Oh Well, Whatever. Nevermind!

I arrived on day one of high school after a very harrowing middle school experience overall, and I decided that I would reinvent myself.

Instead of a thoughtful kid eager to share my insights with my peers, the middle school experience had left me a tentative mess. In some classes, I was afraid to say anything at all, lest the preps ostracize me, or my voice might squeak, or I might have a pimple on the side of my nose everyone wants to point out. Puberty and a toxic social environment combined to make much of this time a living hell for yours truly.

If I was an insider going in, I was very much an outsider leaving middle school. High school, however, offered me a fresh start, so I took it.

I went in the opposite direction of tentative, and successfully became something of a class clown in at least 3 of my classes. Other attempts were less successful—high school is still a very tough time for most kids, and I was no exception—but there was enough traction so that high school was noticeably better for me.

I could make some of my classmates laugh, but I was also very, very interested in undermining the status quo, especially when I thought it wasn’t fair or didn’t make any sense. This combination of being an outsider with a sense of justice is still with me today, central to my own identity.

On Sunday, September 29th, 1991, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit premiered on MTV’s 120 Minutes, and I shuddered as I heard and saw what this band represented. For the first time in my life, I heard someone really speaking my language, giving art and voice and music to the fiery core of resistance and agency living inside of me.

A month earlier, Metallica’s new black album had come out, and I was a really big fan of their previous records. I remember buying both tapes on the same day, and reasoning that both tapes would be in heavy rotation for a long time. At first, I was right about the Metallica album, but after a few listens, it dawned on me that this was not the same band, and they no longer spoke my language.

Nirvana sure did. They spoke to being an outsider, and they saw plenty of injustice in the world. They refused to be cowed by or assimilated into the system, or at least that’s what I thought back then.

There’s a lot more to say about Nirvana, but for now, let me zero in on one particular story from my junior year of high school. I was decidedly not yet punk, as you can clearly see from this pic from around that time frame:

I therefore had one awkward foot in the world of normies, still very tentative about diving into rebellion with my full heart and soul. I was wrestling with my high school team (not yet starting, though), playing D&D, and collecting comic books when I wasn’t being told what to do in school or in church.

I wasn’t yet ready to blow up completely, but there were little packets of resistance I had collected and built up. These were spots where I could allow a little bit of steam to escape, so I could at least make it through high school before exploding.

One of those pockets was a Nirvana T-shirt, which was simply the cover of their album, Nevermind.

CC 2.0

I probably bought this shirt at a music store, where it was incredibly common to see merchandise based on a recent release. I’m sure I was stoked to wear this form of resistance on my chest, so anyone else who also liked Nirvana would know I did, too. I think I also wanted to clue others into resistance and rebellion in my own way, and this was a reasonable approach to use.

I can’t say I was totally shocked when an administrator called me into his office to tell me I couldn’t wear that shirt to school that day. I immediately found this request to be absurd and beyond the pale—for one thing, being so uptight about human biology that you’re worried about a baby’s genitals showing seems like a very weird take.

For another thing, adult humans should understand by now that this sort of control won’t have the desired effect. It’s hard to articulate how meaningful this administrator made this moment for me, and I’m confident their goal was not to radicalize me.

Oops.

I ended up finding a sticker I could put over the little baby-peepee to hide it, and just wore the shirt around for the rest of the day. In my mind, this was absurd and made my point even better than I was making it before: that the system wanted to oppress any kind of meaningful resistance to it.

This quickly became my way of resisting the status quo: I would do something technically within the bounds of school rules, but shockingly different enough so that clever observers might raise an eyebrow.

It took a good year of this before I went to my first punk show, and it’s clear to see that Nirvana was an excellent gateway band to this underworld I was so excited to get to know. By ‘93, seeing live punk bands play was my favorite thing in the whole world, and I could completely be myself, apart from the society I wanted to reject.

There is a great deal more to be said about this transitional period in my life, but I’ll save that for another day. Instead, reflect on your own life for a moment. Is there a Nevermind moment for you, where you ended up doubling down on your rebellion? Was there an authority figure who inadvertently made you double down on your own resistance?