The Greatest Song or is it?

How often do you get asked, “What’s your favourite song ever?”

When I get asked this, I shudder and think, what a pointless question. Music can’t be held to a singular champion, one song to rule them all. Of course, like most, I have my favourites. Some are contemporary and of this era, and others are your traditional classics that most of your peers would also hold up as great songs. Then there’s that thought-provoking side question of what even makes a great song. Many years ago, I wrote a passage about what music meant to me. That passage concluded:

“Music be a gift, be a weapon, but be real and plentiful. Release your hold on this place and be free from its movements, Be Nothing more than everything to me, music be my life, music be my death, but be something more than music itself”

For me, as for many, music can never be filtered down to just one or even a handful of great songs. They each encapsulate different codes that unlock areas of our brain. Have you ever been amazed (I know I have) that you can hear an old song for the first time in decades and yet remember almost all the words, catapulting you right back to a time in your life that is so distant and alien to you now, but somehow that music makes you feel as if you were still back there?

I don’t feel I could ever say what my greatest song of all time is, but I have found one song which I truly believe solely and comprehensively epitomises the genre in which it resides. A song that has the hallmarks of a flagship, a beacon that will unlock the mysteries of what that genre is all about and what the performer was trying to convey. It could all be found in this single record.

The style of music is not particularly commonly played on mainstream media these days, and it’s one of those styles that can be pinpointed to a relatively short window of time, very much like punk was in the late 1970s. In fact, to my ears, punk is a close relation to this style. Imagine that punk was a young, gritty lad who flirts with and hooks up with an older lady, a woman who was in her prime during the 1960s, a woman with a curvaceous body, smooth melodies and catchy hooks.

In my rather romanticised interpretation, the product of this frantic one night of passion would be the lovechild of punk and British sixties swinging pop, and there you have the flash-in-the-pan genre they named grunge.

Anyone familiar with my other writings will know I often write about things from the 1990s. This is for many reasons, but mainly due to the impact that decade had on my life. Therefore, it is no surprise that the genre I write about is firmly rooted in that decade, as is my experience of it. It’s not the grunge movement itself that I will expand on, although I probably could if someone prompted me.

It’s that I feel there is one song that sums up what that style of music was all about, and that song is by Nirvana.

No surprises there, I hear you say, as there are probably only a handful of musical artists that many would immediately associate with this genre, along with the likes of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, to name a few. Although the expanded list would, of course, include many more names.

For me, grunge existed in its most recognisable form for only a short time, and I feel that Kurt Cobain’s suicide played a significant part in its decline, at least in how I experienced it. Grunge, in my interpretation, was about how teenagers and young adults felt disconnected, just like those who aligned themselves with the punk movement years earlier. Despite how isolated some can feel in their youth, and despite how, at the time, we are resolute that those feelings will stay with us forever, the simple reality is that we all too often grow out of them.

Even if Nirvana’s singer-songwriter hadn’t ended his life so prematurely, I suspect that the grit, anger and mood-swinging swagger of his music would have evolved. It would have grown up. I’m in my forties now. I don’t feel the way I did when I first discovered grunge, or did grunge discover me? Nevertheless, my views and rationale have matured.

I know some of my friends question how I can still listen to that music today, but why not? Of course, I don’t feel like a 15-year-old anymore, but I can still appreciate the soundtrack of my youth.

“Will you stop rambling on and tell us what this song is already!” I can hear you exclaiming.

OK, I’ll get there. If, like me, you found this genre in the moment, you didn’t find it on a digital service, so you most likely had the CD. Back then, we had to memorise which track number was our chosen song, and the song I’m describing is Track 8 of the Nevermind album.

I won’t be mean and make you reach for your dusty music collection (not that many of us even have our CDs these days), and so Track 8 was called Drain You.

Anyone who knows the song well, perhaps anyone who has considered the meaning behind its lyrics, might wonder why this, of all the grunge songs. Unlike many others, it’s not the meaning of the words behind this song. One interpretation of Drain You is that the lyrics relate to Kurt Cobain’s addiction to heroin. The reference to vitamins, for example, could suggest that the drug gave him energy, but that the deadly narcotic also consumes, directs and drains you.

I’ve never taken drugs, so I cannot preach about what they do or don’t do to your physical, spiritual or mental state. I do not hold this song up there for the words or their interpreted meaning, but for the entity that is the song and not any of its individual components. We often zone in on words, a guitar riff or a bassline, but those are the ingredients and not the final product. And so it is only fitting that it’s the complete song that, for me, explains the complete genre.

The song has jagged edges that appear to smooth themselves out. It has a catchy melody you often don’t find with rugged rock songs, but that is part of the allure of grunge. As I outlined earlier, it has the roughness of punk with the caress of swinging bands like the Beatles or The Kinks. Listen to Drain You. You need to hear the first half to appreciate the flavours and tones, like a full-bodied wine.

But it’s not until you reach the instrumental break that the true genius and beauty of the track presents itself. From one minute forty seconds onwards, you hear short guitar riffs, with a bassline that builds and then is abruptly halted, only to start over a moment later. When I hear this, it conjures a visual image of being trapped in a box, with each bass note appearing to be a bang against the sides, a knocking sound trying to alert the world that you’re stuck in that cage.

Each bass riff gets slightly louder and harder, as if to portray the panic setting in as you feel more scared that this box will forever hold you. As the song reaches around two minutes twenty seconds, those three musical instruments (guitar, bass and drums) are joined by a fourth and ever so powerful new instrument. That new addition is the soft and rapidly increasing scream of Kurt’s voice.

That scream, accompanied by that banging in the box, reaches the expected conclusion that you will not be trapped for much longer. Sure enough, these four musical components wield so much power that you’re released from your prison, and here is the amazing, fluid outpouring of magic and adrenaline. If you’ve been listening correctly, if you’ve been feeling trapped and caged, then here within that song you are launched into a frenzy of flight, soaring into a melodic freedom.

As the box is smashed open, the scream transitions to the lyrics, but here, unlike the first half, you don’t hear words. His voice is now the massive, all-consuming instrument. It’s transformed your passive music listening into something altogether different. You are free, the music is pumping through your veins, reaching every organ of the body. Your frustration at not being heard whilst you were trapped in that jail cell just moments earlier has transformed into aggression and anger towards the world.

How dare they incarcerate you in the first place? How dare they make you feel helpless? But now you can all hear me. Now that I’m free, you will never forget me, and you will know that I endured such pain. I will now fly, not because of you, but in spite of you.

I do realise that this is my personal interpretation of this song and my relationship with the genre. I’m not so naïve as to think that others won’t experience this song differently. They may have different images and they may strongly disagree with me, and this is, of course, perfectly acceptable.

But the feeling I have in hearing Track 8, the visuals of being trapped, unable to relate and misunderstood, is what the grunge message was all about for me. I once read a music journalist describe Nirvana as the band that told America how unhappy its kids were. I think they were right. The children were unhappy because they felt under-appreciated and unheard. The funny thing is that every generation has felt that way at times.

Every generation has its alternative characters. For every mainstream, there is, and has to be, a counterculture. For me, this was grunge. Drain You reminds me, and perhaps even teaches me, that those feelings existed in the first place. It gave me reassurance that it was OK to be slightly different from the person next to you. This has resonated more loudly now that I am a parent to a child who has autism and high anxiety, where differences must be embraced and understood.

I crave for her to find the attachment to music that I did when I was younger. The comfort in listening to sad songs when you yourself are feeling low, remembering that you’re not alone. And the drug-like feeling when a song or sound can enter your inner psyche and transport you to another place. I hope that she finds her own comfort in music like I did. I hope both my children enjoy music for what it is and what it can be.