A Small Percent: Nirvana, pt. 3

April 21, 2006

A line from a Nirvana song that has always stood out to me is from "Smells Like Teen Spirit":

A little group it's always been
And always will until the end

For a long time that sounded to me like a pure expression of punk idealism: Nirvana is a small rock group, and always will be. The storyline for Nevermind goes that they had no expectation for the kind of wild success they eventually achieved.. and how could they have anticipated knocking Michael Jackson from Billboard's #1 pedestal? Their expectation was to stay small.. a band for insiders.

One interesting page from Kurt Cobain's journals includes an early version of the lyrics to the song.. and one alternative version goes: "The same small percent has always been and always will until the end." But what can "small percent" mean? It obviously does not refer to a small rock band, so we can eliminate my stand-by interpretation.

Cobain several times makes reference to this "small percent." One important reference comes from a rough draft of what must have been intended as liner notes for Nevermind. Cobain writes:

Thanks to: un-encouraging parents everywhere for giving their children the will to show them up, and to the white macho-american male for reminding the small percent who are capable of recognizing injustice to fight you... [165]

Here small percent means a small minority of individuals with a specific insight: recognition of injustice. The antithesis of this gifted group is the pack of white macho-americans.. which we can assume to be a larger percentage (large enough to elect a president).

Another version of this idea comes out a little later in the journals:

There is a small percentage of the population who were BORN with the ability to detect injustice. they have Tendencies to question injustice and to look for answers in ways that would be considered abnormal by their oppressors. They have Tendencies and talents in the sense that they know from an early age that they have the gift to challenge what is expected of their future...

The larger percent who have and always will dominate the smaller percent were not BORN with even the slightest ability to comprehend injustice. [183-4]

The "have and always will" echoes the line from "Smells Like Teen Spirit".. helping to prove the relationship of this idea with those important lines. Cobain is restating, with his own emphases, the Romantic doctrine of the genius. A few people are BORN special, and no matter what the effort at education, there will always be a small percent who are special.

What is sad is to watch Cobain follow up this rather stimulating restatement of the Romantic genius with a deflating note: "It's obvious that I am on the educated level of about 10th grade in High School" (185). And a Nirvana fan will remember Kurt's "I think I'm dumb.." line from In Utero.. his honest evaluation of himself. But he had no need to be defensive on this point, since his definition of the small percent has no place for "intelligence", but is comprised of something we might call "consciousness." A different state of mind than the larger percent that inevitably surrounds an individual.

This idea of the "small percent" also makes its way into Cobain's vision of Nirvana. To the side of one of his interminable lists of bands, he writes the following:

But as I said before the small percent of deserving bands and music-loving employes will keep sawing away at the Heap... [233]

So punk is invested with that same individual consciousness. Not all punk bands, but the ones worth listening to.. the ones obsessively mentioned in Cobain's journals. Despite Cobain's conceptual alignment of Nirvana with the world of punk (see pgs. 106, 277), he actually believes in a very elitist version of it. Punk is not music for a social class, nor for a group of rock rebels.. nor is it a statement of radical egalitarianism.. it is music for a small percent who share a common interior consciousness.. which is naturally shared by only a small percent of bands.