Elliott smith either or meaning
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See, Nietzsche had this theory about curing nihilism. Grunge musicians chased after existential enlightenment by playing music. And it did this in the coolest and most meta way possible. But all of grunge, if I had to stick a label on why it happened, employed existentialism to bring enLIGHTenment down into underground darkness (see what I did there?). It’s harder to find oblique references to solutions to the problem of aesthetic nihilism in grunge, probably because complaining about problems is more punk rock than solving them. You can find a lot of other artists making the same point, albeit in less cogent terms with less references to Kierkegaard - Nirvana is very fond of doing this. You can do what you want to, there’s no one to stop you You can do what you want to whenever you want to It’s just a brief smile crossing your face (“Speed Trials”) There’s always something you go back running to You’re such a pinball, yeah you know it’s true He’s critiquing the part of himself that would rather live an aesthetic lifestyle, whether that be through alcoholism or destructive relationships or who knows what else. So when he critiques an aesthetic lifestyle, he’s really not critiquing other people. And I think that Smith understands that, maybe in a way that Kierkegaard, writing more than a hundred years earlier, did not. The phrase “either/or” makes a harsh distinction between two dichotomous things, but it’s never that simple in real life. We have the potential for both of those things inside of us and I think that most of us, at some point, give ourselves over to both. Or we can risk everything and go find that meaning. We can follow in our parents’ footsteps and be aesthetes or, at the very best, ethicists, who want to stick to the status quo and ignore the profound meaning in life. That’s pretty textbook imagery for “duality of self.” It makes the point that we all have this choice. So on the cover of Either/Or, Elliott Smith is sitting with his back to a mirror where you can see his reflection. But if you’ve chosen the wrong lifestyle, you’re never gonna find it. We’ll risk 9 to 5 jobs and the nuclear family structure for honest spiritual expression.” If punk of the ’70s and ’80s was a declaration that there was no future and nothing had any meaning, grunge of the ’90s was essentially an insistence to the contrary: there is meaning. This is huge to grunge! Grunge was the reaction to a former generation’s repression and bigotry and unhappiness, one which said “all of the things you guys were after are actually not worth it. People CHOOSE to be aesthetes or non-aesthetes. Choosing aestheticism means that your life is bound to suck on a spiritual level, but Kierkegaard never imposes aestheticism on anyone.
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Kierkegaard thought that people could live in one of three states: they could just try to find pleasure from a variety of different sources (aestheticism), or they could devote themselves to making the world more pleasant for others (ethicism), or they could transcend all of that and devote themselves completely to enlightened faith (not sure what the catchy name for that is). But they did ask the right questions. Consider an album deliberately named for an existentialist text, Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Elliott Smith’s album of the same title.Įither/Or is all about the divide between meaningless aestheticism and spiritual enlightenment, which was really important to Kierkegaard. Unlike existentialist philosophers, grunge musicians never thought they had any of the right answers. In other words, is there a way to make something of existence? Critics of grunge who see it as nihilistic would probably say no, but I think that grunge is really more hesitantly hopeful than willfully pessimistic. This is a continuation of a post that I wrote here, which I ended by saying: if we live, for better or for worse, in this “underground” and if we are trapped, for better or for worse, with a nihilistic mess of humanity, what do we do to find ourselves and assert our freedom in the middle of all of it?