Episode 214: Starbucks Lovers
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Transcript
Time Crisis.
Back again.
There are so many iconic American artists,
especially musical artists.
And we'd love to talk about them all.
But today is about two icons that tower above the rest.
Taylor Swift and Nirvana/Kirk Cobain
on Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
Time Crisis back again.
It's me, Jake, and Seinfeld currently.
What's up, fellas?
Hey, what's up?
Banking some EPS.
We're banking some EPS.
Getting back to work.
Did we bank it yesterday?
Did we bank it a month ago?
Who knows?
It's not important.
It's a busy year.
We want to make sure that we got the goods for all the TC heads out there.
Evergreen content.
Evergreen content.
And today, this episode, we'll be talking about two of the most iconic artists of all time.
Taylor Swift and Nirvana.
Just starting, are there any connections between Taylor Swift and Nirvana?
Hmm.
Well, she was alive during Nirvana's, you know, popularity.
She was born the year that Nirvana's first album came out.
Oh, so that's a big connection.
1989.
That's the year she was born, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, and each came out in '89.
There we go.
Seinfeld debuted in '89.
Whoa.
Okay.
'89 is a big year.
True.
Seinfeld, Nirvana, and Taylor Swift.
That's pretty big.
I mean, that's all of pop culture, pretty much.
In a way, you could say that every element of pop culture is some combination of those three things.
Taylor Swift, Nirvana, and Seinfeld.
Like, Lana Del Rey is Taylor Swift plus Nirvana.
Taylor Swift plus Seinfeld is...
Friends.
Friends.
Seinfeld plus Nirvana is Foo Fighters.
Mmm, I don't know about that.
Well, they brought more humor than Nirvana.
Yeah, it all depends on the dosage.
Seinfeld plus Nirvana.
I'm still thinking that one over.
Seinfeld plus Nirvana is The Curse on Showtime.
The Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie program.
I like that.
Yeah.
That works.
That tracks.
Seinfeld minus Taylor Swift, True Detective, season four.
[laughs]
Just throw that out there.
Love it.
Oh yeah, I like we're doing addition and subtraction.
We should do multiplication and division too.
Or Nirvana plus Taylor Swift, you could say is Billie Eilish.
There you go.
Accurate.
I feel like Dave Grohl said she's the Kurt Cobain of her generation.
And then she's a pop star.
Taylor Swift is a pop star.
Taylor Swift minus Nirvana, Starbucks.
Ooh.
The coffee chain?
Yeah, the popular.
The popular coffee chain.
Yeah, yeah.
I can see that.
It's getting abstract, but I'm with it.
I'm with it.
Starbucks plus Nirvana.
Starbucks plus Nirvana.
I mean, that's what I hope Vampire Weekend is.
I'm not saying we got there, but that's always been my goal.
That's a hell of a mission statement.
Yeah, but that's, you know, that's a pie in the sky.
[laughs]
♪ In times of war, the educated class knew what to do ♪
♪ In times of peace, their pupils couldn't meet your bed blooms ♪
♪ 400 million animals competing for the zoo ♪
♪ It's such a bleak sunrise ♪
♪ Untrue, unkind, and unnatural ♪
♪ How the cruel with time becomes classical ♪
♪ I know that war's far-shak-shake ♪
♪ This burning fire's break is clear ♪
♪ Something's gonna change ♪
♪ And when it does ♪
♪ Which classical remains? ♪
Now, because this is a banked episode,
we may not know who won the Super Bowl.
That probably would have some impact on this conversation.
And we don't know if the halftime show
was actually a new episode of Seinfeld,
which we've really been hoping for.
But Seinfeld, I think it's fair to say in this room,
Jake is the most decidedly not a Taylor Swift fan.
I've definitely connected with some of her material over the years.
I haven't kept up.
She's very prolific.
But you, so I'm somewhere in between, but you are a Swifty.
Yeah, and you know, I've never, going into the episode
where it was sort of revealed that she was at the top of my Apple Music
wrapped last year, I hadn't really considered myself a Swifty,
you know, as such in name.
But I, you know what?
I embrace the brand and sure, I'll wear it.
I'll wear it proudly.
You're a Swift boat veteran.
I think that's, yeah.
You're a Swift boat veteran for truth.
That's right.
That's how I've mostly thought of myself.
Yeah. You know, at various points over the long history of this radio show,
we've gotten little glimpses into what really makes Seinfeld tick.
We've got into Seinfeld origins.
And I think the truth is, because you started
when we used to have more kayfabe on this show,
it was a little more, you know, wrestling vibes.
You came in kind of being this antagonist.
So we always had this kind of,
you had almost like a mythical villain kind of backstory.
And I think at times we've talked to you more as the real person,
you know, a Canadian man named Seinfeld 2000
versus this kind of persona of Seinfeld 2000.
But, you know, I can imagine for some of the listeners, they
they still don't know the real man behind the curtain.
So my question to you is before we get into
2024, the year you became a Swifty,
I'd like to go all the way back to 1980s
Montreal and just kind of understand your musical journey,
because I think the thing is, when your parents named you Seinfeld 2000,
you were destined to always be seen as a TV fan.
Right. Not a music fan.
Yeah. People like me and Jake, they see us, take one look at us.
They want to talk about music.
Yeah. But you you're called Seinfeld 2000.
So people think so.
You know, they might they might say, oh, you probably like
Seinfeld theme.
And you might say, yeah, actually, once on a radio show, I'm a part of,
we interviewed the guy who composed it.
Jonathan Wolfe. Jonathan Wolfe.
But they're not going to go to you, Seinfeld 2000 and say,
hey, what's your favorite Neil Young album? Right.
Somebody doesn't even need to know who Jake is.
They take one look at him and they're going to ask him that question.
Look at this guy.
This guy's got Neil Young fan written all over him.
They might think he is Neil Young.
For real. It's happened.
Where's your pono shots fired?
Jake, Jake, wait in line at the coffee shop.
All right. So Seinfeld, I guess the first question is,
did you always like music or did Taylor Swift kind of what shook you
at your little TV thing?
Well, I mean, first of all, I appreciate I feel very seen by that setup.
And I will say that, you know, whenever I'm at an airport or something like that
and the and the security person looks at my passport
and they see Seinfeld 2000, there is my government name.
You know, already you get typecast already.
You get put in a certain in a certain hole for pigeons, as it were.
And people don't think that you experience any other media.
And so I just like any other kid, any other baby, I, you know,
I grew up listening to nursery rhymes and simple music for children.
And so I knew about music for years
from birth. I knew I knew what it was.
Instinctively, as soon as I heard it, you know, and I was like, what is this?
And people like, oh, well, that's music.
So, I mean, I appreciate you kind of, you know, giving me that access point.
So you were and I guess when I run the numbers, if I do my own number crunch.
Yeah. You were born 1982.
Is that correct? That's exactly correct.
So I guess it's it's hilarious to think that
the TV show Seinfeld didn't even exist yet.
So you were actually probably listening to music,
kind of baby stuff, kind of the Goo Goo Gaga type,
you know, Mother Goose type stuff.
You were actually listening to music before you even saw the TV show Seinfeld.
I'm sure you were a fan of his stand up in 1982.
Your parents probably that's probably why they named you that.
But yeah, you were and you were listening to music before Seinfeld even aired.
And I mean, no, absolutely.
A lot of his stand up was playing while I was in the womb and utero,
that sort of thing.
So I came out, I knew a lot of his bits sort of, you know, from day one.
But it's no, it's true.
And I will say, you know, I was listening to music and whatever,
Sesame Street and watching that sort of thing.
But it always felt like there's something missing.
They have Sesame Street in Canada.
Yeah, actually, they do.
And they're they're like segments that are Canadian only.
Like there's a polar bear character.
Yeah. For real? Yeah.
This is this is not a bit.
I think his name was Baloo, if I'm not mistaken.
Hang on. I'm going to check.
There's Baloo from the Jungle Book.
Oh, wait, I'm mixing it up with the Jungle Book.
I'm going to find the name of the Canadian Sesame Street polar bear character.
You're a young child in the 1980s.
Canada, you're watching.
You still have Big Bird and all this stuff.
Yeah. Oh, Basil.
Basil was his name.
So they would just cut in a new segment.
Yeah. It would be like a beaver, you know, or Basil or whatever.
And there was French stuff.
But yeah, Canada, we've talked about CanCon, right?
Where like 20 percent or something of Canadian media
needs to actually reflect the Canadian identity.
So you get like Canadian Idol or you get like, yeah, you know.
But then infused into Sesame Street, there were segments where it'd be like,
yeah, it'd be like French, Canadian characters.
OK, that's interesting, because if I was
the prime minister of Canada or or certainly if I was involved
in the famously intense Montreal politics,
Sesame Street is where I'd put my foot down.
I'd say, all right, you want to you want to air some episodes of Webster
Tuesday night, who cares?
But this is the soul of the nation.
This is what the kids are watching.
Like, for real, I'd be like, why do we want someone
from the American Children's Television Workshop
trying to, you know, teach our kids how to spell
and do numbers and treat each other with kindness?
That should be a Canadian show.
Yeah, I mean, you got it.
You got to go back in time and take it up with Brian Mulroney
or whoever was the prime minister at the time.
By the way, Matt has refreshed my memory here by sending some research.
Basil Basil is a cheerful polar bear and star of Sesame Park.
Along with Dodie and Lewis, Basil was one of the three original Canadian Muppets
beginning in the period where the program was simply known as Canadian Sesame Street.
I actually forgot that it was like the whole show was called something different.
But anyway, we're really going off on a tangent here.
OK, let's let's let's get back to the music.
So, all right, let's fast forward to the 90s.
You're 10, you're tween, you're becoming a teenager.
What are you really getting into?
What was the first thing you loved that was your thing?
I mean, the the not so exciting truth is that this was before the time
of the iPod and the democratization of genre.
And so you really I don't know if you guys had this, but I feel like
there was a period where you you had to identify with a certain genre of music.
So I was like through my teenage years, preteen years, I was
I was listening to like just rap music, like primarily.
Like, yeah, right. Like and it's like it wasn't cool.
I remember very clearly my friend, my one of my best friends, Sam.
He bought Melissa Etheridge's.
What was the name of that album?
Dirty Little Secret, I think it was what it was called.
Come to my window. Yeah. Yeah.
All that to say is we we mocked him mercilessly
for stepping outside of of the Wu-Tangs and the DJ premieres and what have you.
You were looking at his cassette tape of Melissa Etheridge and you were like,
how I don't know, doesn't look very hip hop.
And he was like, no, she's a bit she's a bit hip hop Seinfeld, you know,
give it give it a chance.
And you're like, all right, let's put it on.
You're just like, not hip hop enough for me.
You're out of the gang.
What was his name? What was the friend's name?
Sam. You're out of the gang, Sam.
I would dial the numbers just to listen to your breath
and I would stand inside my hell and hold the hand of death.
You don't know how far I'd go to ease this precious ache
and you don't know how much I'd pay or how much I can take
just to reach you, just to reach you,
oh, to reach you.
Oh, come to my window,
quiet side, wait by the light of the moon,
come to my window, I will hold you.
So you were kind of ostracized and then, you know, in college
being in Toronto at that time and, you know, as this was I mean, you were
you were part of this whole thing, but the the emerging indie rock scene
at the time, that's really where I was able to sort of start
to listen to other things.
Get outside of rap a little bit. Get outside. Yeah.
Yeah. It's interesting that you mercilessly mocked Sam
for liking Melissa Etheridge and bullied him.
Yeah, I don't bully.
But then all these years later.
You at the time you were scared of a strong woman, singer, songwriter.
And then now now you're not.
So I guess in these years of going from hip hop to indie rock,
you know, Taylor Swift, of course, she's been she's been called country.
She's been called pop.
Above all, she's like a singer, songwriter.
Is there anything like that that snuck in?
Well, you know, actually come to think of it, I was also at the time,
you know, an avid like radio listener.
And I would listen to like Casey Kasem and Rick Dees and all those top 40.
So, you know, in the background of it, all all that MTV stuff,
all the you know, the Backstreet Boys and whatever Olympus kid
and all that stuff was definitely like I was Avril Lavigne.
And I was very familiar with all that music as well.
And I think, you know, I never really let go of my appreciation
for just accessible mainstream music as well.
This is why I like the top five on this show.
I enjoy I enjoy hearing Jake's reaction to like whatever it is,
Bruno Mars or whoever, because I I definitely have appreciation for like
music that a lot of people, mass audiences can get into as well.
But so who was the first like singer songwriter you got into where you're like?
Because I think part of being a Taylor Swift fan,
not that different than being a Neil Young fan, is that I buy into this person's
songwriting point of view.
It's different than with a pop star.
It can even be different sometimes with like a certain type of band.
I like this way this person writes songs.
I like digging into their discography as a songwriter.
I like their POV.
Did you ever have that before Taylor Swift?
Oh, probably.
I'm kind of I'm kind of blanking, to be honest with you.
I don't know, Madonna, maybe.
Oh, you know what?
Randomly, I had the I had the Madonna Immaculate Collection.
Does she count, by the way?
Is she what you what you put her is like?
I don't know if I would consider her a singer songwriter.
She's even though she does write.
She's such like a massive pop star.
Yeah, but she's interesting.
She's somewhere in between.
Yeah, because I do think she's writing the vast majority of her lyrics.
I do think they reflect her her worldview and her artistic sensibility.
For sure.
I mean, I can't think of any Madonna song that's like
gets into kind of the specificity of a of a Neil Young or Taylor Swift song.
But that doesn't mean but I know what you mean.
Yeah, there's definitely she is a songwriter, certainly
with a very iconic way with words.
I didn't realize there were two Madonna heads on this show.
Yeah, I mean, I remember I had that greatest hits album.
And and, you know, she was
she had put out the sex book around that time, which, you know, as a kid,
right, very provocative and something that was very controversial.
So I was like kind of weirdly compelled as
as as I'm losing innocence and what what have you.
But, you know, as far as like singer songwriters and like the rock tradition
and like the Joni Mitchell sense, maybe the folk sense,
I don't really think there's someone like that who
who like appealed to me at the time.
I got to say I was a little all over the place, as you could tell.
Do people in Canada have a special sense of loyalty
or appreciation for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell,
even though they moved to L.A. in the 60s and they made their careers there?
Well, Canada will always honor and remind
through their media that these people are Canadian figures.
And so I think we have a heightened sense, even in like, you know,
when you talk about like John Candy or like a Jim Carrey, like Mike Meyer,
that sort of thing, like these people are often celebrated and they'll get like
a star on the Canadian Walk of Fame, whatever it's called.
Walk of Fame is what it's called, which is like Canada's
like Hollywood Walk of Fame and where is it?
I don't know.
It's on King Street in Toronto, which is kind of like the
I don't know what to compare it to.
It's kind of like the business corridor of the city.
But there's a lot of emphasis placed on these legendary people,
even if they are expats and whatever.
OK. Yeah. Yeah.
So, yeah, very hyper familiar.
But also, you know, if I'm being real, there's also a little bit of like,
OK, we get it like for certain people.
I feel like there's like, yeah, we know like, OK, stop talking about the same,
you know, 20 people.
You know, a few times in my life, I've spoken to people from other
Anglo sphere countries, I think mostly Australia and maybe England, too,
where they use this phrase tall poppy syndrome.
Oh, yeah. Which nobody says in America.
I've never heard. You never heard of poppy syndrome?
No. Yeah, because, of course, Australia is such a small country
in terms of number of people compared to the US.
So you would assume, oh, yeah, everybody loves when an Australian makes it.
But I've just a couple of times I've had Australian people like, no, mate,
we got tall poppy syndrome over there, which means that
if one Australian poppy grows too tall, it must be cut down.
So almost the opposite.
ACDC and the Bee Gees?
Yeah, they got to cut them down. What does that mean?
Yeah, I don't know if it's true.
Maybe that's just how everybody feels.
Have you heard of the expression crabs in a bucket?
Which is kind of similar.
No, it's different from shooting fish in a barrel.
It's almost the opposite in a sense that I think this is kind of on the same theme.
But basically, the idea is that like if one crab tries to escape a bucket,
the other crabs will sort of pull them back down into the bucket
and then no one escapes kind of thing.
Does that happen in Canada?
Yeah. I mean, I can't give you like a literal like...
It doesn't seem like it does, though.
What about in your own life?
Did other social media influencers try to tear you down
when you said you were going to move to America?
I wouldn't say that. No, no, no, no.
But I also don't consider myself a social media influencer
because I'm not like visibly, I'm not like, hey, guys, try my new tea blender
or whatever, like I don't do that, that thing.
Love of the game.
You know, it's the love of the game.
Yeah. Anyway.
Because also the truth is the phrase haters,
as we use it in the modern parlance, that comes from America.
Right. I think I think it's very easy whenever you're from one place
to have these like insane conversations with people from another place.
That's kind of like I've been a part of them.
I've probably said it.
I've certainly heard people say it to me where it's kind of like,
you know what I like about this place is that the basic human nature,
which I experienced in the place that I'm from, it totally doesn't exist here.
You know, it's just like, yeah, that's not true.
It's like, you know, things like things like jealousy, competition,
status oriented hierarchy, all the things that I experienced,
you know, my school, my town, my country.
It's cool because here it's like no one gives a shit.
It's just like, no, my friend.
No, not far from it.
Yeah. It also makes me think a little bit of like
the Arnold Schwarzenegger doc, which was on Netflix last year.
And just the idea of this dude.
He basically says that he's like, I always knew I was American.
He lived in a small town in Austria.
He would say, like, I wonder if like maybe my father was like
actually some American G.I. and not my actual Austrian dad.
As if like as if you well, who knows?
Maybe you do get some
American this passed down in your genes.
But he just had this feeling like that's where I belong.
And I guess I mean, in his case, I guess he was right.
But he probably had some sense of I cannot achieve what I need to
in this small town in Austria.
People don't understand me.
There's a freedom in America, a freedom to go and do what you want to do.
Although, of course, you know, America's got haters, too.
And anyway, that brings us to Taylor Swift, somebody who,
you know, at this point has become so massive.
And, you know, in some ways, she's archetypally American.
She's she's all American.
And yet, you know, there were definitely times when,
you know, she was in these high profile kind of beefs.
And, you know, I'm sure in her mind, like anybody's,
she she's probably savors her wins, but she also remembers some,
you know, hardcore haters and even her whole mythology.
And I don't know the early music too well.
But my understanding is that part of the reason a lot of people connect with her
is that there's from the earliest days she spoke to something
that many people have, which is a feeling of outsider ness.
And I guess maybe not to the extent of a Kurt Cobain.
There's something interesting about that, that it's like the ultimate winner
who got there through some type of feeling of alienation.
I mean, it kind of makes you think about, wait, is everybody actually Loki alienated?
What's her famous old line that people always quote?
She's a cheerleader. I'm on the bleachers.
Oh, yeah. I'm team.
She's team captain and I'm I'm on the bleachers.
Yeah, I wear short skirts.
She wears T-shirts. No, she wears short skirts.
I wear T-shirts. Thank you.
She's team captain and I'm in the bleachers.
That's the line. Can't believe I know that.
And that's an early like that's like an important song in unlocking the
that's the Taylor Swift. Right.
You belong with me, which was sort of like an earlier.
She was still in the country mode, as I recall, but it's kind of a crossover
starting, you know, we're getting we're getting the sense that she's about to
become the megastar that she is today on that track.
Yeah. I wonder what that's your captain thinks now.
She's also known to be.
I'm sure like any songwriter, there's flights of fancy in her songs
and, you know, just writing characters and stuff.
But she is known to have at least a strong streak of autobiographical songwriting.
So maybe she really did feel that way in.
What, middle school or high school?
Yeah. I mean, you know, not to put too fine a point on it,
but she's she is now dating the football star.
As of this recording.
You're on the phone with your girlfriend.
She's upset. She's going off about something that you said.
She doesn't get your humor like I do.
I'm in my room.
It's a typical Tuesday night.
I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like.
And she'll never know your story like I do.
Because she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts.
She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers
dreaming about the day when you wake up and find that what you're
looking for has been here the whole time.
If you could see that I'm the one who understands you
been here all along, so why can't you see?
You belong with me.
You belong with me.
What got you in?
I think maybe I asked you this on another episode.
It was it was the one of the the folklore album.
Oh, well, I mean, I think I think even from like when
when Shake It Off came out and and she she was very deliberately
sort of telegraphed, I am I am a pop star now.
My music is no longer country.
And then those songs were some that impressed you.
Which album was that?
Was that in 1989?
That was 1989.
So you saw her status rising and you said, all right,
I think she was a country bumpkin.
Now she's announced herself as a pop star.
Let's see if she can go the distance.
I mean, from a strategy standpoint, which is where I always start
my appreciation for anything, you know, cultural.
Yeah, I was like, I'm I'm I'm into the strategy.
I do want to clarify, by the way, that, you know,
I am probably not a Swiftie on the level that your 14 year old cousin,
Brianna, I think some of the most hardcore Swifties are in their 30s, actually.
All right. Fair, fair enough.
I guess what I'm saying is that like you may ask me questions
and I'm just not going to be able to give you an encyclopedic.
I love to think about like an actual real deal
Swiftie listening to this and just being driven mad, just like
Seinfeld has no idea what he's talking about.
He's got all the lore wrong.
Well, here I mean, truthfully, I I I did put a lot of effort
into putting together a little bit of a like an overview.
Let's get to it. Let's get to it.
I feel like what's the first song you picked?
Can I just even get into some of her background
that a lot of people may not know about before I even get into this?
I can I can breeze through it quickly, please.
All right. So I put together some top line facts about Taylor here.
So born in 89, Penelope Taylor, Marie Swift
is an American singer, songwriter, musician.
Nelly Swift. Penelope.
I know, but Nelly is like a nickname for Penelope. Oh, right. Yeah.
Well, what a different career if she Nelly Swift is stuck with Nelly's sweet.
Nelly Swift. Yeah.
No, Taylor heard that before.
Taylor is actually a nickname with not not her biological name.
She's an entrepreneur from logical
from Shreveport, Louisiana.
Incidentally, her twenty six seventeen perfume line,
crisp Adam Autumn Apples and Pears was the top selling fragrance that year.
But she's not actually the first powerful business titan in her family.
Her great grandfather, Bernard Murray Swift, invented the Swiffer Wet Jet.
We are for real. Yeah, this is.
Wait, what is that?
What is the Swiffer Wet Jet?
Is it a vacuum? It's a cleaning product.
It's it. Well, I get into it.
We are using Swiffer or Swifter.
Well, it's a play on their surname.
It's the Swiffer Wet Jet.
But it's it was derived from.
It's kind of like it's like the Dempster brothers who invented the dumpster.
It's exactly it's exactly right.
Paul, as you said, that was her great grandfather.
Yeah. Bernard Murray Swift.
He invented the Swiffer Wet Jet, which became a phenomenon in the 30s.
And, you know, of course, launched the Swiffer company,
which was then acquired by Procter & Gamble in 1985.
You know, that reminds me of something.
I didn't know that she came from that kind of like a corporate prestige.
But also Trent Reznor is from a family, you know, and I'm not saying that he
I don't know if he was born rich or whatever, but somebody and a relative,
maybe a grandfather, great grandfather, great uncle, something
founded an elevator company called Reznor, because sometimes you'll be somewhere
and you'll see, oh, yeah, Reznor, Reznor.
It's such a distinctive name.
That's interesting.
And, you know, we could call these people Nepo babies.
But I'd also like to think that sometimes, you know,
is it that crazy to think that one person in a family
might have some insight into,
you know, an industrial product, mechanical thing like and then like elevators
and or whatever, heating, HVAC, whatever they do.
And that then, you know, 80 years later,
somebody in that same family might have an insight into industrial music.
I actually think that makes sense.
That's a nice through line.
Yeah. And I think the same thing with this Swiffer thing,
that you take something kind of kind of messy or throw away
like a messed up mop and turn that into a billion dollar product.
And then later, somebody in your family takes the pain of feeling left out
or sitting on the bleachers and turns that into a billion dollar tour.
I see a through line. I don't see Nepo baby.
I see a familial greatness.
I was going to say you, you, if you're making music that's antiseptic and sterile,
it's it's a nice through line to your.
OK, OK. Oh, there it goes.
Listen, what we're not going to do, Jake, is disparage Taylor Swift.
I'm so sorry. But like, you know, I think I was.
Yeah, it's it's it's an ingenuity and it's a resourcefulness
that I think you can see has has changed hands generationally.
So I like Ezra's take on it.
I mean, also, I'm sorry.
I know this is probably a very basic question to be asking a Swifty,
but is she related to Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver's Travels?
Yes, that is her her great great uncle.
I think you'd have to throw a few more greats in.
Yeah, a couple. I mean, yeah.
And I know that's where it gets funny.
It's like, you know, how everybody's related to the English royal family.
Yeah, because at a certain point, one human in history,
if you look at the pyramid of after a few hundred years,
thousands, tens of thousands of people.
But but that's still cool.
Jonathan Swift, very important figure in the Western literature.
Kind of like Moby.
He's related to Herman Melville.
And then that's how he got his his name.
Yeah. Moby. All right.
OK, so let's keep going down the lineage of.
Right. Well, Nelly Swift.
Yeah. And by the way, you know, not to try to tie it all too much together,
but much like Gulliver, Taylor is embarking on her own travels around the world,
you know, raking in the dollars and the fans.
But yeah, let's get back to Penelope.
She's cleaning up.
Yes, she's
much like the Swiffer wet jet.
Yeah. So, yeah.
Anyway, Penelope or Taylor, as her friends would call her due to her
proclivity for hamming it up at various talent shows and state fairs
in her home of Cody, Wyoming, where she was born.
We think it's a reference to Taylor Ham.
Yeah, that's I thought they only had that in New Jersey.
It's well, it's a it's a it's a nationally known.
Oh, no, no, maybe I literally.
Wait, she's from Cody, Wyoming.
Yeah. I mean, that's where Kanye has.
Yeah, that's where Kanye has a compound.
Right. So it's all a full circle.
It's all interconnected.
And it's interesting how the universe works like that.
That's crazy.
Yeah, I know. It's she looks it's she's got a fascinating back.
Is that why Kanye wanted to go post up there because she was born there?
I think it is like a weird, like almost sociopathic kind of thing.
That's weird. That's weird. Yeah, that's right.
So anyway, all that said, just to just to give you a little context.
And then so, you know, I went ahead, I chose a few of her most iconic songs
that I think will represent her her vast underappreciated catalog.
Did you say underappreciated?
I did say underappreciated. Do you know?
Well, if there's one person on Earth whose music is not underappreciated,
it would be Taylor Swift.
Well, maybe, maybe what I'm saying, maybe what I'm saying
is that she should be appreciated even more.
Maybe being Time magazine's 2023 person of the year isn't enough.
You know, it's also it's it's an interesting phenomenon, too.
You know, talking about the tall poppy syndrome, haters, whatever the
anything that grows to a huge degree, whether it's a singer's career,
an empire, a business,
there is no such thing as complete victory.
And the bigger somebody gets, the more fans they have, obviously.
But sometimes at a certain there is a tipping point
where then it's also more haters.
So I read, though, she has a very favorable public rating.
She has 70 percent favorability in America.
Is that the Q score?
Some it was something like that.
If people were just comparing it to, you know, Biden and Trump,
who are both much lower.
Oh, sure. Yeah, I guess.
I guess, to be fair, there's more reasons why a president
or presidential candidate might drive people crazy than a singer.
Oh, sure. OK, but go ahead, Seinfeld. Let's get into the music.
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to kind of kick off each of these three tracks
with a question.
And, you know, I'd turn this one to Jake.
Jake, you lived in New York for a stretch.
A couple of years. Yeah. A couple of years.
So, Jake, just a question about your experience when you lived in New York.
You know, want to know where you immediately swept away by,
you know, the romanticism, the neon lights, the possibility in the air.
That was so tangible.
You could taste it like a crisp autumn apple on the first day of fall.
Absolutely not. OK.
How would you characterize your, you know, the sentiment that you felt
when you first moved to New York?
It was a bitter disappointment and struggle.
OK. Absolute low point in my life. Damn. Damn. Wow.
Can we unpack that?
Were you struggling as an artist? Were you struggling?
Creatively, financially,
interpersonally, not a fun two years.
I lived there. We had some good hangs. We did. OK.
We had some good hangs.
Was it all it was at all terrible.
Yeah, but I could. It was a rough period. Yeah.
OK, so you might I mean, just by virtue of how opposite this is to your experience,
you might appreciate you might appreciate this song.
It's a welcome to New York.
This is from Taylor's album.
Oh, my God. Is this?
This is from 1989.
I don't I don't think so.
Yes, it is. Welcome to New York is famously from 1989.
Man, are you a Swiftie or not?
I'm not cut this part out, but I know I know we're not cut out.
All right. I keep starting to song. OK.
Yeah. You're some of your Taylor Intel's little sus.
So I know that was heavily researched.
Wall Street Journal.
All right. Here's welcome to New York.
But you want to play Taylor's version?
Yeah, let's do Taylor's version out of respect. OK.
I'd actually like to be the Taylor's version versus the. Yeah.
Original, I've been curious about that.
And I don't know if we can if you have the lyrics.
I don't have the lyrics.
Oh, yeah, I got the lyrics on right here on Apple Music. Oh, yeah.
Walking through a crowd, the villages a glow
kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats undercooked.
Everybody here wanted something.
Searching for a sound we hadn't heard before.
And I said, welcome to New York.
It's been waiting for you.
Welcome to New York. Welcome to New York.
So Taylor has moved to New York around the time of this song.
She lives in Soho famously.
And I'm kind of as I listen to this, I'm imagining Jake
getting off that bus train.
Oh, train, train.
This is the positive framing you needed.
But this reminds me of that Jay-Z and Alicia Keys song.
Was it Jay-Z or yeah, Empire?
That song drove me up a wall.
I remember working in a gallery and that the artist was playing that.
I think I've told that story before on the show.
This artist is playing that song on loop.
And I was just like,
I can't deal with this New York boosterism, man.
Like, OK, I mean, and again, she's a famous pop star.
She's loaded. She moved to Soho, buys like a Tribeca.
She buys like a brownstone or whatever, a townhouse in Tribeca.
Great. Good for her. Welcome to New York.
Not relatable.
OK, but for real, Seinfeld, this is a song that you put on and get hype.
You love it.
I think it's a, you know, since in all sincerity,
to me, this is a very easy to listen to song.
OK, but for real, you're from Montreal.
Yeah. You moved to Toronto.
Then you moved to L.A.
Just like how often do you, you know, once in a blue moon, maybe you go to New York.
Are you just putting this on like going to going to work in L.A.?
I was well, I was going to New York quite a bit throughout my childhood,
you know, with my family.
I you know, before I moved to L.A., I'd probably been New York
30 to 40 times, something like that.
That's a lot. Yeah.
I mean, I know, but the song wasn't out then.
I'm just saying now in your life, when are you blasting Taylor Swift?
Welcome to New York.
Yeah, I would have this on like a playlist, like if I'm like,
you know, firing off emails or whatever.
And this comes up.
This came up last time we talked about this.
Your relationship to this music is it's on loop and you're doing work.
Yes. Yeah. It's like very innocuously in the background.
Correct. It's as a knowledge worker.
I am I am playing music that I'm trying not to tax my brain with too much.
So I'm looking for basic sounds, melody lines.
I know that's that's funny, though, because that's a lot of a lot of
hardcore Swifties.
The that's the last way they want to listen to this music.
They want they want to dig in.
Like, what does she mean by that?
What they're always searching for clues and things like that.
Well, I think that, you know, the nice
the great thing about Taylor Swift is that you can engage with her music
at whatever access point or entry level is suitable for you.
And so, you know, that's for a song like this. That's cool.
Yeah. I mean, and, you know,
I appreciate the sort of innocence of the feeling of, you know
you know, the song to me evokes, you know, the I love New York logo,
the famous logo, those first impressions
being outside the Times Square M&M store, you know,
that that type of vibe.
How about that Olive Garden?
Right. Have yet to experience it, but would love to go there on a T.C.
You know what I just realized this this song
I'm sure I've talked about on the show, you know, my my family,
multi-generational New Yorkers.
I was born in New York, but I grew up in Jersey.
Right. You know, you're not that far.
So it did feel like a big deal after high school.
I moved to New York, go to college.
But still, you know, I grew up, you know, 12 miles away.
I didn't have that sense of
of kind of like, wow, I'm finally here kind of thing,
which I guess people have in New York.
But it's it's funny to think about that kind of sense of wonder.
Wow. Can you believe it?
I'm in New York, New York City.
Look at me kind of thing.
And I think the polar opposite of this song
is about somebody coming to.
America's other great city,
the second biggest city in America, which is similar but different
in so many ways, which, of course, is Los Angeles.
You know, it's like I'm talking about.
I think I do.
You talk about Randy Newman?
No, Randy. No, no, no.
Randy Newman's from L.A.
So when he writes I love L.A.,
that's the acerbic wit of like a born and raised Angelino.
Are you going to talk about?
This is a song about somebody.
You're going to die. Yeah.
I just realized welcome to New York and welcome to the
maybe Taylor was listening to Welcome to the Jungle
and just being like, oh,
this this sucks.
You should you should be full of wide eyed wonder
when when you go somewhere.
We should do a jukebox musical.
It opens with Welcome to New York.
Well, I thought you were going to say also the flip side of Welcome
to New York is the fairy tale of New York.
Oh, fairy tale of New York. That's true.
I guess also one thing about this song is is Welcome to New York
. It's like the city
is speaking to Taylor, whereas
in this song, Axl is like this, like
kind of satanic figure.
He's basically saying, welcome to hell.
So he's talking to you. Right.
I want to watch it.
I was sexy girl.
News to me, Axl.
He says, Jake, you're a sexy girl.
Very hard to please.
But he's also says, wait, what was in the Taylor song?
What's the line about bright lights?
Because in Welcome to the Jungle, it's
it's you're a sexy girl who's very hard to please.
You can taste the bright lights, but you won't get there for free.
Whereas in Welcome to New York, she says the lights are so bright,
but they never blind me.
So it's like this glow of New York.
It's all positive.
But Axl sees that same image of the bright lights of the big city
as like this, almost like a drug, a drug that's going to kill you.
You want to taste the bright lights?
Axl's back story is he he takes a bus from Indiana
and gets off on the Sunset Strip and is just like, I'm here to make it.
Taylor's story is she's already a wealthy pop star, buys a loft in Tribeca.
It's a different, different entry point.
I'm not saying that she didn't struggle on her way up,
but in terms of their entry point into these iconic cities.
This moment in her life. Yeah.
I have a bit of a counterpoint.
Also, this is where I thought you might have been going to is.
Have you heard Gil Scott Heron's New York is Killing Me?
Yes. I mean, to me, that that is the polar opposite.
Can we go there real fast?
Or is that is it like.
12 minutes, I think, let's sample it.
There's an XX remix of it that I think was the sort of definitive version.
Is it classic XL recordings
produced by Richard Russell?
Here we go.
Have we listened to this on the show before?
You might have listened to some Gil Scott Heron.
Yeah, the doctors don't know
but New York was killing me.
Is this late period Gil Scott?
Yes.
But the doctors come around, they don't know that New York is killing me.
Yeah, well, I need to go home and take it slow down in Jackson, Tennessee.
Let me tell you, city living ain't all
that is cracked up to be.
Bad city living ain't all
that is cracked up to be.
I like on the cover of this Gil Scott album, he's just blasting a cigarette.
Yeah, that's pretty sweet.
Completely disillusioned.
He's like, I'm getting the hell out of here.
Yeah, I'm going home.
I need to leave.
All right, what's the next?
Well, I just want to say one thing.
OK.
That's why, you know, cities, big, especially big cities.
Are, you know, amazing and beautiful and also.
Horrendous is that you get a lot of people in one place,
get eight million people to be quite a variety of experience
happening at any given moment, and you can almost picture
the the Taylor character walking through a crowd, the villages aglow.
So excited.
Just dropped 20, 20 mil on the Tribeca loft.
Not that she didn't have her struggles, but she did.
She did it. She's coming in.
And then we had her struggles and just walking past another dude
is ready to die.
Another dude having the worst day of his life, this city
took everything from me.
It's killing me.
And I'm I'm about to die.
And you know, that's life.
But when I'm firing off an email to the finance department,
I don't really want to be thinking about, you know, an older man
laying on the street in New York wanting to move back to Tennessee.
I want to hear a beat with a bass line.
Absolutely. And the last thing I'll say.
Your luck can change in a New York minute.
I thought about that song, too.
So your luck can totally change in a New York minute.
So I could totally picture an older man who's been through hell.
He's lost his health.
He's lost his money.
He's lost his family.
And he just wants to go home and die in Tennessee.
And then in a New York minute, he's in a 20 million dollar loft in Tribeca.
Everything can change.
That can happen.
That happens every day in New York.
OK, what's the next song?
Well, I'm going to I'm going to start off with another question for both of you.
Have either of you ever experienced a strange
meteorological conditions in a place you least expected?
Have you ever witnessed snow on the beach is what I'm trying to say?
No, but the first thing that comes to mind, I witnessed
playing at Red Rocks in 2019.
Woke up, took a walk around my hotel in Denver.
Ninety six degrees.
Shorts and T-shirt. Wow.
I'm sweating. Walking around Denver.
Jump in the car, go to the show.
By the end of the show, snow.
So I that was the only time in my life I think I've experienced a 60 degree,
like a 65 degree drop.
Now, I guess that's par for the course out there in Colorado.
But that was a shocking.
Those are shocking meteorological conditions for me.
There you go.
And I think more and more frequently we're going to be experiencing
that type of dissonance, if you will.
The environment versus the weather that we're not used to.
Actually, this song Snow on the Beach features Lana Del Rey.
And I know Nick, I think Nick is actually ready to join the episode.
So he might have some some good insights on this, too.
I don't know if we want to use this as a point to to dial him in.
But but I know he's an LDR fan.
So, yeah, Nick, Nick might be our resident hardcore.
I'm a big fan, but he's a hardcore.
What do you call it?
And a big Lana Del Rey fan.
Is there is anybody here speak Spanish?
Un poco. A little bit.
So is there some phrase that might mean like servant of the king
or subject of the king?
Oh, that I don't know.
Subject of the king in Spanish.
Subdito Del Rey.
Nick, how's your Spanish?
Let's let's see.
Is a big Lana Del Rey fan called a subdito del Rey?
Is that a subject of?
Yeah, I feel like it should be something like that or or servant.
Serviente Del Rey?
The servants.
She's the monarch and the Del Rey.
So you're a loyal subdito Del Rey, something like that.
I just looked this up and apparently a lot of fans are called Lanatics.
Nick, are you a Lanatic?
Fanatic? Lanatic?
A Lanatic?
I've never heard this.
I don't like it because that gets confusing because it's it's Lana.
It's not.
It's not.
Well, not.
No one says that.
Lanatics.
Honestly, I.
Lanatics. Lanatics is OK, I guess.
Yeah, Lanatics. All right. That's fine.
Lanatics sounds good. Never heard it.
Your timing and joining is is perfect because we were just
we're in the middle of this Taylor Swift
deep dive, which is going very well, by the way.
And I felt game prepared.
He had like notes and questions.
And yeah, yeah.
So we were about to play Snow on the Beach featuring Lana Del Rey,
the Taylor Swift song.
I'm sure you're familiar.
And Taylor Swift obviously is a she clearly has a very distinctive voice.
But I imagine like many good songwriters,
she's also a very good student of what other people are doing.
And and and as I see this, I don't know whose idea it was, but Snow on the Beach.
Is much more Lana coded as a title than Taylor coded.
I'm not saying. Absolutely.
Of course, there could be a Taylor song called Snow on the Beach,
but a very iconic early ish Lana single.
It was high on the beach.
That's right.
And also when you have a song with beach in the title and Lana Del Rey on it,
immediately you're going away from maybe an all American kind of Taylor Swift beach.
You're going to like that kind of eerie Lana Del Rey beach.
A more Lynchian beach. Let's listen.
Wait. And before you do, Ezra, do you have the idea of the more Lana Del Rey
version up?
Because there was an original version that were Lana's very buried in the mix.
And then I got snow.
I got snow on the beach featuring Lana Del Rey from the Midnight's Till Dawn edition.
OK, I think that's the one.
She's a little louder on this version.
I say, did you guys already talk about I had a handful of people who are fans
all actually wonder if Seinfeld, if this was genuine or a joke?
Is he pretty legit so far?
No, I know. I know. I know it's legit.
But I'm telling you, so many people have asked me if it was a bit so many people.
Well, I mean, this is the fourth.
Let let let let each other speak.
Don't pull a Kanye.
Let her speak.
But it might just have been you
passing by unbeknownst to me.
Life is emotionally abusive
and time can stop me quite like you did in my flight
was awful.
Thanks for asking.
I'm unglued thanks to you.
And it's like snow at the beach.
Weird, but it was beautiful.
Oh, OK.
All right. So the song doesn't take place.
It's it's a metaphor.
Yeah. Also, this is the clean version.
The the the real lyric is it's like snow on the beach.
Beach. Weird, but beautiful.
Oh, I don't like that.
I like the clean version.
You know, like, you know, like beautiful.
It's it's Taylor, you know, really,
really dropping that F-bomb in the chorus.
Very edgy.
Honestly, that I think she's trying to show up for a lot like that's a showing off.
Rihanna. This is a lot of.
I searched for a screen I've never seen.
So I'm from within.
Blurring out my periphery.
My smile is like I want to contest and to hide.
That would be so dishonest and it's fine to fake it
till you make it, till you do.
Till it's true.
Now it's like snow on the beach.
That was a strong couplet from Lana.
So that's kind of the opposite of Welcome to New York.
And I'm sure maybe that makes sense that this would be on a more recent Taylor album.
She doesn't have the stars in her eyes anymore.
It's fine to fake it till you make it till you do till it's true.
Like event, you know,
you're just doing you're doing your best faking it.
Then eventually you're there and it doesn't feel right.
So, you know, I don't have a complex read on these lyrics,
you know, as well, that's your department.
But just what a nice what a nice song to listen to.
Just what a what a pleasant song of the of the ears.
Oh, all for you like Janet, little Janet Jackson.
Intertext. That's fun.
Yeah. Are we falling like snow on the beach?
The April is beautiful.
Flying in a dream.
Stars. Jake, you feel like it's fine.
It's pretty mild.
And it's impossible.
I'm just picturing you firing off those emails to the finance department.
I mean, Jake, picture yourself at a desk.
You've got an urgent email from accounts receivable.
Yeah. And you want something to take the edge off.
Isn't this the perfect song?
It's hard, hard to fight you on that point.
Close your eyes.
Suddenly your desk is on the beach.
Snowflakes falling all around you.
Now that email doesn't seem so tedious, does it? Hmm.
My sip on a 20 ounce Frappuccino.
Ice. You got you got you've got a tall boy Red Bull
on the desk. It's a little harsh.
It's one 30 p.m. That's a little harsh.
Well, you said you've been nursing it for a couple of hours.
You're sipping it slow. It's room temp.
You're saying I'm drinking a room temperature Red Bull?
Look, it's not quite room temp.
That's rough stuff.
It's not as cold as it was.
Yeah, it's a nice song.
Now, was that a single or was that just like a deep cut from Seinfeld?
Deep cut. OK, nice, dude.
I'm sure it got a lot of attention because Lana's on it.
Oh, sure. OK, well, I'd sign for that.
OK, do you want to kick off your third choice?
Because I just saw what it is and I'm.
It's an interesting choice.
Yeah, I mean, question for the group.
Have you ever had someone push you to the edge, push you so hard
that it made you do something, something that might be a little out of character?
Jake, is this in a positive context or negative?
Either probably in a spiteful sense, maybe in a vengeance, you know, sort of way.
Oh, wow.
I haven't been in like a physical altercation since I was a child.
Maybe as an artist, maybe the question I can frame it this way as an artist
has has something ever motivated, motivated you to really,
you know, go wild on the canvas
in a way that you wouldn't normally because your work is,
you know, it's serene and it's very aesthetically pleasing.
Yeah. In my own weird way.
Yeah, sure. All right.
Well, maybe that's the best way I can tee up.
Look at what you made me do a real departure for for Taylor off the reputation
album. What year is this?
Reputation would have been what, 2017, if I had to guess.
Now, am I correct that that in reputation she was in her villain era?
Absolutely. Villain era. Yes.
Yes. Because she and she'd been pushed by Kim and Kanye.
She sure had been pushed by Kim and Kanye.
The secret. I mean, we don't need to get into the whole saga,
but the secret recordings, the selected editing, the sort of
the fake amends and then the the betrayal that came from it.
And then and then the onslaught of snake emojis
that came from Kim and Kanye's dual fan bases,
which drove Taylor into seclusion.
And then for her, she reemerged with this reputation album,
a departure for her, a loss of innocence and a real sort of clapping back
to use the language of that era
and the lead single that that no one saw coming.
But my God, let's do it.
Well, let's listen. I vaguely remember this.
This is her Yeezus.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Like your perfect crime, how you laugh when you lie.
You said the gun was mine.
Isn't cool. No, I don't like you.
But I got smarter.
I got harder in the nick of time.
Honey, I rose up from the dead.
I do it all the time.
I got a list of names and yours is in red underlined.
I check it once, then I check it twice.
Look what you made me do.
Look what you made me do.
What you just made me do.
So this is directed directly at Kanye.
Yes. And there are a lot of
a lot of references to Kanye.
The tilted stage. Sure.
Got that.
Is a reference to write his stage design from the Yeezus tour.
And in this song, what do you think it is she did to him?
This is her fantasizing that that she just like shot him and he's bleeding out.
I think the song itself is what she made it.
You know, he drove her to.
So it's a song about her writing the song.
In a way, there's a metatextual quality to it, for sure.
So it's basically saying I just dropped a metatextual song.
Right. About my anger towards you.
Oops. I think I'm OK.
OK. No, I think I think it's very clear that in this song,
she he's bleeding out.
Absolutely. And what I think actually,
you know, zooming out a little bit, it's you made me change
my whole career trajectory.
I wasn't planning to release negative,
you know. Oh, that's interesting.
Antagonistic music.
I wasn't trying to make enemies here on record.
I don't trust nobody and nobody.
But you know what? Kanye wins then.
I mean, the real move would have been just to completely ignore him and move on.
Well, I mean, look at them both now.
Who would you say is the winner?
Oh, no, no.
But that has nothing to do with this record.
It depends. I mean, yeah, I've talked about this many times with the other people.
First of all, I wonder if Taylor looks back at this era and says,
I appreciate those difficult things I went through.
Thanks for all this to make emojis because it pushed me
towards this more interesting arc.
I had to go make my kind of my made.
It made me make my Yeezus.
And then I got to come back and make be more positive again and get folky.
You know, however you describe that arc, like maybe without the antagonism,
she might have been a little confused about where to go artistically.
Like she's fired up.
Look what you made me do.
I mean, the line I got, I got smarter.
I got harder in the nick of time.
I rose up from the dead.
I do it all the time. That's the best line in that song.
I like that.
I rose up from the dead. I do it all the time.
You're sinister.
Yes. In some ways, she's she's acknowledging the Kanye's power.
Look what you made me do.
But it's all saying, but thanks.
It's I need I needed your negative energy.
And then in terms of who ended up in a in a better place,
I imagine if you most people would probably rather be Taylor.
But the thing when people vest my opinion behind closed doors,
if I'm at a music industry event, people want to still keep talking about Kanye
and Taylor, and I'm like, come on, guys, it's 2024.
Let's talk about, you know, Noah Kahan.
It's you know, I don't want to talk about this anymore.
But whatever you go to these music events, people still bring it up
because people have their loyalties and whatever and say, you know,
can you believe this reversal of fortune?
The way the way I see it,
the two people who've been playing their roles from the jump.
You know, if you asked way back at that MTV Awards or whatever,
which one of these people is more likely to lose 400 million dollars in a day?
The person who impulsively ran up on stage and grabbed the mic from somebody
or the person, you know, standing there in a gown going,
oh, my God, what just happened?
Duh. Even though that's the the moment that this antagonism started.
You're kind of like, I think she'll probably continue to do her thing.
And she always seemed to have a she was always a less provocative figure
and also a person who people describe as being very savvy.
So you're like, who's more likely to have the biggest tour of all time?
The person who's a little more low key and savvy
or the famously provocative, reactive, nuttier person.
Anyway, life is long.
Who knows what the next 10 years will take?
Kanye, where the next 10 years will take Taylor.
You know, sometimes antagonisms end up in surprising places.
Sometimes there's a synthesis.
I think of the Netflix program Beef.
I think I think we might get a beef type ending for Kanye and Taylor
that involves some sort of a tragic moment of tenderness
and somebody's seemingly dying or something.
Thank you so much, Seinfeld, for giving us a window into your Taylor Swift fandom.
My pleasure.
I want to go to one song that I believe Jake likes the song, too.
And I might be basic.
But when I think of my favorite Taylor Swift song,
I always come back to Blank Space.
I thought that was a great song.
I've always found it to be a moving song.
I liked when it was on the radio.
I've enjoyed I know over the years we've talked about this song.
Is this Starbucks lovers?
This is Starbucks lovers.
And I also just thought it might be interesting
because we've talked on the show about the difference
between the Taylor's version and the.
Oh, yeah, let's get into that.
And the old Taylor's version.
So let's just listen a little bit of the original Blank Space.
So this is from the 89 record.
Yeah.
And, you know, I like Welcome to New York.
To me, this is a much more emotionally nuanced song,
as you might expect on an album.
This is when she was sharing more.
Oh, my God. Look at that face.
You look like my next mistake.
Love's a game. Want to play?
No money, student.
I can read you like a magazine.
Hidden money. Rumors fly.
And I know you heard about me.
So, hey, let's.
Yeah, I like that kind of straightforwardness at this point in her career.
She was like, and I know you heard about me.
I'm not pretending I'm on the bleachers anymore.
No, we can.
So it's going to be forever.
Or it's going to go down in flames.
You can tell me when it's over.
If the high was worth the pain.
Got a long list of ex lovers.
They'll tell you I'm insane.
Because you know I love the players and you love the game.
Because we're young and we're reckless.
We'll take this way too far.
It'll leave you breathless.
Or with a nasty scar.
Got a long list of ex lovers.
They'll tell you I'm insane.
But I've got a blank space, baby.
And I'll write your name.
I always like the sentiment of the song.
It's like, it's just interesting because it's a kind of,
all right, let's see where this goes.
You know, you could write a song like that, meeting somebody for the first time.
This is an exciting moment.
Oh, I wonder where it's going to go.
Whereas she's at this point in her, and this is even before Reputation,
she's been through too much to be wide-eyed.
Despite what the character in Welcome to New York might feel like.
So she's basically saying, you know, it's like that Grand Theft Auto meme.
Ah, s***, here we go again.
And I do, I like that sentiment.
Just kind of like, hey, here we are again.
I mean, you know it's got a little bit of Groundhog's Day reincarnation vibes.
Here we go again. Let's see what happens.
Oh, oh, maybe it's going to be amazing.
Leave you breathless or with a nasty scar.
It's one or the other, good or bad.
Here we go again. Let's try to make it fun.
And there's this kind of knowingness about how things might go.
And you could picture like, almost like a kind of like badass country song.
It's like, and I got a blank space for you.
Just kind of like, you know, like I roll.
But the song has like a sadness about it.
It's like putting on a smile. Okay, all right.
Now I know what kind of guy, okay, you got some new money, suit and tie.
And then it's weirdly, it's like the, it's prosaic at this point.
It's, you know, I've been here before and yet you can feel there still is the sadness in it.
And I've always found this song very moving.
I always come back to it.
But I want to hear what the Taylor's version sounds like.
Because we actually know this song very well.
Pretty close. Yeah, I don't hear a difference to be honest.
The vocals maybe are a little different.
Yeah, can you, somehow she sounds like a little older, obviously, but less vulnerable.
It sounds less vulnerable.
It's the sound to say maybe it's like almost too confident for the lyrics.
I can't, it's like subtle, but it's not, it doesn't hit the same way.
Can't step in the same river twice.
Yeah, but it's subtle. It's very subtle.
The difference. I mean, the reduction is like exactly the same.
She's a little louder in the mix.
I feel on this one, her voice is a little more prominent.
Do you think she tried to correct the Starbucks lovers?
Clearly not.
I wonder how many Swifties struggle with this.
I'm like, God, I really want to listen to Taylor's version, but honestly, like,
even though the differences are subtle, I feel more connected to the original.
Can you put the original back on?
I'm just like really curious what Nick was saying about like the vocal performance.
There is a distance between those two.
This is the original again.
This has better drum sounds. It's very subtle, but the drums sound better.
Yeah.
The vocal is drier on the new one.
Less reverb.
No, this is drier.
They gave her, yeah, reverb echo.
This is mixed better.
I like that single track vocal she did.
Oh, yeah, that snare hit is different.
The snare is different.
It's subtle. The vocal is drier in the original.
Yeah.
Incredibly subtle and yet meaningful.
Must have been a real drag to re-record your music, you know?
Can you imagine, dude, going, can you imagine trying to re-record the Contra album?
It'd be horrible.
It sounds miserable.
Yeah, just like, yeah, just having to get in like, is that close enough?
Yeah.
All right, let's do another seven takes.
Would you just listen to, like, would you just play Contra and sort of karaoke along to try,
like, how would that even, from a process standpoint?
Well, theoretically, they have to re-record every element.
Oh, right.
I mean, in a pop song like this, it's relatively simple.
Getting into having to re-record like a guitar take through an amp.
Brutal.
It's going to be so hard to, like, really match that.
At least, you know, I imagine both of these songs, they probably were using the same snare over and over again throughout it.
So it's a bit copy and pasted, but still you need to get it right.
And she probably showed up.
I mean, whoever produced the Taylor's version probably did all the instrumental tracks.
And then she showed up and was like, okay, I'll do my vocal.
It'd be very frustrating to try to match.
I mean, it's good for, I mean, whether the Swifties listen more to the old blank space or the new one,
it's a very interesting Borgesian task to just re-record.
Well, you know, Morgan Wallen just did this.
Oh, yeah? Why did he do it?
Yeah.
Beef with the manager?
Well, because there are these, yeah, beef with, it's only on his, like, oldest, like, it was one or two old songs that he re-released.
Because, yeah, an old label of his, like, one of his earliest recordings.
But to your point, I mean, it sounds sort of different to me, but it is when you're using guitar sounds, it's definitely like a lot.
Yeah, we were talking, we've talked in the past, too, about when, you know, people in the '90s are trying to recreate rock recordings from the '60s.
It was just impossible and it sounded terrible.
But, you know, this is pretty close.
And yet I think we all, we feel that slight change.
But anyway, she added all these bonus, she made it a whole event.
So it kind of doesn't matter.
She made those new versions have added value beyond that.
I mean, and honestly, if I was, you know, out and about somewhere or, you know, in an Uber or something and I heard "Blank Space," there's no way I could be able to tell
which version it was.
Even after doing this detail-oriented A and B.
Jake's in the back of the room, "Bro, bro, excuse me. Is this Taylor's version?"
"Yeah, bro, Taylor's version. Only Taylor's version in my Uber."
All right. Copy that. Copy that.
Seinfeld, thanks so much.
Now, time to talk about Nirvana.
Good band.
The king and queen of 1989.
Kurt Cobain and Taylor Swift.
Jake and I have both read this book, "The Amplified Come As You Are, The Story of Nirvana," by Michael Azarad.
Who's a legendary music journalist who we're excited to have on the show soon.
Jake, you've known him for a while. I think I met him through you.
Met over the years.
He's known, I think, primarily for two very iconic music books.
One is "Our Band Could Be Your Life," which is an excellent book about some of the independent American bands of the '80s.
But also, the first book that really put him on the map.
As a young journalist, he was asked to profile Nirvana in like '92, '93.
And so he had a lot of access to the whole band. And it's not an authorized biography.
He was allowed to write it the way he wanted to.
And he says in the book that Kurt thought an authorized biography would be very "Guns N' Roses" and not very Nirvana.
Corny.
He thought it would be corny, but that book came out in 1993.
And then pretty early into 1994, Kurt kills himself. April '94.
So he had written this kind of very important document about Nirvana.
But obviously, so much changed in the years after.
So, you know, almost 30 years later, he writes this version of the book.
And it's a pretty incredible book because it's essentially two books in one.
You have a paragraph from the original 1993 book and then sometimes a whole page of reflection and explanation written in more recent times.
And somehow it's still extremely readable throughout.
But it's also pretty long. I think it's almost 600 pages.
So you're getting his kind of original account of Nirvana in '93.
Plus you're getting so much more nuance and reflection about what he knows now about Nirvana.
And Nirvana's come up on the show before. We've never really gone deep.
We've talked about them here and there. And I think Nirvana, for you, Jake, that's a band that's like such an iconic Jake band.
You were the right age.
I was the perfect age.
You were the perfect age to kind of love them when they came out.
I was a little bit young, so they kind of seeped into my consciousness. I'm sure I've told the story many times that I received in utero on cassette on my 10th birthday,
which happened to be April 1994.
It's a pretty hard record for a 10-year-old.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Kurt's body was found on my birthday.
That's right. We talked about that. Maybe we talked about it off mic.
I got to school on Monday and a kid was like, "Oh, you know that tape you got at your birthday? That guy's dead."
I'm like, "What?"
But anyway, Jake, you were there from the jump.
Well, I wasn't there in 1989.
Bleach wasn't on your radar as a 12-year-old?
No, it wasn't. In '89, I was into Skid Row and Motley Crue and Milli Vanilli.
But I was the...
Hell yeah.
But I was the... Those Milli Vanilli songs hold up.
I was the perfect age for Nirvana to be on MTV and change the cultural landscape or whatever. I was 14.
I mean, I was a freshman in high school when I remember hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio.
And I remember going to this NHL hockey game with one of my friends and his dad.
And it was just in between one of the periods and they were blasting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" over the PA after a Motley Crue song.
And I was like, "Whoa."
I'd heard it already, but it really sank in in that moment.
Dad, did you just feel the vibe shift?
Dad, I think the '90s just kicked in.
And I actually read Michael's book in 1993 when it came out.
Oh, the original edition.
Yeah. 'Cause '92, '93, '94, Nirvana is it.
Yeah.
And I remember when my... 'Cause I know Michael pretty well at this point and I met him through my brother.
And I remember Dave, early Dirty Projectors days, playing some show in Brooklyn and him texting me and being like...
So this must have been, I don't know, '04 or something.
Him being like, "Michael Azarad came out to our show tonight."
And we were just like, "What?"
The author of 1993's "Come As You Are"?
Yeah. I was like, "Azarad showed up to one of your shows? That's amazing."
But yeah, anyway, yeah. I mean, I was...
If you're born in '77, if you're born in the late '70s, Nirvana is a seminal band.
You were the right age at the right time.
I can totally imagine it. And actually reading this book, being younger, I took it a little bit for granted how much this kind of changed things.
But to actually picture, especially back then when there was no internet, and to suddenly on MTV see something that sounded like Nirvana...
Which of course, if you're really into that type of music, there's a million precedents for Nirvana. Pixies, whatever.
Replacements, yeah. If you're older... Yeah.
I remember meeting guys that were like three, four, five years older than me later in life.
Who were like, "Oh yeah, I mean, when Nirvana came out, I already knew Bleach. I thought 'Nevermind' was kind of lame."
Yeah, right. But I was like 14. I didn't know anything about cool music.
And also, for that album to go to number one, that just blew everybody's mind.
And just for it to fully take over was kind of insane.
One thing I really like about this book is it really, really paints a picture of Kurt and Chris growing up in Aberdeen, Washington.
And it kind of got me thinking that Kurt might be the last true working class rock star.
Who made good music. Because I think maybe Fred Durst or something.
I don't really know much about the kind of like Korn or Fred Durst kind of guys.
I get a sense they're maybe working class guys.
I guess, but I mean, he's... I guess, yeah. I mean, you're right. There's always working class rockers.
No, no, but Kurt was a working class guy that was making college rock.
And was a superstar.
Yeah, he was like the... Yeah, to be kind of left of center and a superstar and from like a town like Aberdeen.
One thing growing... It's like really sad reading this book because, you know, I felt like I knew a lot about Nirvana.
But I guess I realized I hadn't thought deeply about them.
And it's so sad in the book that he... You can tell he's almost like embarrassed to admit it.
But his parents divorce seems to be just the defining moment of his life.
And of course, that's a huge moment for anybody.
But in terms of just like this primal, like searing pain in his life.
And you can tell he goes on, you know, the opening track in "Utero".
He has this kind of like funny line about the legendary divorce is such a bore.
Like he's kind of like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boo-hoo. My parents got divorced. Everybody's parents got divorced."
And actually they make the point in this book that Dave Grohl, also the product of divorce, seems like a pretty like cheerful, happy guy.
A laughable guy.
Yeah, and so it's obviously it's not just about divorce. It's also about his specific relationship with his parents.
You know, they talk about... They interview Dave Grohl like, "What's it like after your parents divorced?"
"You know, it wasn't easy, man. But my mom, she's a real rock star. She was out there, you know, busting her up for her kids, providing for us. Like such an inspiration."
You know, he had this like kind of positive take.
And like, whereas with Kurt, seemed to have very difficult relationships with both his parents.
Like getting thrown out of his mom's house and bouncing around with like other...
Like living at friends' houses or, you know, he famously, even though Azrad is not totally sure this is true, but he claims he like lived under a bridge for a while.
And there's these just like insanely sad quotes where he's just kind of like, "Oh yeah, I liked life until I was eight."
And his mom was like, "Kurt was such an optimistic kid. He would just wake up every day so happy to be alive. Just, you know, putting on shows and this and that."
And then he's just like, "Yeah, I was happy until I was eight, until my parents split up." And he's like, "That was it."
And then also there's an element of Kurt. And I can remember flipping through that. There's a book of his journals. That's pretty interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Where you can also see this dude, like maybe a lot of people of his generation, he's kind of like punk rock to the core.
Knows every kind of, you know, obviously he like fam... He's covering like the Vaseline's and real left of center, unknown stuff.
When you look at his list of his 50 greatest favorite albums, he went out of his way to really weight it towards underground stuff, wipers, whatever.
But by the same token, he grew up loving Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and stuff. And he's... he was savvy, you know?
There's a little bit of Taylor Swift in him too, you know? He, just like Taylor Swift went from country to pop, Kurt understood.
And he even had a mission statement that he would say privately. He's like, "We're going to combine the textures of Black Sabbath with the pop savvy of the Beatles."
[Laughs]
Which sounds kind of lame. Well, or he would have thought it. I don't think it's lame. He would have thought that was lame to say it publicly.
I mean, it's the most like Gen X. He's like the most Gen X character because it's like, yeah, he's holding on so hard.
Also living in Olympia, I think he really got deep into the kill rock stars mentality of like, it's lame to try to be a big rock star.
And I remember when I knew Calvin at the end of the nineties, early 2000s, he'd be like, "Why do you even listen to music that aren't isn't your friends?"
Like, I remember him literally saying that to me. Like, why do you listen to like guided by voices and like, and like...
Even guided by voices?
No, yeah. He was like, "Why? Like, you should just listen to like your friends' music that they're playing in their living room."
And I was like, "My friends make some awesome music, but that's a pretty small pool."
I like Little Wings a lot, but like I listen to it every day.
I also like the Eagles.
So anyway, like, I think like Kurt, like it's just seemed like just having gotten a tiny taste of that myself way after the fact, I can imagine him living in Olympia in the
mid eighties, late eighties.
But then again, like you were saying, loving Aerosmith and like Creedence Clearwater.
And maybe sensing his own talent and his own pop sensibility and his own kind of like natural inclinations as a songwriter.
And I think that's often the case with these characters.
Based on how maybe they react to fame or how they talk about themselves, you'd imagine they were dragged kicking and screaming from, you know, wherever they came from
into the limelight.
And then, you know, in this book you start to realize, well, he signed a sub pop.
They might've had a somewhat spicy relationship, but the sub pop guys were very savvy at turning the Seattle sound into something coherent and marketable for the
world.
And it also, there's even some quotes from Kurt where he's kind of like, "I know we can be huge."
So he actually believed more in Nevermind and Nirvana's possible trajectory than probably some of the people they worked with.
It's not like he's like, "We're punk rock, man. We're never going to sell more than 80,000 records."
He had a feeling that he could make something really big.
So he wasn't dragged kicking and screaming. Maybe he didn't like it when he got there.
I feel like in the book, the book, I mean, he's such a conflicted guy.
There are times when he's like, "Yeah, I know we can be huge." But there's other times where he's just like, recording Nevermind, he's like, "I don't want to do double
track vocals. That's lame."
Right.
Like Butch Vig had to push him to like, "No, sing a harmony track." And he'd be like, "Why? That's lame."
It almost drove me a little bit crazy reading this book.
How conflicted he was.
How he flip-flopped so hard.
Yeah.
But that's a classic artist in the moment of weird confidence and then huge self-doubt.
Yeah. And also for him to be so ingrained in a scene.
It seems like as the band got bigger, he needed to signal over and over again to the people who, the kind of scene that he came from,
"Don't worry guys, I'm in on the joke. I'll go on. Yeah, all right, we'll be on the cover of Rolling Stone, but I'm going to write 'Corporate Magazine Still Suck' on my
shirt."
And the alternate photo shoot, he put on another homemade shirt that said, "Kill the Grateful Dead."
Yeah.
And I was like, "Bro."
Yeah, he really was cruel to the Grateful Dead.
I wonder how well he knew, of course, we're talking about Nirvana, but we have to sidebar to the dead. I mean, it's time crisis.
Yeah.
But I wonder how well he actually knew the music or if they were just the obvious target of like hippie boomer.
I think they're the obvious target. And I think also he probably would have come around if he was older because I think a major theme for that generation of punk rockers
was a little bit, "Wow, you guys had it all in the '60s."
You had something to fight for, you had something to believe in, you had a moment of flux and social change. And what did you do with it? You were at Woodstock and then by
now you're running car dealerships?
Trust me, that's not going to be us. Like that was a classic theme. So I think there was this like anger that some of these people felt towards the hippies, even though
they liked the music of the '60s.
In that song, Territorial Pissings, Chris Novoselic starts it off with, "Come on now, smile on your brother, everybody." And that read to a lot of the audience as like
mocking the '60s. But in the book, Chris and Kurt are both like, "That's a great song. I love the Young Bloods."
Yeah, we didn't mean to be so-
And so I'm sort of like, I wish that Jerry Garcia and Kurt Cobain had lived a lot longer so they could have met in the 2000s and they could have both been like, "You know
what? We were both reluctant front men of these iconic bands and we shared addiction problems."
Because like, yeah, I mean, like, you know, like in the Dead documentary, it's like Jerry like really started to resent becoming like the Papa Bear.
It's crazy. They had a lot in common.
And then Kurt, obviously like very uncomfortable with his place in the spotlight. So anyway.
Kurt probably made-
I just want to read you this great quote from Kurt to Melody Maker in '92. Quote, "I wouldn't wear a tie-dyed t-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Bill Collins and
the blood of Jerry Garcia."
Yikes.
Yikes. Also-
But you can picture him saying that in like his like snide Gen X, like, "I wouldn't wear a shirt unless Bill Collins should be put to death, man."
And Jake, did you know this? Or Ezra, did you know Kourtney Love's father, Hank Harrison, was a one-time road manager for the Dead?
I did know that because there's a rumor that Kourtney's on the back of like a Dead album as a baby.
Oh, on the Palindrome one.
I don't think it's true, but yeah, there is a connection. I think, yeah, of course Kurt probably later in life, I could imagine him being like, "I'm ashamed of what I used
to say about the Grateful Dead. I finally got in.
You know, I really just hated Touch of Grey when I was growing up and there's so much more."
I also think there's a connection here that, again, I don't know exactly what kind of music Kurt's parents listened to. They don't seem to be, have been hippies.
No, they seem pretty square.
They seem somewhat square, but it's also worth keeping in mind that seemingly for Kurt, the thing that changed his life, that took away all joy and innocence, was his
parents' divorce.
When, I think the '70s into the '80s is when divorce peaked in America.
Hmm.
Maybe this is a bit of a reach, but like, people used to not get divorced, right? You just couldn't.
It was very rare, the societal pressure, you know, people were involved in religious institutions. It just wasn't going to happen.
The cultural revolution of the '60s, the sexual revolution, opened up the possibility of divorce.
Divorce probably saved some people's lives.
Divorce probably let some people go and achieve their dreams, but if you're the seven-year-old kid, you didn't live through the repressive '50s, all you know is that
your parents seemed to make a change, which, you know, they probably had to.
But if you're Kurt, in your mind, you're just like, "Well, this is the thing that ruined my life."
Probably somewhere in your brain, you're drawing a connection between the permissive, the rise of a more permissive culture in the '60s, and this really brutal
fallout for families in the '70s and '80s.
And interestingly, I'm pretty sure the divorce rate's gone down since then.
So this is like a pretty unique moment in the history of America, where, I mean, also there's less marriage now, so that's probably part of it, but at this moment when
kids like Kurt and Dave or whatever, they're experiencing something that their parents probably hadn't experienced, and maybe even their kids won't.
You know, of course people still get divorced, it's a fact of life, but that was a time when--
It was like half of marriages would end in divorce.
It peaked with that generation, and, you know, Azrad makes the point that there's maybe some small part of that.
If like-- maybe this is going too far, but if in some ways Kurt is like the poet of the pain of coming from a messed up, divorced household--
Not that all divorced households are messed up, but his was, where the divorce ruined his life and it didn't get any better, and his relationship with his parents
deteriorated, the opposite of Dave coming from a divorced home.
That's a huge part of why there were millions and millions of people ready to tap into his wavelength.
And of course, they also cared about social justice issues, so they had that in common with the hippies, but you could imagine that Kurt was speaking to the generation
of divorced kids who were really wounded as children, and you'd have to probably look at this idea of the 60s like, "Hey, do what makes you feel good, man."
And I could see him projecting that onto the Grateful Dead, just being like, in some sense, even though his parents weren't hippies, just being like, "This is that
attitude that caused me so much pain in life."
And when I hear a bunch of kids my age being like, "Let's follow the Grateful Dead, do what we want, do drugs and stuff," you could see why he'd be like, "F*** that. I'm a
punk rocker."
So lame. Right. No, I like you putting those in that huge generational shift of like, yeah, the 60s rock stars were rebelling against the stifled 50s vibe.
They were pissed off their parents were married. Right. And were like, and were squares.
Yeah. We should listen to some of their music. Yeah, yeah, let's get in.
But I was talking to you, Jake, when we were texting a few weeks ago about Nirvana, and I do think Kurt is a fascinating lyricist.
It's very poetic. It doesn't always, famously, the actual lyrics to Smells Like Teen Spirit are kind of all over the place, but he always, there's such real emotion,
whether he's in a kind of Dadaist, weird word salad phase, or he's saying something specific, there's always real emotion.
And I always thought about the fact that like, there's definitely like, a strain of Nirvana, which is like, was a strain in a lot of art of this time. But there's
something about like some of these phrases that he's drawn to.
Like, I'd never thought about this before, but maybe reading this book and listening to Come As You Are, like, I always, to me, the phrase Come As You Are always seemed
like this kind of, like weird, mysterious, like, almost metaphysical phrase.
I was thinking about it more, but I kind of know this phrase, and it's the title of the book too, but Come As You Are is what would be on like an invitation from the 50s, where
you're basically talking about the dress code.
Yeah, it's casual.
It's Come As You Are. So you could totally picture like some weird 50s party with like, you know, fruit suspended in jello and beehive hairdos, and just be like, Come As
You Are. Oh, no need to dress up. Just a group of friends. Come. And there's something about like,
Memoria.
Yeah, I thought it was memory. On the screen, the lyrics say Memoria.
Yeah, maybe he's just saying,
Come, doused in mud, soaked in bleach.
Soaked in bleach. So I think there's always been this like Nirvana thing where it's like, he likes these like funny, formal old phrases, and then he throws like mud and
bleach on it.
Well, yeah, there was a few other songs we were texting about that, I remember.
Yeah.
Pennyroyal Tea sounds like an old.
Oh, yeah. It's like the Beatles. And I always thought of like, um,
Aneurysm.
Aneurysm.
I can't believe they have incesticide in the Apple Music app as a compilation.
It is a compilation.
I know, but to me, that's an album. That's a-
I don't know if Kurt's on that, would you?
Oh, yeah, I remember how this starts now.
It's like a tempo change.
But the lyrics, I mean.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I love that shift.
This is sick.
I haven't spent a lot of time with Nirvana's music in a while, and then reading this book.
You're getting back in?
Oh, yeah. I've been listening to it a lot, but I was always, I always thought of Nirvana as like, yeah, like a little more earnest or something than like the other like
classic 90s bands like Pavement or something.
But honestly, like, I think what you're right. I think you're saying is real that like, I mean, his lyrics are so 90s.
Right.
And when they really work, whether it's like Nirvana or Pavement, the lyrics are, can be sort of like scattershot and illogical, but there's like an emotional truth in
them.
Yeah. And also he was, you know, obviously he only made it to 27.
So you start to see towards the end how with In Utero, he might have been heading to some other place.
But it's like maybe only on In Utero he was trying to like shake off like, all right, guys, enough about this legendary divorce.
I don't want to be the guy who's still just like stuck in his childhood. But that's where he was.
The music is so rooted in like the pain of growing up.
Listen to this one, Sliver.
Yeah, classic.
And this is a pretty early Nirvana song. It came out on.
I think this is like 90s, it's like in between Bleach and Nevermind.
"I kicked me off of Grandpa Joe's, I kicked and screamed, said please be home."
"Grandma take me home, Grandma take me home."
Also, Kurt could be very cool when he wanted to, but Grandma take me home.
It's like, it's not.
"Grandma take me home."
"I had to eat my dinner there, mashed potatoes and stuff in there."
Yeah, I just found like listening to this now after reading this book, like so heartbreaking.
Like, it's kind of like if you just heard a punk band having this song like, "They made me eat some mashed potatoes."
It's kind of like, all right.
But then there's something about like seeing how like, yeah, emotional Kurt was.
That suddenly it's like Grandma take me home actually feels really sad.
Yeah.
Just like lonely little boy.
It's really, I don't want to be here.
Why are my parents not here? Grandma take me home.
No, it's very singular. Yeah, you're totally right.
Like another band performing this.
"Grandma take me home, Grandma take me home."
"After dinner I had ice cream, I fell asleep and watched TV."
"I woke up in my mother's arms."
That's, yeah.
"Grandma take me home, Grandma take me home."
I woke up in my mother's arms.
"Grandma take me home, Grandma take me home."
And she keeps screaming all over.
"Grandma take me home, Grandma take me home."
Yeah, like when you consider Nirvana being probably the biggest band of the 90s
and in some ways like the coolest, like Kurt just had like a natural cool,
but like other like famous intense bands from the 90s, like
Tom Yorke never going to scream Grandma take me home 20 times.
Chris Cornell.
Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, even Eddie Vedder.
Grandma take me home.
Eddie Vedder's not going to say that.
Rage Against the Machine.
No.
Definitely not.
Only Kurt could say Grandma take me home.
And I think it's partially because of his insane voice.
Yeah, totally.
Like kind of, he really meant it.
You know what's been interesting Jake?
This song's been having kind of a moment lately.
It was like in a movie trailer.
Oh, it was in the Batman movie.
Yeah.
So now I think this is like a big Nirvana song.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Was it number three on the Apple thing there?
Yeah, it's up there.
Yeah, it is.
♪
Everybody was always under bridges in early 90s alt rock.
A lot of time spent under there.
♪
I could kind of see Anthony Kiedis going Grandma take me home.
Rapping or singing?
[laughs]
Yeah, more rap mode.
♪
It's okay to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings.
That's been one of the lyrics that's been bouncing around in my head for the last 30 years.
For 30 years.
Every time you eat fish?
Yeah, I mean I just, for some reason that one really stuck with me.
Yeah.
♪
Amazing production.
Yeah.
♪
It's interesting too, reading the book, I didn't realize like a lot of the
iconic songs in utero were already written in this period.
Like he had Rape Me, he had Pennyroyal Tea, he had All Apologies.
Heart Shaped Box.
I don't think Heart Shaped, I think that was new.
I think that was one of the newer.
But like it's kind of interesting, like, I mean they chose the perfect songs for Nevermind.
Like All Apologies, like last track of Nevermind, not gonna work.
♪
It's also interesting going back to Bleach.
Aside from About a Girl, Bleach is like so intense.
I don't know if I heard Bleach if I would have made the call that Nirvana was going the distance.
♪
This song rips, I love this one.
♪
But yeah, I know what you mean.
♪
I'm not like a, I'm not throwing on Bleach that often.
♪
Negative Creep is pretty classic.
Yeah, I mean it's definitely a cool album.
♪
But yeah, Nirvana is, sorry Nevermind is so top to bottom hits.
♪
I wonder if he double tracks his vocals ever.
I just remember, I thought that was so funny in the book of how Butch Vig would be like,
John Lennon double tracked his vocals all of the time on like every Beatles song.
♪
And Kurt was like fine.
♪
He had a lot of different vocal approaches too.
♪
Such a messed up lyric.
♪
But yeah, I mean he's kind of obsessed with like the loss of innocence and the end of childhood.
♪
And then of course, About a Girl.
I mean this is the one where you're like,
yeah I feel like you heard this in 1989 and be like, this is very strong songwriting.
♪
Fast.
Compared to the acoustic.
♪
See, I never, this was never one of my favorites.
I mean I like it, but it's like a 50s, early 60s pastiche a little bit.
Like I don't really feel like it's like, it's not really like them.
It's poppy, it's cool.
♪
Like the, I mean this is totally, yeah it's totally coming from a different place.
♪
Go back to Nevermind for a sec.
There's some songs on side beat, like can you throw in like Lounge Act?
I listened, I really listened to these records and like, side beat of Nevermind, like.
♪
That's what was doing it for you?
Kind of unstoppable.
♪
See I like this vocal approach he's doing here.
He goes from that like smooth kind of mid-range to the screaming.
♪
♪
He almost has like a twang on this song.
♪
So you got In Utero for your 10th birthday.
At what point did you go back?
Like did you ever like really go deep on Nevermind?
Or was it just so already in the ether?
I just knew the hits.
Yeah.
Yeah, I knew In Utero somewhat better.
Although listening to it I'm like, how much did I really listen to this as a kid?
I remember like being very fascinated by Heart Shaped Box.
That was a huge song, it was on the radio all the time.
But going back I really like Served the Servants.
♪
I like that chord.
♪
Yeah, it's amazing to think where Nirvana might have gone.
I know.
Might have been a bummer.
Or it could have been incredible.
I mean, I like where In Utero is heading.
♪
Self appointed judge's judge more than they have sold.
It's about the haters back in Olympia.
Yeah.
♪
I think I texted you this at one point when I was reading it.
It was like the funniest scene to me when like Dave Grohl shows up at Olympia.
And like there's sort of like, I think Nirvana plays a show that he's in the audience for.
But I think there's already sort of like they've been talking to each other or back channeling.
And there's basically an understanding that they're going to fire their current drummer and hire Dave Grohl.
But he's sort of like new on the scene and he's like a rocker guy.
He's a punk guy, but he's like, he's not hip to the like.
The hardcore Olympia, judgy, indie thing.
Exactly.
The like politically oriented, kind of like feminist rock of Olympia.
And so they're at some party.
I think it might even been at Kathleen Hannah's house.
And Dave Grohl busts out a Primus tape.
Yeah.
And it just seemed like the funniest like party foul.
Everybody's bummed out.
He just throws on like Sailing the Seas of Cheese or something.
To me, that was like one of the funniest parts of the book.
Grohl throwing on the Primus at the Olympia house party.
They kicked him out.
Kurt's like, dude.
Not cool, man.
It was also like, I've read all this stuff talking about tension between Kurt and Dave, because Dave's the new guy.
It's interesting to read there's this like six month period where they shared a house.
In Olympia.
Yeah, just the two of them.
Yeah.
Going pretty deep.
I know, it's like they had signed to Geffen, but like had no money.
The album wasn't done.
They were still like rehearsing.
And they were eating just like refried beans and like, and just like living like complete, like 22 year old slobs.
It is very funny to think about, when you think about Dave Grohl now, like Dave Grohl living in Olympia.
It's just like a funny image.
It's crazy.
Five years worth of recordings.
And like, it really feels like a full career.
Yeah.
And it's funny listening to this music again.
And like, we touched on this a little bit, but like, it's so easy to see how it spawned so many imitators.
Yeah.
But like, it's, it's so singular.
Yeah, like they, the music is so much more interesting than just like kind of generic grunge.
Yeah. They really had a pop sensibility.
You know, it smells like teen spirit.
Maybe we should end with it smells like teen spirit.
Let's just go there.
It's also just funny to think like, without that, I mean, Nirvana is big no matter what, but without smells like,
smells like teen spirit is like, it's in that pantheon of rock songs that just are.
It's like a steroid habit or something.
Well, yeah.
And also, but also it just rocks.
Like it's in, it's like up there, like with like, you know,
back in black ACDC or just like seven nation army.
These songs, they're not always like the most indicative of the artist, but they're just like all timer.
You know, like, like the perfect rock songs are not always the perfect pop songs.
It's more about just, does it have like dong, you know,
I can't get no satisfaction.
Yeah, exactly.
Like the stones have better pop songs than that, but that's like, it's just a rocker,
a rocker that transcends that anybody who likes any genre just kind of gets.
It was interesting in the book, reading about this, they didn't like, Chris was like, yeah,
I thought the song was okay.
Like it took a while.
It wasn't immediately apparent to them that it was like a banger.
And then like Chris coming into the playback booth and be like, well, this rocks.
Like kind of surprised.
I had no idea that the opening line was load up on guns.
Oh really?
Yeah.
Somehow I think just because when you're 14, your, your brain is so absorbent.
I was just like, these lyrics are like hardwired into my subconscious, even though like,
the lyrics weren't in the tape cassette.
I don't think so.
But somehow I know the lyrics, even though they're hard to understand.
I've always got words, but I know.
With the lights out, it's less dangerous.
Here we are now, classics.
Yeah.
I feel stupid.
Yeah.
I never knew you sang a mulatto.
Oh really?
An albino.
A mosquito, my libido is.
I had no idea what he was saying.
I'm worse at what I do best and for this gift, I feel blessed.
That's a real head scratcher.
Conflicted man.
And that bears out the book.
With the lights out, it's less dangerous.
Here we are now, entertainers.
I feel stupid, and contagious.
Here we are now, entertainers.
Mulatto, albino.
Interestingly, a mulatto, an albino, and a mosquito are all different types of old-fashioned cocktails.
Wow.
Maybe Kurt had a book from the 50s of cocktails.
That's so funny.
Maybe he meant, "Here we are now, entertain us. Come as you are."
We're drinking.
Basically, Kurt was throwing a 1950s suburban party.
I wonder if the albino is a white Russian.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I haven't listened to Nevermind that much over the past 30 years.
Because it, like, almost immediately, especially after he died, like, it just became, like, the weight of history.
It's like listening to, like, Sergeant Pepper or something.
It's like one of those records that became, I don't know, kind of inert or something.
Yeah.
Like, almost too big or something for its own good.
If you had to guess what an albino was, what would you think?
Like, the drink?
Yeah.
Like I said, a white Russian.
That's what I thought you thought, white Russian, yeah.
It's not, no.
Oh, it's not?
It's an old-fashioned, it's a riff on the old-fashioned white whiskey and white grapefruit.
No, that sounds kind of good.
But it does.
White whiskey?
I don't know what white whiskey is, but even, like, the white, like, grapefruit and whiskey does sound kind of '50s-ish.
Yeah.
Look at the single track.
Yeah, that's cool.
It's hard to tell with his voice.
Yeah.
His voice, like, that crazy scream has so much depth.
The texture.
Yeah.
I mean, Kurt really, he was the chosen one, you know?
It's also, like, funny to picture all this little...
It's like Johnny B. Goode.
Yeah, yeah it is. That is a Johnny B. Goode of a generation.
I mean, yeah, like, coming from nowhere.
Totally.
Going to the big city.
But also just to think about, you know, all the scene he came from and all the judginess and the rules of punk rock or indie or whatever.
And I'm sure he probably had, like, a lot of people in Seattle being like, "All right, well, why them? Why were they the ones?"
And sometimes it's hard to, like, look back until you can look back to really see.
And it's like, nobody had a catalog like this, you know?
Like, even these bands that clearly influenced him and, you know, the Melvins, whatever.
It's like, he was touched, you know, for whatever, whether that's because of the pain he was carrying or it's just a coincidence.
I think a lot of people have a lot of pain in life and they don't have a...
Manifested.
They don't manifest it, like...
Brilliantly.
Brilliantly like Kurt did.
He just, he was the chosen one.
He understood on some deep genetic, like, yeah, it's a great idea to combine Black Sabbath with the Beatles.
But like, also you're talking about two of the biggest artists of all time.
Like, yeah.
Yeah, it's absolutely kind of an insane...
Like, cool, let's combine Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd.
Okay, dude, let's start a new band.
Let's do it.
And, but he understood on some like deep level actually how to do it.
And that's partially because he was ambitious, you know, interesting mix of things.
There's a lot of bands that try to sound like the Beatles who are "Beatlesque".
I would never call Nirvana that at all.
I think he like had a similar set of sensibility to like John Lennon or something in his like,
just how like the melodies he wrote over the chord progressions he came up with.
But what I'm trying to say is like, in the scene he came out of, it probably wasn't cool to try to write music in that mode.
Certainly like Soundgarden, it was like not trying to write three chord songs saying "Grandma Take Me Home".
And like the guys in like Alice in Chains, friends of the show, big Alice in Chains fans here on the show.
But yeah, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and then Pearl...
I mean, I guess Pearl Jam tried to go for a really poppy sensibility.
They're going for more of like a classic rock, like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Stevie Ray Vaughan kind of thing.
Yeah, kind of. And yet still all this music, as much as it's rooted in the past, there's no obvious precedence.
You know, it's like when The Strokes come out, also a very important band, but you know, you hear...
You're like, "Oh yeah, that sounds a little bit like Tom Petty. That sounds a little bit like Buzzcocks or Velvet Undercover."
With this stuff, it's like, "Yeah, it sounds kind of like Neil Young. It sounds kind of like Sabbath."
The chord progressions are so different in Grunge.
The lyrics and the chord progressions are slightly from another planet as much as there is...
Yeah, I feel like a lot of the Nirvana songs are all major chords.
Like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is like F major, B flat major, G sharp major, C sharp.
Well, it's bar chords, but it's implied major.
It's implied major, but also it's not major in the sense that the chords stay within the key.
Right.
He takes a simple shape and kind of just moves it around.
Yeah, moves it all around. So like, you know...
So this is just a simple power chord being moved around.
Yep.
This whole record is like this.
And that's why it's neither major nor minor. It's just kind of eerie.
It's grunge, baby.
It's just some grunge.
I wonder if Kurt ever would have made like a Metal Machine music.
If he might have gotten so just alienated and started making true weirdo stuff.
From now on I'll be all about you.
With eyes to dilate and hide.
Kurt and John Lennon was also like very smart, acerbic, witty guys.
You know, who could like make an interviewer look dumb.
Full of cutting remarks.
Actually, this is interesting. John and Paul, bit of a Kurt-Dave dialectic, maybe.
That Kurt and John are like...
Oh, right.
Everybody's very talented. John and Dave, obviously like cheerful.
And also another thing, Paul McCartney's mom died when he was really young.
So of course, I mean, come on, talk about the pain of growing up.
So he had to deal with something extraordinarily difficult when he was growing up.
John also had to deal with a difficult family situation.
His parents were split up and his mom, I don't remember exactly the story.
His mom had like weird boyfriends he didn't like.
He also had a lot of pain from childhood and maybe an auntie.
Mother!
Yeah, so he had a lot of, he had like a mother wound too.
Big time.
These are all people who had difficulties in their growing up.
But for whatever reason, Dave and Paul are a little more cheerful about like, you know, life can be tough.
I don't know, their vibe seems, whereas Kurt and John, and I'm sure there's reasons for it.
It might be innate.
It could be innate.
Maybe there's textures to the kind of loss they experienced that we don't know about.
But there's something about these characters, Kurt and John, both being incredibly witty.
Borderline mean at times, like with the cutting remarks and the acerbic vibe.
But then also, yeah, there's something about the John Lennon song "Mother".
Mother!
After all the Beatles stuff and just like getting raw and just being like, I wanted more from my mother.
Or like, I wish we had a different kind of relationship.
Just so straightforward.
There's a little bit of like grandma take me home energy and just like that.
And I guess, you know, some people would say psychologically, everybody's like that a little bit.
But your experience, there's some sort of like scared child side to everybody that either you address or you don't address.
But these guys who, yeah, on paper are kind of like badasses.
But then they always still wanted to show you through the music, this like really kind of like sad, small thing.
And I guess if you had to sum it up, you're like, it's kind of like, and maybe this is true for like people in general.
It's like the John Curt worldview is just fundamentally skeptical of other people.
Just like the world sucks.
I'm not saying that they don't believe that you can't find moments of joy in their music.
Or I guess maybe I'm wrong when I consider that John wrote "All You Need Is Love".
But that was a brief moment.
Imagine.
And imagine.
But even then, I don't know.
Is that the real John?
Who's to say?
Certainly I'm no authority.
Maybe Curt would have written his "Imagine".
Maybe.
Yeah, I mean, look, everybody, even if you're fundamentally skeptical of other people and think the world is just going to let you down,
you might still have your imagine moment.
Maybe that's why he called it "Imagine".
Oh no, but at the end he says, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I hope one day you'll join us."
Whatever. He's a complicated, complicated figure.
All right. What's a Nirvana song to go out on?
School. That's another funny one.
The combination of like, what is he saying?
You're back in high school?
Wait, how does that one go again?
That's "Deep Bleach".
Oh yeah. "Wouldn't you believe it's just my luck."
Oh yeah, "No Recess".
"No Recess".
And then at the end he just goes, "You're in high school again."
Also, you can imagine just...
Yeah, back to childhood.
Who knows?
Maybe that was Kurt's difficulty in life, was feeling like, trying to escape the brutal feelings of being young, abandoned, isolated, whatever.
And then like, imagine, if you're a dude like that, you feel like your childhood sucked, and your town sucked, what's your worst nightmare?
Back in high school.
That's literally a nightmare.
Yeah.
We all had that dream of like, "I didn't study for the math test. I forgot my shoes."
Dave Grohl's back in high school, you go stop by his favorite teacher's classroom.
How are you, man?
Hey Dave!
Hey, I just wanted to say, your English class really meant a lot to me. I don't want to give you too hard of a time.
Let me just stroll down to Dave Grohl Alley in Warren, Ohio.
Won't you believe it's just my luck?
No recess!
That's a sick chorus. I forgot about this.
No recess!
Recess!
No recess!
Oh wait, it's even worse. What if you had to go back to school, and they didn't even have recess?
Oh man. Anyway, shout out to Devon, and shout out to Taylor Swift. We'll see you next time.
Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig.
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