GETTY IMAGES; MEN’S HEALTH ILLUSTRATION
The following excerpt appears in Chuck Klosterman’s new book, The Nineties: A Book, out now. It is being published exclusively on Men’s Health courtesy of Penguin Random House.
THE SONGS ON Nirvana’s Nevermind did not tangibly change the world. There are limits to what art can do, to what a record can do, to what sound can do. The video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music. In the post-Nevermind universe, everything had to be filtered through the notion that this specific representation of modernity was the template for what everyone now wanted from everything, and that any attempt to understand young people had to begin with an understanding of why Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain looked and acted the way that he did. In the same way the breakup of the Beatles was only half-jokingly seen as the end of the British Empire, the public ascension of Nevermind is where the nineties became a recognizable time period with immutable values.
Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991, the same day as the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik and The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest. Only 46,251 copies of Nevermind were shipped to stores, generating a brief scarcity of resources (it opened at a quiet 144th on the Billboard charts). It didn’t explode nationally until Thanksgiving and wasn’t certified as the number 1 album in America until the following January. But its ancillary, rippling reconfiguration of the zeitgeist was vast and rapid, even in zones typically immune to the proclivities of youth culture—like car commercials. In October of 1992, Subaru introduced the Impreza, a compact five-door hatchback. It was considered a marketing dilemma.* “Despite exceeding competitors in many, if not most, feature variables, the Impreza is still a Civic-class formula car that lacks a buyer-swaying hook,” argued Jim Piedmont of the Wieden+Kennedy advertising firm. Piedmont was outlining the problem for executives from Subaru. “Its upscale refinement qualities are mostly intangibles… our challenge is to cut through the advertising clutter and position the car so we can get on the shopping list of Civic-class intenders.”
What Piedmont meant by “Civic-class intenders” was “people who actually want a Honda.” Such consumers would likely be twentysomethings with entry-level jobs. This prompted a 1993 commercial starring twenty-four-year- old Jeremy Davies (who’d go on to have a nice career as a character actor in films like Saving Private Ryan and TV shows like Lost). The thirty-second spot features Davies wildly gesticulating around the Impreza in a series of jarring edits, acting like a teenager who’s just tried recreational Adderall for the first time. “This car is like punk rock,” he insists, and goes on to (sort of ) explain that the Impreza will remind people “what’s great about a car,” in the same way the Ramones reminded people that Jethro Tull used too many time signatures. It’s framed like Davies is talking about events from the seventies, but he’s actually talking about the present. He is talking about Nirvana without talking about Nirvana, which was the only way to do it. Davies could never have talked about Nirvana directly, because (a) Nirvana would have never participated in a car advertisement, and (b) doing so would have caused the commercial to fail even harder than it did, if that’s somehow possible.
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It’s tempting to dismiss this Subaru commercial as a corporation’s clueless attempt at appealing to a demographic they don’t comprehend, and that wouldn’t be a wholly inaccurate conclusion. But what’s really happening here is more complicated. When punk rock was new, almost every TV depiction of punk was negative.** It had no symbolic value to anyone trying to sell anything expensive. By 1991, kids who’d experienced punk firsthand (often through its negative network TV depictions) were now young adults. Nirvana delivers this audience Nevermind, an album that is not very punk in practice—it’s financed by billionaire David Geffen and sounds, according to Cobain himself, “closer to a Mötley Crüe record than a punk record.”
And those details embarrass him, because Nevermind is completely punk in theory. Everything about its atomic structure is informed by punk values, which have become the default values for all the young adults who recall those early TV depictions of punk as preposterous and wrong. Nevermind becomes the most commercially successful punk album ever made, in large part because it doesn’t sound like punk music (yet still is). It’s the ideal mainstream version of counterculture ideology. Society at large, still trapped in the 1980s, now has a viable art product that can be used as a fulcrum to overturn everything else. The nineties begin in earnest. Companies who sell things like Imprezas see this transformation and conclude, “Nirvana is what people want.” But Nirvana isn’t interested in being nakedly commoditized. The contradictory values of the band (and its individual members) reject that process. Instead, companies must adopt (or pretend to adopt) the contradictory values themselves. You can’t capitalize on the fact that Nirvana is popular. Doing so would have the opposite result. You must focus on the fact that Nirvana is popular against their will, despite all the conscious choices they made in order to become the most popular band in the world.
It was not, as Davies says in the commercial, “like punk rock, but for cars.” It was more like cars, but for punk rock.
*The following anecdotes come from the 1995 book Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign.
**The 1978 WKRP in Cincinnati episode “Hoodlum Rock,” a now-famous 1982 episode of Quincy, ME (“Next Stop, Nowhere”), a 1984 telecast of The Phil Donahue Show, etc.
From THE NINETIES: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Charles Klosterman.
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