Obviously most of the stuff on this shelf was out of my reach. I wasn't old enough to watch many of the movies so instead, during morning walks to school, I'd ask my mum to explain the plots to me of movies I'd seen on the shelf. I knew the plot the entire Scream trilogy long before I came to watch them. By the time I was old enough to view most of them they had been chucked out in favor of the DVD revolution, while on the hand the video games fed an unhealthy childhood obsession. Neither gave me anything I could call my own.
No, it was the music that spoke to me. I can't recall the first time I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit, it was one of those songs that's always been in my music vocabulary due to its constant rotation on music channels during the early naughties, along with the likes of Hey Ya by Outkast and Bad Day by Daniel Powter.
Teen Spirit was my favorite song at the time, so I checked out my family computer for more Nirvana. The only track my dad had downloaded was Lithium. It freaked me out. "Foreboding" doesn't begin to describe the opening riff of Lithium, quickly building to something mischievously evil. Like a troll from a children's cartoon pulling out a sub-machine gun. MTV hadn't prepared me. And the lyrics too, like the fractured scrawl recovered of a disgruntled teenager written days before going on a high school massacre. I turned off the computer telling myself the track was terrible. Put it out of my mind for days. But eventually I had to go back: I listened again and it turned out to be just as great as my mind has been trying to persuade me it was.
After that I went to the shelf and found what I had hoped would be there: a box with a completely black cover other than silver lettering spelling out the word "Nirvana". I didn't love everything on their greatest hits straight away. About A Girl sounded too sappy for what I was looking for at the time. And Where Did You Sleep Last Night? was what I believed to be country or folk, sounding like an older, wiser version of the soul who had given me Teen Spirit. It would take time for me to appreciate the broader sides of Nirvana. But the disk did have what I was looking for. In Spades. I wanted to hear Cobain's agonized scream towards the end of trailer trash nightmare Silver, and hear his quiet musings burst into feedback in You Know You're Right.
All in that moment I knew who I was. The world outside was the same but finally I saw it different. There was a part of it for me afterall. Those poor fuckers at school, clamoring over Steps and Nickelback, I finally knew something that none of them did.
I took guitar lessons in my middle school. They were held in a tiny store room at the very back of the school. My teacher asked me what sort of music I wanted to play and I said something like Nirvana. None of my friends there motioned that they'd heard what I'd said. They didn't know what I was talking about. But this girl - smeared in make-up and black hair dye, the furthest a person could go for a rebellious look while at a school that enforced a uniform - knew what I was talking about. She told me she liked them too, not that she needed to, it was written in her makeup and the fact she was probably the only non-male person who had ever entered this neglected, spider-web covered area of the school. She got it.
One night I was trying to play Teen Spirit on my family computer to no avail. I turned the sound dial right up but nothing. Then I saw the plug wasn't fully in and (without noticing what I'd forgot to do) plugged in. The speakers fucking exploded. A few doors down must have heard Kurt Cobain's guitar. It woke my mother up in the next room. The "visual" of the music on the screen turned into an indestructible block of sound while I scrambled for the volume. It was so loud it hurt my ears, blasted them into tinnitus. But what the fuck did I care? It sounded beautiful. That ugly mass of distorted noise was what I knew should be on the radios. It was the frequency my brain had been waiting for.
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