Nirvana
Bleach

THE REVIEW

I gaze fixedly at a detail: the iridescence at the top right of an opal that at the moment is emerald green. The jewel depicts two little fish diving vertically into the precious stone set in silver.

My thoughts are still on the new apartment; at the very least, I will sublet it. The opal sends me celestial reflections.

I could play This must be the place by the Talking Heads to inaugurate it.

No.

My gaze moves to the eyes, also two precious stones. It's a gaze that smiles, and in all the smiling gazes, I see her, who was free, freer than the person confidently in front of me.

I fell in love because I had nothing to do; I became infatuated once more with Nirvana's Bleach.

How dirty it sounds, Love Buzz the first single released, has nonsensical guitar slashes, where's the second guitarist seen on the cover? Paper Cuts has a nonsensical rhythm section, Chad Channing hits and sweats in a crescendo like a miniature Dimension 7, a horror song where Kurt scratches his way up.

I didn't experience grunge or whatever you want to call it, born when that explosion impacted, I absorbed it later in big gulps since childhood. Kurt was my idol, the embodiment of an individual who did not hide fragility already in his gaze; to me, it was like seeing an emotion in the flesh, a mood teetering between a nervous breakdown and generalized hatred barely contained. Blond with blue eyes seemed like Christ descended to earth for redemption.

That person, what he conveyed by launching himself on the drums, shredding his vocal cords, self-destructing live, represented for me those acts that ultimately aim for liberation from inner torments, escaping reality, trying to stay true to oneself under the spotlight. Kurt was too alert to rest. Someone shouts Nevermind at the packaged and perfumed commercial operation that winks, never been of that party because the bile was the same.

However, Bleach as the title suggests, possesses something irritating, quickly and hastily bleached. Here we find raw grudge, delusions of rage screamed on lazy mantras where instruments are also moods rowing against life, hymns to self-destruction, as I said.

And for me, they were guts transposed into music, it was centuries-old vomit provoked by human smallness that cannot see beyond its nose. It was a liberating outburst. As a child, I listened to Bleach and felt clean, like new under a jet of boiling bleach.

And now I've fallen in love with it again at thirty, it's like perpetrating the rape of the childish self, relishing rancid sensations that have surely made me an uglier person, and I take pride in it. The hatred Kurt screamed I internalized, idealized, scrutinized like a lover, and in the end, I had almost forgotten how much it represented for me.

Bleach is a masterpiece because it has a punk attitude, but it's heavier, hits the right spot at the right time without style, depraving the trinkets of catchiness while keeping the listener glued in a vortex of absolute moral lowliness.

This year Bleach turns 33, and it seems essential to declare that it's a record of Christ.