Repeating Nirvana's All Apologies on a past mid-February night

 

Eyes slightly surprised, this slow start, the patient starting pace with the catchy modest melody of a dozen notes. The eyes unfocussed a bit more - not that they had been highly concentrated before - any visual intention stepping to the background. Here is a song to listen to, a few minutes with more accute concentration, especially since the rhythm now accelerates pushing any cuteness by the shoulder. But  in a certain way this is the common Nirvana explosion, their usual balance - slow verses, punk chorus.

Still the song diffused its own tint, a small spark.

     REPEAT.

Another start, the same careful setting, everything assembled itself again, the shallow grasp might have been slightly more obvious, the good surprise feeling lightly more intense. I was younger at the time, I was still learning the classics - I could still be surprised by a battered album like In Utero. Could you imagine I had never listen to it from start to end before 23? How could I call myself a rock fan? I knew Rape Me, knowing more maybe, maybe indiscriminate acoustic versions from the Unplugged In album, without nothing their origin; I might still consider "The Man Who Sold the World" a Cobain song at the time... I was fresh, as jaded as university student can be, and even more jaded in a way since I was from Paris, and its snobbishness. Perfectly unwise & inexperienced.

Boring, lazy, or merely predictable. The vaguely boring ending slowly faded.

     REPEAT.

What sort of combination is this? My mind was shrugging faintly, constantly, nervously, ideas trying to find a stable ground - this sound was confusing. And then I could hear a few cello sparks, charming, nice, commercial, produced & packaged: I would have never imagined cello in the background of a Nirvana song. No doubt Cobain felt he was selling out. Cello, how punk, my dear - and give me some more tea & cookies, Courtney. And the tiny, fresh looped melody, acoustic clear: it could easily be implemented in a music box. The ballet dancer would swirl in between two dirty saturated guitar lightning's. That's a vision.

The fading sung echo even keeps going on without music in the end, pure voice, pure voice, vocal weakness alone.

     REPEAT.

A mumbling voice in the final and a mechanical list in the beginning, triggered a few seconds after the cleanly-installed atmosphere. Questions, complaints, questions, complaints - as simply assembled as most Nirvana songs. As blurred & teenage meaningless, blue pencil ants on a cheap notebook Cobain stuck in a shapeless backpack to college. But not ridiculous though. Not cheap. - not too cheap Neither the screams and their clumsy wordplay 'Married! Buried!'. Things remained on balance, things were slowly building something bigger, something trembling, flickering, so small & invisible, something diffusing patiently,  around, all around, inside.

The husky lyrics kept trembling nervous & contained all along, with controlled levels: early low-husky, mixed-mumbling-husky eventually, jumping-husky in chorus. A latent painful anger buzzing far, far, deep, and only jumping a bit closer to the surface at some points.

     REPEAT.

Anger, anger yeah, clear even in the first verses. Not the first, flat, clean, basic, but already obvious in the final syllabi of the second verse; a lock shaken back with a grin, a sigh, a grumbling lip - anger was walking calmly, thorns ready to jump if attacked, if talked to, if gazed at, if it suddenly wanted to swell up. Anger, an hurt anger, battered anger. Hence pain, through the scratched anger, the scratched screams and reddening shouts. Fakely-sleeping anger & disguised hurt pain, looking with modest eyes, talking like any day, like small talks at the bakery store, small talks with apparently polite & harmless words; but anger & pain gazing, gazing, gazing without end, with half-shut sleepy eyes, eyes loaded with velvet unclear products, eyes that certainly cried themselves to sleep in between stomach pain and life-is-so-pointless pain.

The looped cute melody now sounds costumed, a make-believe approach, Troy horse leading to vague lyrics leading vague shouts - all of them saturated with invisible pain & anger. FM waves were certainly filtering them, you would barely hear them on the car radio, and still.

     REPEAT.

Anger & pain I could scream in the tiny student room, in front of the cheap desk covered with a couple of scientific sheets, scattered logarithms or heat transfer formula or electronic meaningless diagrams. But who can remember now, and who cared at the time by the way, on that very night? I was screaming in tune, pacing the beat, clapping opened hands on the bare industrial wood, stuck to the assembled layers that were opening next to me. Eyes full of tears, belly & chest shaken with anger, infinite sadness & deep anger walking hand in hand, impossible to distinguish, mixed & blended, one single inescapable feeling with merely two vague trembling shades under the unstable light. I could not stop singing & shooting, even silently most of the time.

Even the the final fade out had grasped me by then, mashed words who could not keep inside your throat, but raw sound pieces I could not shape before they leaked through the lips. allinallisallweallare allinallisallweallare allinallisallweallare, not even capital letters required. Did not know what it meant, did not think it meant anything, nothing but breaths with vague vowels thrown to the wind.

     REPEAT.

And it was not a real break-up, not a break-up at all, come to think of it. Just a worthless girl, an egoist girl, a girl in her world. We had shared coffee a couple of months before, had ordered fine tea in a fancy cafe, had seen a bad movie she had chosen. We had talked, talked, she was lost, recently alone. And almost instantly she had vanished, had dived in a faster life, further than the campus, invisible, only sneaking in classrooms without a word. A new boyfriend for sure. A real one, after the naive kid who had served tea when confidence was lacking, the movie companion who had slowly started thinking "and if? but no... but if?".

No, not a girlfriend at all, not even close to be one. No more than a couple of afternoons with light chat and snobbish laughs and mechanical compliment. No more than a bitter paragraph you can classify and quote years later as cheap late-night anecdote.

Still, the sad shouting anger would not release the grip, the flux in my mind in this mid-Feburary evening.

     REPEAT

Details can break weak doors and release the files that had not been cleanly classified, not clearly concluded and forgiven. At lunch, she had been sitting at next table, one meter away; not even a word, not even, a movement of the eyes, not even anything - statue laughing with another buddy one meter away. Nothing at all, cheap & easy & petty arrogance, uninteresting pride. Not even enough material for two paragraphs in a short story. Merely a flash, a vision, a couple of shapes for disbelieving eyes.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, this nothing whispering all afternoon and all evening. The little nothing seeds of sadness & anger & pain, mute and swelling. Nothing, nothing, the tsunami wave was a mere 2 cm step above the deep sea, while rushing fast toward passive islands. Just turned the head where it was darker, more blurred, over the quicksandy carpet - I could not see anything else but this nothing, I could see it growing and could not really look away.

     REPEAT.

I had found the In Utero album at the University library, the previous day or that very night, not the kind of details I could remember or I would have written down. I had put the CD on without thinking, a weird vision of mute arrogant girl printed in my mind. A few tracks, the unbalanced songs gathered by Nirvana, raw & predictable, and then All Apologies appeared. All Apologies kidnapped me, leaving only my finger on the CD player button.

    REPEAT.

The song had unravelled itself, it had made obvious unpredictable blends, it had revealed it intimate skeleton and consistency, its meaningful succession. A then B then C then D, even mere drum beats were now resonating crystal clear in twelve square meters, the predictable highlights that were appreciated even more at each of their iteration. I could feel the details in Cobain grainy voice, grainy grumble, unrecorded breaths. I could get drunker and drunker to the unsuspected idea that pure desperate sadness could be associated with honest & intense anger. They could be blended, they could be one, and I did not need any justification - I was feeling the blend so clearly and feelings are their own justification.

I dived and sung and inspected aspects and aspects of All Apologies.

I must have listened to the song 10 times in a row that night, repeating it again and again, totally unable to stop the string of identical fascination, self-fed.

I cannot remember how it ended, how I stopped. I can only imagine it as an oscillating restless scuba diver who suddenly kept his head out of the water, removed his mask & tuba, and started floating on the water on his back, with a sad & angry & exhausted faint smile.