Political hipster turns grunge classic into bumper shtick

I had seen the singer interviewed on TV. He was a foppish young man who seemed thoroughly disgusted to find himself so liked.

—Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To


As of this writing, the cover of Nevermind’s 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition has more than 45,000 Likes on the official Nirvana Facebook page. To promote this rerelease, the two surviving core members of Nirvana and Nevermind’s producer Butch Vig will participate in a live two-hour SiriusXM Radio Q&A on Sept. 24. The interviewer will be Daily Show host Jon Stewart.

The curious choice of Stewart to focus on the album’s legacy all but guarantees that the Q&A will be a Like-fest rather than an interesting or revealing discussion. Stewart will appear as yet another Gen-X authority touting Nevermind’s era-encapsulating importance. Nevertheless, the fact of his participation tells us a lot about how pop culture has changed since 1991.

What hasn’t changed is Nevermind’s inflated reputation. Now as then, it benefits from mainstream media’s long-standing, oft-noted rockist prejudice. The eventual dominance of hip-hop forced critics to come out of their rockist shells a bit, yet to this day no hip-hop record has gone canonical in the way of Nevermind. As our culture’s fragmentation increases, so does the solidity of this album’s position as its era’s unmatched classic.

Yes, Nevermind is overpraised as “a great modern punk record,” but in at least one respect it is underappreciated. Twenty-first-century praise for Nirvana’s loudness and rawness misses how Kurt Cobain actually spoke to his times. Wikipedia informs us that Cobain was inspired by the simplicity of children’s music, but an even more apt reference point might be TV theme songs and jingles—translated into a punk idiom by sarcastic, pop-addicted kids. The album has a fairytale quality of inverted innocence, reminiscent of toys that scare the kid who owns them by seeming to assume scary shapes when the lights go out. It’s essentially a post-punk record (defying pop music convention with pomo idiosyncrasy), but without ’80s-utopian sonic experimentation.

Nevermind authentically portrays the inner world of the pampered post-boomer youth class, alienated from their advantages, dimly aware that mass media, no less than their parents, are preparing them to accept predetermined social roles. Cobain’s lyrics, often mumbled like half-swallowed backtalk from the back of the classroom, mocked the options available to white youth (e.g., “We can plant a house/ We can build a tree” from “Breed”). Rather than energized by its opposition to conformity, though, the album as a whole is anxious and uncertain, even heartbroken by the lack of satisfying alternatives.

From a vast remove, Cobain sought to recapture punk’s counterculture integrity for an infantilized generation. That’s why the title Nevermind references the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks but refracts that totem to recall Peter Pan’s Neverland. The way Jon Stewart’s Daily Show works is not so different: Stewart’s humor, meant to appeal to the “smart” youth market, holds today’s political commentators to a ’70s ideal of oppositional journalism and finds them wanting. Unlike Nirvana, however, Stewart entertains his demographic without first considering the import of his own corporate-media celebrity.

The Daily Show was an early adopter of red-state/blue-state humor. Even before Stewart became its host in 1998, the show frequently featured “field pieces” that exploited the eccentricities of un-hip Americans with proto-Borat glee. Comedy Central paved the way for Jon Stewart to become our preeminent purveyor of political snark soon after the 2000 election. In the Obama era, we hear less about red states and blue states; the cultural divisions that now both intensify and disguise genuine American antagonisms correspond more closely to middle-class hegemonic tastes. And here’s where Stewart has proved himself the least subversive of satirists: In promoting “Sanity” (i.e., sanitized discourse), he is as slick a triangulator as Bill Clinton was in the ’90s.

In fact, Cobain satirized American entertainment values more successfully than Stewart in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” (“A mulatto, an albino/ A mosquito, my libido”). But the salvageable, sophisticated element of Nirvana’s legacy is difficult to appreciate in the context of today’s Like-based cultural economy. Today’s pop artworks are judged by how well they inflame or distract from our repressed conflicts. Jon Stewart’s refusal to acknowledge the placating purpose he serves for his youthcult audience, or even who signs his paychecks, makes him mad Likeable in a way Nirvana never were.