Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP.
This month, as a coda of sorts for the Webby-nominated podcast The Cobain 50, co-host Martin Douglas resurrects his personal essay series “Requiem for a Fake Punk” to tell his story as a lifelong Nirvana fan.
Note: This piece contains themes of suicidal ideation. If you’re in crisis, please know that there are professionals out there ready to help. Contact 988 Lifeline for more information.
*A note for clarity: The years posted in parentheses are the years in which the experience happened and not necessarily the year the song came out
Exhuming my trauma through writing has paid off well; now I’m bored and old.
I slid down a familiar path to the office. South on Aurora Avenue, ol’ Highway 99. Past independent sex workers and heroin dealers on the beat; past the few still-standing fleabag motels Kurt Cobain rented rooms to do drugs in; past Beth’s Cafe and Green Lake Park and Woodland Park Zoo. I found myself blasting In Utero in my Jeep on the way to my usual work parking spot. The hosts of The Cobain 50 and El Cancionero de Kurt—Albina Cabrera, Dusty Henry, and me—had a date at MoPOP, where we (amazingly) had exclusive access to the exhibit Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses to film content. I’ve visited the exhibit going on half a dozen times; most recently three months ago with my partner, who made the brilliant suggestion which led us to the MoPOP doors.
A lonely, depressed kid—in one of the most depressing places to live in the United States—grew up to become the most celebrated songwriter of his generation and the most well-known fan of underground music this side of the pond John Peel lived across. One of the lonely, depressed kids who idolized Kurt became one of the co-hosts of a podcast dedicated to his memory and advocacy; the part of him that wore homemade band tees and cried the first time he saw Shonen Knife live. What feels like a lifetime ago, back when I fantasized about living in Seattle without ever knowing that dream would come true by happenstance, Kurt introduced me to punk rock. I found myself duty-bound to introduce a new generation to favorite bands I wouldn’t have heard of if it weren’t for him: Kleenex, the Stooges, Beat Happening, the Slits, so many more.
As I had been the past several times I visited the exhibit, I was drawn immediately to the Black Candy shirt Krist Novoselic wore on Saturday Night Live when we entered the exhibit. The Heather Lewis-drawn candy wrapper that adorns that shirt (and the album cover it depicts) perfectly matched one of the half-dozen tattoos on my right arm.
I thought about that shirt all the way down Aurora, on the bridge as a navy blue Mazda CX-30 rode my bumper—even though there were two open traffic lanes next to us. Minutes into the future stayed on my mind as the language of the Greater Seattle Metropolitan Area—passive-aggressive terror—threatened to ruin my morning. But the thought of having full and private run of one of my all-time favorite displays of pop culture kept me from throwing up my middle finger as the driver finally passed me.
Every scratch of every busted-up guitar was inspected by my curious eyes, as was the electrical tape atop the tom of Dave Grohl’s drum kit (an easy way to cover up the holes so that it’s still functional). I traced the faded black and even-more-faded screenprint of the Black Candy shirt. I did a hardstyle pose to show off my matching tattoo. Naturally. Professional accomplishment aside, getting to record footage while wandering Taking Punk to the Masses felt like a very surreal way to honor the inner child who stood at the gates of Nirvana and saw a whole new world just past them; an entrance to a life I never would have (or could have) imagined for myself prior.
I believe in dumb luck too much to say a rock band steered the course of my life. But if there’s any band that ever came close…
I had thoughts of suicidal ideation before the day I found out my musical hero pulled the trigger on a shotgun with its barrel resting in his mouth.
A great many news stories cropped up in the mid-1990s about kids contemplating suicide because of Kurt Cobain. I think the people who wrote said stories failed to take into account the unimaginable pain some children are forced to live through. Pain too multifaceted and dark to even begin to unpack here.
Years ago, I wrote extensively about poverty and child abuse in the context of how Kurt Cobain created a musical language for my sadness, but this doesn’t speak to the other contributing factors of my childhood depression that metastasized as I grew into an adult. There’s also the bullying (not just by classmates and other kids in the neighborhood, but by men who were supposed to be my role models), the alienation, the idea that I didn’t deserve positive encouragement because I didn’t always follow the rules.
I now walk past the Seattle Center fountain every time I head into the office—and it reminds me of being parked in front of an old TV the day it was reported that Kurt took his own life. Looking at all those people, some of them dressed like me, many carrying the same sad expression I did, heartbroken that whatever was weighing Kurt down was too much for him to bear. I’ve felt that exact same feeling since very early childhood; the feeling that maybe I’m not strong enough to carry all this weight.
I wasn’t fully allowed to be a kid, not really. I went to school and was pressured to get good grades; but there are layers of trauma—and later, responsibility—that were tacked onto being forced to try out for sports and join the school band. Components of my life that would drag the pace of this essay to a halt. Taking care of a low-functioning autistic little brother and getting my ass kicked like a full-grown man weren’t the only ways I was dragged away from the carefree pleasures of childhood, just the heaviest.
And my childhood wasn’t all bad; it wasn’t entirely devoid of youthful joy and imagination and mischief. My two sets of cousins and I had great times playing outside of my grandmother’s house all day long on Saturdays. It wasn’t until later, after my little brother was born and Grandma passed about three months later, after all of Grandma’s belongings were removed from her senior living high-rise, and I bounced between my cousins’ homes and foster houses, that I truly saw that not every kid is afforded the simple life of a child.
Thus, I can’t pretend I never imagined dying as a child. Even as young as seven or eight years old—it should be noted, around the time I first heard Nirvana on the eastern end of High Point, North Carolina—I knew that if Jesus actually wanted me for a sunbeam, his dad wouldn’t have made my life so painful that I frequently daydreamed about ending it. I can’t say that living through Kurt’s passing inspired me to keep living, but somehow I stayed alive.
I watched MTV’s coverage of Kurt’s Seattle Center memorial all day long. I wondered if you get to watch your own funeral when you die.
I wandered the bottom floor of the Barnes & Noble in Downtown Federal Way, which at the time was located across the street from (what used to be called) Sea-Tac Mall. I’ve been reading music magazines since I was a young child; when I went to the Food Lion or Bi-Lo in High Point with my grandmother—Harris-Teeter was too rich for our blood—she always knew where to find me. SPIN was my first love. Rolling Stone wasn’t quite as cool; they were still trying to appeal to the old guys.
Years after Kurt died, I listened to hip-hop exclusively. (Those years deserve their own mini-essay collection, but I digress.) The Source became my bible. I remember when Life After Death received 5 Mics; such an honor was like being anointed as the Pope. In 2004, thanks to bands like the White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the Strokes, I became obsessed with SPIN and rock music mags again.
Anyway, I was at Barnes & Noble—a hideaway for bookish young people in the suburbs who had no bearing on where the cool, independent bookstores were—wandering around downstairs. Probably with a copy of MOJO under my arm (thanks in part to the Strokes, British music magazines were a brief obsession of mine). I poked through the Music Biography section, a place I’d go to see if there were any artists I was interested in reading about. Usually to no avail.
Only one day, there was a copy of a book about Kurt Cobain on the shelf. A paperback copy of Heavier Than Heaven by Charles R. Cross, the last one in stock. Reading the description on the back cover of the paperback, it looked like it might be pretty good. I decided to buy it; if it ended up not being a compelling read, at least I would learn something I didn’t already know about Kurt. The cashier, with her round, cherubic cheeks, short blond hair, thick-framed eyeglasses, and genuine smile, rang up the magazines, and saw Kurt’s face in black and white on the cover of the book.
She told me it was the best music book she’s ever read. I devoured it in like three days.
There were many parts of Heavier Than Heaven that I loved and still love to this day—a constant source of interest is Kurt’s time in Olympia—but the scene that always stands out features a bit player in Kurt’s story. On Page 226, Cross writes about a Black fan who approached Kurt at the MoMA in New York and asked for his autograph. He responded kindly and seemed proud and kind of shocked that he had a Black fan.
Nas—whose epochal Illmatic would make him the voice of a generation when it was released two weeks after Kurt killed himself—later cited “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as one of his favorite songs. Countless rappers at this point have cited Kurt as a major formative influence. Back in the day, there was an invisible color line between “white” and “Black” music, and a frankly modest number of people back then publicly acknowledged how stupid it was. As we will all readily state in the present day, rock music was invented by Black people and Kurt could sing the blues as well as anybody.
Yet, as my origin story goes, I was made fun of in middle school for being “the Black guy who liked Nirvana.”
In the third-to-last episode of the HBO series Six Feet Under, a flashback scene finds main character Nate Fisher crying in his bedroom while listening to In Utero, distraught over the news of Kurt’s suicide. Years before the tragic event that brought Nate back to his home of Los Angeles to help his brother run the family business, a funeral home (Nathaniel Fisher Sr. was hit by a bus in the show’s pilot episode), he shared a house on Queen Anne and worked as the assistant produce manager at a co-op.
My partner and I watched Six Feet Under, a show rather unambiguously about death, while being quarantined during a global health crisis. The irony isn’t lost on me.
In the episode, Nate’s eyes are flooded with tears while mourning Kurt, and he says something to the effect of, “He was too sensitive for this world.” It’s a moment so genuine that it comes across as kind of cheesy. But genuine only seems cheesy because it touches a raw part of a person’s heart that’s supposed to hurt when something brushes up against it too hard.
Vulnerability isn’t cool. It never was. It’s embarrassing. But it’s an important component of art. And art is how a lot of sensitive people deal with living in a brutally insensitive world.
In March 2018, I took over this very column from my colleague, friend, and Cobain 50 co-host Dusty Henry; my first edition of Throwaway Style covered the Olympia art-punk band Broken Water. This summer will mark 20 years of me writing about music primarily on the Internet, and the Pacific Northwest has historically been my primary area of coverage and, unsurprisingly, my favorite regional music scene in the world. In that time, I’ve covered plenty of contemporary artists and scores of bands from the somewhat recent past (and contemporary at the time, when I was a 20-something-year-old introvert in the scene who didn’t know anybody), but I was weaned on the great NW artists of lore.
I’ve been listening to the first three Wipers albums consistently since I was 20; Youth of America was the second or third record I bought on vinyl after my parents gifted me a record player a few years later, for Christmas in 2006. The lifelong debt I owe to the riot grrrl movement for radicalizing me is well documented. Right next to the aforementioned Beat Happening tattoo on my arm is one that was inspired by the Sonics. Obviously, my CV is much longer than that as it pertains to Northwest music knowledge—extending back to being the North Carolina middle schooler obsessed with a cassette-dubbed copy of Superunknown.
But a funny thing happened to me on my way to the comic tragedy of becoming a 40-something-year-old rock critic: I became known as “the Northwest music guy” to the network of music journalists across the Western Hemisphere (and parts of Australia). I’ve had conversations, chats, and interactions with people the world over about Northwest music. A record shop owner on Ladbroke Grove in London who moved there from Vancouver 40 years ago; a server at a Marks & Spencer café in the same city who resembled a very tall Ian Curtis. Punks in Memphis, Minneapolis, Edinburgh, and Brighton.
There is still a curiosity from people all over the world about the damp region with trees all over and 4 pm sunsets in the wintertime. People wanna know what it’s like, what’s in the water we drink from, whether people really wear flannel like that. (For posterity: I’m wearing a red buffalo plaid flannel as I write this feature.) The kid I wrote about a couple of thousand words ago would have never expected people to consider him an ambassador for Northwest music.
I don’t consider myself an ambassador today, just a fan who can write pretty well.
For years after I took over Throwaway Style, my entire identity as a writer was wrapped up in this perception; I squeezed every second of the first few years working for KEXP listening to what the scene had to offer right then and there. And the better part of a decade later, there were a couple times where I thought to myself, “Working on The Cobain 50 is doing nothing to help me beat the Northwest Music Guy allegations.”
Longtime readers of my work for KEXP Editorial might remember my stories featuring a friend of mine who was born, raised, and is still living on the Eastside of Tacoma. We originally bonded over a shared love of rap music, vintage Chevrolet models, and being smart Black men in America—the latter a quality both of us know puts us squarely in the crosshairs of the people who pull the strings of this country, the people who pay attention to us with a particularly cautious fear.
We’re roughly the same age, so one day, I was curious as to what he thought of Nirvana. We had never talked about rock music before, and I hate it when people assume Black men of a certain age don’t listen to anything other than rap. He told me he was interested in seeing what Nirvana was about when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” catapulted them to superstardom. He heard their bassist lived in Tacoma, and it was so unreal to him as a preteen that a band from where he was from suddenly became one of the biggest musical acts in the world.
What about the music, I asked. He replied that he thought their radio songs were pretty good, memorable songs, so he stole a copy of Bleach from Tower Records before a Supersonics game and thought it was hard. (In case you’re unfamiliar with the lexicon of young and young-ish Black folks, “hard” is in some instances the highest compliment a piece of art can be offered.)
It made sense. A few of my Black friends liked punk music because of the aggression. Banging their heads with the volume up loud was a productive outlet for their anger. Even though he would be annoyed that I described him in this way, I've always thought of my friend as a sophisticated music fan. I cued up Bleach in his mid-90s Impala. His memories of Tacoma in the early-90s of his youth cropped up. He praised the drumming of Chad Channing and Dale Crover—”even though Grohl’s drumming is like getting hit by a truck.” We chatted about spiritual weight (a common theme between us), and briefly about Bad Brains (he liked their reggae stuff best).
Because I told him early on in our friendship that Kurt was one of my precious few true-to-life heroes in music, he listened to a lot of Nirvana for a while, just to see if he could feel what I felt. If he could see in the band what I see. He liked it. Good songs are good songs, and Nirvana’s tunes spoke to him a little more clearly than when I mentioned the Beatles to him and put on some of their early R&B covers. He gave high marks to the pounding of Dave’s drums (perhaps his favorite element of the band), the subatomic drop-D bass commanded by Krist, and Kurt’s instinct for melody. Above all else, he appreciated Kurt’s humor.
It’s easier to laugh when you’ve been in the gallows. If you can chuckle your way through the darkness, your smile shines that much brighter in the daylight.
It was Dusty’s turn on the turntable as we prepared to go onstage for Come As You Are: A Live Finale. He, Albina, and I have been trading off songs during our joint DJ set. Most were in their seats, waiting for the event to start in earnest. Some people were at the bar, buying a drink to sip during our conversation. Wish I had thought of that. I only had my trusty black Hydro Flask with stickers from record shops, bands, and zine presses. I faded out the song, and Dusty cued up the theme music from The Cobain 50. Showtime.
Funny how life works out. The Black kid who was laughed at by the preps for liking Nirvana was seconds away from stepping onstage in front of a packed house to wrap up a 16-month series about the band who directed the course of my life more than any other. Funny how life ends up coming full circle like that.
Dating back to her days as part of the Black Chevys, Maya Marie has been a fixture in Seattle’s rock scene—and as good a songwriter as this city’s scene has witnessed since the mid-to-late-2010s heyday some of us still pine for. After a few incarnations since (including a great solo run as a quasi-blues singer), Maya is joined by bassist Len Cochran and drummer David Cubine to form the Maya Experience, which is shaping up to be a crucial part of an alternative rock/”grunge” revival there have been rumblings about in the city for the past couple of years. Thankfully, you can drop a talent of Maya’s caliber into just about any style and she’ll floor you—just a few months ago, she was getting her trip-hop on with AJ Suede and Wolftone on their great album Permafrost Discoveries.
Are You Influenced, in spite of the too-familiar Hendrix signifiers in band name and album title, finds the band wrapping themselves around its frontperson’s gifts. Maya’s voice is clearly the centerpiece on the band’s debut album, where she wails through a lifetime of tumult, pain, and spiritual weight. Songs like “Joke,” “Cloned,” and “I’m Brown (I died long ago)” find Maya wailing through the psychic wreckage made at the hands of institutional atrocities. “When It’s Over” contains the nervy energy of Maya’s friends in Black Ends. Closing combo “Mothers Child” and “Stolen Bloom” both showcase Maya’s vocal and spiritual range. For years, Maya has been more or less the Seattle rock scene’s best-kept secret; Are You Influenced might just give her the spotlight she honestly earned a long time ago.
The best part of running a regional music column is the thrill of finding what is essentially a needle in a haystack. I would estimate that I listen to about 200 new albums from Northwest artists every single year, and you can only imagine how many of them I only listen to once. This three-song EP from the brand new Seattle band—”brand new” as in they’ve got fewer than a dozen live performances under their belt—captures a sense of promise that genuinely makes me excited to have this job. Drowning (but not drowned) in a sea of volume and fuzzboxes, opener “Wake Up Dread” is a ‘90s smash hit that could’ve been; an alternate-universe highlight from the Empire Records soundtrack. “Pisces Revenge” has a similar bent towards the gold dug from alternative rock radio, and “We Dream of Annihilation” feels plucked from the first wave of emo (somewhere between the debut of Rites of Spring and the fracturing of Sunny Day Real Estate). On each track, singer Anjali Kusler’s lovesick vocals feel like they’re being sung straight from her diary—and for once, I mean that as the highest compliment.
For years, Alexandra Lockhart has been the creative nucleus for Cumulus—spanning the gamut to Death Cab for Cutie-inspired indie rock to skyward electronic pop—but on the band’s fourth full-length, a new dynamic has been established, with William Cremin co-writing and co-producing the band’s fourth LP, We’ve Got It All. The result is a stately and wistful set of songs; nostalgic without being saccharine or cloying. The band swings from Fleetwood Mac-esque soft-rock to contemporary indie and all the way back around, with songs about headlines creating downcast moods (“Bad News”), sentimental souvenirs from the past (“Boxes and Letters”), a treatise on creating music for the love of the game (“Money & Music”), and a touching parental ode (“Dad Song”). We’ve Got It All is full of strong songwriting, immensely personal references to people and places, and a clear sound and artistic vision that serves as not only an instant reminder of Cumulus being one of the great pop-leaning indie acts in Seattle, but also new peaks they’re scaling toward.
New from our pals at Suicide Squeeze is the latest EP from Portland psych-rockers Blackwater Holylight—four songs that are somehow heavy and atmospheric. After seven years and three full-lengths, Blackwater Holylight are still taking long and winding paths to seek untouched horizons, adding new elements to their blend of psych, metal, and shoegaze-leaning textures. These four epics (the shortest by a decent margin, clocking in at around four-and-a-quarter minutes) channel sorrow, loss, and overwhelm over soundscapes that toe the line of overwhelming but never cross it. And for good measure, there’s a downright graceful, nearly six-minute cover of Radiohead’s “All I Need.” If You Only Knew turns out to be an ideal soundtrack for finding the brave new world inside yourself.
To commemorate 2004 Week and the inception of KEXP's punk show Sonic Reducer, Martin Douglas has resurrected his punk essay collection for an explosive sequel.
To culminate KEXP's Punk Month, Martin Douglas explores his life through the cracked prism of punk rock music.
On what would have been Kurt Cobain's 51st birthday, Martin Douglas reflects on a pivotal moment in his tumultuous young life, watching Nirvana's MTV Unplugged performance re-aired shortly after Cobain's suicide.
