The Last Action Hero

Number one in rock and roll heaven

Sub Pop, the independent record label which needs no introduction, has turned 20 years old. For me, the Sub Pop story begins and ends with Nirvana, who were my first real favorite band (before that: Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and Bill Joel for "Beat It," "Born in the U.S.A.," and "Uptown Girl" respectively). Cool kid that I was in sixth grade, I didn't get into them until after Kurt Cobain's suicide, meaning that my worship was consecrated in overdramatic douchebaggery: lines which seem lifted from Mystik Spiral b-sides - "I miss the comfort in being sad" or "Throw down your umbilical noose, so I can climb right back" come to mind, though that's just because I was listening to In Utero this morning - seemed like cosmic totems of profound insight, a perception sealed when Cobain, unable to ascend directly into heaven in corporeal form, opted for plan B. You can trace a not-so-straight line of hysterical devotion from The Smiths and The Cure through Nirvana on to emo stalwarts like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World (whose "Bleed American" reads like "Teen Spirit" run backwards) before ending up at My Chemical Romance, whom blogger hate-object Ultragrrrl once characterized as "this generation's Nirvana." Her assessment, widely ridiculed at the time, largely by the "35 year old men writing for other 35 year old men who think they're actually writing to 21 year old college kids" she was calling out, is resonant because it keys in on where MCR fits in the lives of today's teenagers, which, I imagine for a good lot of them, is precisely where Nirvana figured in my own adolescent passion play. I had the posters of Kurt, Krist, and Dave, as well as one of the cryptic In Utero cover (a title whose provenance I mightn't have discovered until much later in life were it not for the album); I listened to the albums religiously, making tapes of them to listen to on my Walkman during car rides of even the shortest duration; for a brief time I even dressed in flannel and tried to part my hair the way Kurt did - a period from which I am eternally grateful no photographs survive. Nirvana meant everything then, and even though there have been other flames - Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Elvis Costello - maturity, critical distance, whatever the hell you want to call it, has kept me from the same unquestioning adoration. Of course, it could just be that none of those guys is as good as Nirvana was, a notion that would doubtlessly be contested by those that were there with their heads on straight, the clinicians who have seen it all and chart every blip on the rock and roll continuum with perpetual bemusement. Then again, if you actually happed to be at the Sermon on the Mount or the Last Supper, you would probably wonder what all the goddamn fuss was about, too.