7-28-08 Nirvana – Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

We go from radio unfriendly songs to the most radio friendly song in the history of the frigging universe! Yes! It says so right in the title! It’s Nirvana’s Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, off 1993’s In Utero.

Oh, and prepare for some post-songitus navel-pondering. Kurt Cobain and Nirvana tend to engender that in people who don’t know when to shut the hell up (like me).

Here’s a clean (as in high audio quality) video courtesy of ZackXa. Sing along here, if you like.

And here’s a rockin’ live version, complete with a fan throwing some kind of garment onto the stage. I like to think it’s underwear, as that would make the rockstarishness of this video complete, but I doubt it is (unless the possessor shopped in the Big Woman section of the store… shudder).

Courtesy of Pyrokiddaburna.

Well now, that wasn’t very radio friendly, was it? There’s several things that kill Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’s radio friendliness, like that howling guitar at the start, the acid rock-like coda at the end and its length (just under five minutes). About the only things that make it radio friendly are those angsty teenager-writing-in-the-margins-of-her-notebook lyrics… and that fact that it’s from Nirvana.

Wikipedia claims that this song was an unspecified “attack on the music industry”. A ”unit shifter” is apparently industry-ese for a song that sells albums.

But think about it for a minute. You could make the case that Nirvana’s songs, at least the frequent play ones, were radio friendly and unit shifters. You don’t get three no. 1 multiple-platinum studio albums and five no. 1 hits (one of them, You Know You’re Right, topping the charts eight years after your lead singer died) without being radio friendly.

Or maybe radio friendly isn’t the right phrase… maybe “mass media-friendly”. As this short but excellent article, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter: The Commodification of Kurt Cobain, by Derek P. Rucas notes:

Nirvana’s catchy, pop-punk melodic riffs [emphasis mine] were used as a prime vehicle to promote “grunge” as the media saw fit.  Everything from widely ripped, faded jeans to layering shirts upon shirts (oh, and don’t forget the Doc Martens) were considered to epitomize grunge trends.  The guitar equipment company DOD even manufactured the F69 Grunge pedal in the early 1990s, insinuating that it could mimic the “grunge sound of Seattle.” (“Power of DOD”, pars. 1).  The media transformed Cobain’s pop cultural status into a mass-cultural money making enterprise that could be easily digested by an audience that was grunge hungry.

People wanted a Nirvana sound. In economics terms, the profits-hungry music industry recognized a need, so they found someone who could provide the product that the consumers wanted. As Bill Lyman, in his 2001 Salon.com article Kurt Cobain and the dream about pop, points out:

Does anyone really care, at this point, that “Smells Like Teen Sprit” — now routinely cited as one of the great singles of rock history — was made to sound good on the radio? And what’s wrong with sounding good on the radio, anyway?

Well, nothing. I listen to WFMU radio all the time (as those of you who frequent this blog know all too well). The problem, in an era of Jack-FM and Top 40 radio stations with playlist rotations of 100 minutes or less, is not sounding good but sounding the same.

But the point is made. Would Nirvana had made its mark on music – one hell of a mark – if the corporate masters hadn’t given them their shot to make their mark? Would Cobain have had his bully pulpit to complain about the music industry if the music industry hadn’t been a partner in his success? Admittedly, it’s not much of a pulpit, at least in the case of Radio Friendly Unit Shifter. How many people can say they’ve even heard of Radio Friendly Unit Shifter before? Not me; the first time I heard it was when I when I started researching this post.

If Radio Friendly Music Shifter is an attack on “radio friendly” tapioca pudding songs (albeit tapioca pudding with lots of feedback and screaming lyrics), then Nirvana’s argument has a leg to stand on. But if it’s yet another tirade against “the music industry”, then Nirvana’s very success through the music industry makes the song a little spurious, even ungrateful.

Not that Cobain particularly liked his success, or at least the quality of his success, as Rucas notes:

Kurt Cobain was a product of consumer culture during the early 1990s. His influence elevated him to an iconic position that he had never fathomed. In fact, Cobain detested the media for turning his life into an ongoing fiasco. With the spread of controversial stories regarding his drug addiction, and his wife’s (Courtney Love) drug use while pregnant with their daughter Frances Bean, Cobain harboured a hatred for the media with some journalists particularly in mind. One of these journalists was Victoria Clarke, who wrote about Courtney Love’s heroin addiction while pregnant with Frances in her book about Nirvana. In Nick Broomfield’s documentary Kurt and Courtney, Cobain was quoted on Clarke’s answering machine as saying, “If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife…I’ll fucking hurt you…I don’t care if this is a recorded threat, I’m at the end of my ropes.”

Still, he wouldn’t have had to worry about the media exposure – or the mad jack that rolled in from Nirvana’s album sales and concert ticket sales – if he hadn’t “sold out”. Consider, says Wyman:

Still, the story is an inexorable one: These bands soon began popping up on, and then dominating, critics’ end-of-year 10-best lists and building up decent (if uniformly tiny by mainstream standards) tour followings, but couldn’t get a break from radio, or, for the most part, MTV. And it wasn’t clear, at least at first, if they wanted it. The new indie rock had different concerns, including a distrust of technology, and affinity for a lot of things the corporate masters didn’t like: American roots music in some cases, and, most broadly, a commitment to volume, dishabille, contrariness generally, and “authenticity.”

Ah, authenticity. It wasn’t seriousness, exactly — irony in a fairly watered-down form existed in the work of the wacky Camper Van Beethoven and, certainly, in the psychedelic ferocity of the Butthole Surfers. But bands were for the most part expected to be honest and feel honestly. They were supposed to care about their true fans — since the members of the bands, it was assumed, were true fans themselves — and not be in it for the money, exactly.

It’s a question that must plague artists the world ’round in this post-modern dystopia: Isn’t it all right to sell out, if just a little, to get your message out there? What’s the difference between “selling out, maaaaaan”… and selling out? The artist in me gets all Gandalf-versus-the-Balrog at the question: “None! Never! Not an inch!” But I wonder how I’ll break when someone starts waving thick sheafs of banknotes under my nose (I can only dream).

And that’s me trying to be deep.

Postscript: You know, all this stuff is self-evident more than a decade down the line. The problem is it wasn’t while we were in the middle of it, or at least it wasn’t to me. And that’s the way of things. Maybe the very self-aware realized these things but, as you may have figured out by now, I’m not very self-aware.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s easy to kick Nirvana when it’s been dead for a decade and a half. But I’ll bet that Wyman and Rucas had the red flannels, ripped jeans and the Doc Martens, too, just like everyone else. (I had a red flannel shirt and a pair of jeans with a lovingly maintained tear in the knee. No Docs. I wasn’t nearly that cool)