I heard a song the other day on the radio that got me thinking about how we associate meaning solely based on the messenger, and thus create expectations. Here are the lyrics:
“Up, up, up and down
Turn, turn, turn around
Round, round, round about
And over again
Gun, gun, son of a gun
You are the only one
Who makes any difference what I say
The sun shines in the bedroom when we play
The rain it always starts when you go away”
This song is titled “Son of a Gun” and was originally written and performed by a late 80’s alternative band from Scotland – The Vaseline’s. However it may be more readily recognized when it was covered by a troubled heroin addict who blew his head off with a shotgun because he couldn’t meet the perceived expectations of his fans. It was performed by Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, and that is the song I heard.
Cobain had a devastating inability to reconcile the band's mainstream success with his personal antipathy towards that success. In his suicide note he wrote:
“I haven't felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things.”
Author Chuck Klosterman writes in his book Eating the Dinosaur that Cobain’s most depressing artistic weakness was that “he could not stop himself from caring about people who would only appreciate his work if he were a mainstream failure…and that was never going to happen.” He felt he couldn’t meet the expectations of a fan base he wanted, because of the expectations of a fan base he didn’t want.
But this isn’t about what expectations can do to a person, and this isn’t a warning of the danger of expectations, for it wasn’t expectations that killed him. His deep-seeded inadequacies, heroin, and a shotgun did a fine job by themselves. Rather it is about how those expectations manifest themselves in us. What I can understand is a feeling of expectations of a group of people you never intended to provide for in the first place. Those expectations are based on past experience and with a limited set of knowledge of the person or situation.
Take the song “Son of a Gun”. The Vaseline’s version is a lullaby, a matter-of-fact, stream of conscious reflection of an innocent time we can all relate to. The Nirvana version is a dark, ironic song of our loss of innocence. Or is it? Maybe we just imply meaning to it based on the messenger. We associate conflicted misery with Cobain - an inability to enjoy life. There MUST be some deeper meaning to it, we reason. I do it, we all do it. If Miley Cyrus sings that song I abhor it, because it must be a superficial, commercial ploy intended for the masses. If Nirvana sings it, it becomes one of my favorite songs of all time because it must be ART! Or maybe Cobain just really loved the song and was thinking of his wife and daughter every time he sung it.
The point is that Cobain could sing Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” and we would interpret it as rant against the affluence in the US and the antipathy towards the plight in the rest of the world. Those are expectations based on the messenger and they manifest themselves in our lives more often than we think.
Song of the Day
The songs of the day are the Vaselines’ and Nirvana’s versions of “Son of a Gun”.
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