Once Jen and I went to Northampton for brunch and on the way up I put on In Utero and by the time we arrived Jennifer was pretty upset. She said that for twenty minutes this guy had been telling her stuff like "throw me in the fire and I won't throw a fit" and "rape me again" and so forth, and that at that point her first reaction, to Kurt, was "look I didn't do anything to you but if I say I'm sorry will you stop yelling at me?!" and that her second reaction, to me, was "how can you smile through this stuff?"

To me, Nirvana is joyful music. When Courtney Love sings "Love hangs herself with the bedsheets in her cell" it is joyful. When Jessicka Fodera sings "kill me faster with strawberry gashes all over" it is joyful. When Scott Lucas sings "heading for the gun, I can see rock bottom" is it joyful. Why? Because the underlying music is joyful: the cannon shots of the drums, the crashing guitar chords... but really, all music is joyful for me if I like it. Music is magical in its ability to evoke emotion, at any point on the emotional spectrum, without recourse to narrative — but a beautifully sad chord sequence will make me feel not sad, but joyful, because it is beautiful; a furious drumbeat will make me feel not furious, but joyful, because it is beautiful; and, hey, if the music is deliriously happy that works too. The lyrics are usually my last concern: when I write songs I work out the drums, the bass, the guitar and the tune, but the lyrics are negotiable and often change wildly before each recording. But that's not to say that lyrics are totally unimportant: certainly bad lyrics can ruin a song for me, and I could name a lot of songs I'd like a lot more if the lyrics weren't so juvenile or otherwise cringeworthy. But I do like suicidally dark lyrics. To me, lines like those above suggest that the musician could have blown his head off, or slashed her wrists open, but decided to channel that inner torment into making something beautiful. Each of these songs is a moment of triumph against the darkness. (Of course, as Kurt proved, nothing says they won't blow their heads off after they're done.)

I have been somewhat depressed lately, and one of the annoying things about this has been that I haven't been able to work up an interest in much of anything... can't get anything done on my IF project, can't write ACX scripts, can't even summon the energy to play the computer strategy game I've been obsessed with for the past few weeks. There've been two exceptions: I've been logging a lot of hours at work (good for the bank balance, at least)... and I've put in no small amount of therapeutic time behind the drum kit. One thing I had to take out of Ready, Okay!, and am putting in my current project, is the extent to which this sort of "tantrum music" can be an amazing force for healing — I might not have made it through the summer of 1994 without listening to Live Through This ("go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to") several times a day. To me it's not "inflicting pain on everyone else" — it's curing it, showing that that pain is not the listener's alone — and that it can be turned inside-out.