Nirvana-shaped box With the Lights Out gets at the music behind the myth BY MATT ASHARE

According to former New York Times critic Neil Strauss, only 11 out of the 30 teenagers he surveyed in a Tower Records in the upscale LA suburb of Sherman Oaks had ever heard of the band Nirvana. At least, that’s what Strauss reports at the start of his portion of the liner notes to the long-awaited new Nirvana box set, the four-disc With the Lights Out (DGC/Universal). Anecdotal as those numbers are, they still carry weight. And Strauss is shocked to find that a band who had come along and changed the world only a generation earlier were already in the process of being relegated to the dustbin of history — that Kurt Cobain was yesterday’s news.

I have my own theories on such things, some more plausible than others. But it seems that there are those bands who have the right temperament to make a career out of rock and roll — an ability or a willingness to settle in with an audience and continue making their music for the sake of doing what they’ve always loved best. And there are others whose entire concept of rock and roll is simply too volatile to support a long career. These are the bands who, like Nirvana, never come to terms with the inherent conflict between art and commerce and the confrontation of an underground band with a mass audience. At first, these bands — the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Nirvana, to name three — draw strength and inspiration from the sense of mission that comes from tearing at the system from within. But the system always seems to win, or at least, change comes too slowly. Incapable of accepting the fact that their art has become a commodity, these bands hit a wall and implode. Their legacy may fade for a time, but more often than not, pop-culture cycles back around to a point where their music, stripped of the baggage of its era, reaches and inspires a whole new generation. That’s the nature of rock and roll and of pop culture in general.

That’s one of the stories of Nirvana. But it’s not the one I want to tell. Because, 10 years after the voice of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain, put a needle in his arm, a gun to his head, and extinguished his life, it’s remarkable how little attention has been paid to the music his band made between 1988 and 1994. All kinds of books and articles (along with one feature-length film) dealing with the circumstances surrounding Cobain’s life and death have been researched, written, and released to a once-curious public. But the only result has been to paint Cobain as just another in a long line of rock-and-roll casualties. And his widow, Courtney Love, has made a habit of acting so poorly in public that the whole Kurt-and-Courtney tragedy has taken on an ugliness tawdry enough to make the most devoted cultural rubbernecker avert his or her eyes. In the process, the music has been overshadowed. We take it for granted that Nirvana were the band who took the oil and vinegar of pop metal and punk rock and mixed them until, in an effort to imitate the Pixies, they wrote a song that came to represent not just a generation but a point in history — "Smells like Teen Spirit."

Of course, for those of us who were around at the time, Nirvana did more than that. And as Kurt Cobain evolved from the raging frontman of a noisy trio into a thoughtful and poetic songwriter who was learning to articulate his very personal feelings of pain, joy, anger, and alienation, there were those of us who thought we saw the emergence of the next great rock-and-roll songwriter. The definition of a great rock-and-roll songwriter is simply someone who can put what you feel into words and music until it seems he or she has tapped into your nervous system and pinpointed the weak spots. So much of that has been either forgotten or overshadowed by the notoriety that surrounded Cobain’s death, by the junkie stories, by the pale imitations that followed in Nirvana’s footsteps, that I think a lot of people stopped listening to the music. I do know that for me there were just too many mixed emotions wrapped up in the songs on the three proper studio albums the band released during their truncated career, too many unanswered questions about the person who wrote those songs, that it was just too difficult to spend quality time with Bleach, Nevermind, or In Utero. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.