who write this shit [chavscum]. Inventing stereotypes so you can laugh at people and find something to smirk about is pure evil. No one can claim this is light-hearted fun. It is the middle class calling the working class scum and spreading hatred of them on the internet. It's completely fucking disgusting."

- James mk.1

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Idea for an art band - an album, or career, based entirely in writing songs about specific gigs they've played. If you publicized this fact, you might draw the crowds up to the occasion of being recorded. Create some proper interaction for once. You'd try not to make it gimmicky, but you would soon realize that 90% of audiences are cowed and passive - thus you'd have no distinctive thing to write songs about - and that that's the way most bands have liked it.

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"There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well."
- Austen's Elizabeth

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thing wot I've thought (Titular):

"Free your ass and your mind will follow!"
- Hank von Helvete

Isn't the (out of fashion?) practice of the press "outing" closeted people actually fucking indefensible? I mean, prithee I'm missing something. Ain't it just a subtle kind of lynching? I'm not libertarian by any stretch of the mind, but when did someone's sexuality become something that privacy didn't apply to?

I don't mean the action historically, as deadly smear - "sodomite!" - but just the clearsighted public exposure of someone who hadn't previously identified as gay. It's generally reported in the same register as the bastards espy their prey's pregnancies, or weight gains. You might call it "hiding" or being "repressed", and many maybe are. But I'd be more inclined in general to call it trying to live with some dignity.

Clarification needed here, I suppose:

1) no, despite the clumsy phrasing, I didn't mean that homosexuality is any more undignified than hetero; I think all such exposé is undignified, whether it's OK! wedding photos or details of who one was talking to at that party-one-was-paid-to-go-to.

Anyone got any examples of cases in which someone was "outed" as straight; in which the reversal of the expectation about them was newsworthy?

2) yes, it is probably wrong that our uniform presumption is of a person's heterosexuality (even noting the 10:1 likelihood of it). It's The Glass Closet.

3) no, I'm not particularly prudish when it comes to people reporting their tastes/exploits, though I'll not dignify many of them with the idiot attention they're designed to attract.


We do, of course, gurn merrily when it's a pious Republican senator's hypocrisy shown up, carnal rentboy style. But even there, do you not recoil from the malice? Politicians are seen to be fairer game than, say, actors, for some reason.


I suppose when it was the gay press (or rights activists, or rabid fans) they could imagine themselves liberators, fucking, surgeons on their subjects' repression, their self-inflicted ailment. Or maybe it was more of a weird recruitment angle, trying to force the hate-sick world into normality one ass at a time. Or trying to fight the invisibility of the lobby, or whatever. Spin magazine once tried to out Busta Rhymes, which I do concede would have been an amazing headline.

Pressure, pushing down on me.

Obviously far worse than either is the US military's bullshit. (Though China and Greece's are always forgotten about.) "Don't launch inquisition, so long as they don't act funny."


"I don't think it's any kind of secret within the music industry and within the fan base at large what my sexual preference is..... I was born with it. I don't like the word gay because I don't know what the word really means.... I'm not your spokesperson, because I don't know what you're about.... I do not flaunt my sexuality. I do not deny my sexuality. It is my sexuality. It is not the public's sexuality... I'm not a fucking freak, or at least not because of that."

- Bob Mould, who was more or less blackmailed Out in 1994

Think about "closeted". The word carries denial, shame, and being made to deceive. In a lot of the world, this is still what it is to be privately gay (as well as massive buckets of fear). But it also implies that 'real' homosexuality is public, that it is an explicit essence that one must unleash on the world; almost that "one may know a gay person even by their non-sexual behaviour".

Of course we do judge sexuality on visual cues, just as we do for gender, age and, in fact, the presence of a sapient mind. But this creates a social role, and roles want filling, even if we have to distort ourselves to fit into them.

Heterosexuality has plenty of absurd visual/behavioural stereotypes too (the most facile being that one where Straight Men are supposed to recoil from the sight of a penis; the most excellent being the loose restrictions on grooming). And it's a gleeful thing that the overlap of this with homoerotic ideals is so high. (How is a relationship with twice as many men in it supposed to be less manly?) But it's nothing like the Identity claim that homosexuality still seems bound up in.

"I was being made out to be a coward about it, rather than someone who felt like it really was a very private thing."
- Michael Stipe

Fuck, maybe not, maybe it is liberating. Bob Mould even djs house music nights these days, this instead of wailing goodly macho hardcore punk. Maybe he wouldn't have been able to swallow his irony enough if, y'know, the get-out-of-taste-free card (which is what it means to be camp (which obviously is what it means to be gay)) hadn't been pushed on him.

There must be a distinction between being repressed and being private.

I dunno. Maybe it is no big deal, maybe it should be treated the same as any other predicate that people want to hang their opinions off of. I'm obviously too naive for this discourse - I still don't really understand the David Laws situ.

I'd thought I lived in a newer world than the one in which public figures still did this.