Come as you are - as you were - as I want you to be: Former dean explores Nirvana

On Wednesday, March 2, Middlebury residents came as they were to the Ilsley Public Library in downtown Middlebury for the lecture “Nirvana and Religion.” The lecture was part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays series, held on the first Wednesday of every month at Ilsley and other locations statewide. The monthly series is designed to bring esteemed speakers to Vermont to discuss a wide range of humanities subjects.

Giving the lecture was George Dennis O’Brien, former president of Bucknell University and the University of Rochester, and former Dean of Students at Middlebury. At the onset of the lecture, O’Brien noted that the focus of his discussion would be Plato’s ancient notion that a change in music denotes a profound change in the world’s culture. Given Nirvana’s groundbreaking success establishing alternative rock at the forefront of popular music, O’Brien aimed to take on the band’s wealth of cultural import in an academic setting.

While the focus was on Nirvana, O’Brien spent the better part of the lecture providing a lineage of American popular music. From Frank Sinatra’s crooning to Elvis’s swooning and on to Pink Floyd’s anti-establishment mantras, O’Brien attempted to place Nirvana in its oft-disputed place on the popular music spectrum. With a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Chicago, O’Brien also examined Nirvana’s “songs of chaos” in the context of the philosophy of art. In O’Brien’s opinion, the band’s popular and philosophical place in history represents an open attack on articulation and is a “breakdown of the spoken word.”

This breakdown provided the initial intrigue for O’Brien’s study, and appropriate song clips were played during the lecture to provide lyrical evidence. One example of the “breakdown of the word” was the arbitrary snarls of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in “Smells Like Teen Sprit” (“A mulatto an albino/A mosquito my libido”).

O’Brien also considers the phenomenon of Nirvana to be closely related to his lifelong involvement in education. He recalled his days at Middlebury.

“I remember being a dean when Pink Floyd came out saying, “We don’t need no education” [in the song “Another Brick in the Wall”]. I felt that was a strong attack on the educational system. That was when I really started to pay attention to recent music, which eventually brought me to Nirvana.”

As a former educator in elite colleges and universities, O’Brien recalled feeling that many of the students he dealt with were not fulfilling their huge potential. O’Brien sees Nirvana’s tragic frontman Cobain as an example of young artists, and youth in general, who do not fit into the mold of systems such as higher education.

“I asked myself, why do these bright kids not perform?” O’Brien said. “Like [Cobain], I think that their personalities are not made to fit the rigid structure of society.”

O’Brien’s interpretations of grunge rock presented many important questions on the subject of recent popular music and its place in academia. At what point does a pop cultural phenomenon become ripe for academic scrutiny? When do the angst-ridden anthems of our youth and Nirvana’s convention-threatening attacks become fodder for critical interpretations or philosophical consideration? Next month marks the 16th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death and the subsequent end of Nirvana, and academic contextualization seemed strained, if not impossible.

Chris Kirby, Adult Services and Technology Manager for the College, commented on the apparent contrast.
“I came away from the talk wondering whether the critical academic tools at O’Brien’s disposal could shed further light on Nirvana’s art,” said Kirby. “Articulate academic discourse applied to a form of expression that is primarily inarticulate and nonconceptual seems to have its limitations.”

In many ways, disparities such as these proved to be the underlying theme of the evening. Rolling Stone puts Nirvana at number seven on its “Greatest Songs of All Time” list, though the Ilsley Library Community Room smelled nothing like teen spirit. Instead, O’Brien spoke to a room of older Vermonters whose familiarity with Nirvana was apparently limited. As O’Brien ran through a brief history of American popular music, references to now-obscure musicians were met with looks of pleasured recognition from most of the crowd, and perplexity from the younger attendees. Due to technical restrictions, low-fidelity song samples were played via cassette tape over an antique boombox in an unintended tribute to the pre-digital musical environment in which Nirvana flourished.

If anything, O’Brien’s lecture was a tribute to Nirvana’s success in its attempt to rattle the stale conventions of popular music and our culture at large. While younger audience members may have found the academic context troubling, Kirby acknowledged the immediately redemptive qualities of the lecture.

“A younger audience already familiar with Nirvana might find the talk less edifying,” said Kirby. “But I felt that the main strength of the talk was in providing a context, one of many possible contexts, for Nirvana for an audience with no previous exposure to the music.”