What is some music you like?

[Nilsi]

 

[Nilsi]

After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Courtney Love went to Malibu to recover. Celebrity Skin, the Hole album released four years later, is the first major artistic expression to emerge from that period. “Malibu,” its lead single, seems at first like a breezy radio-friendly track - sun-drenched guitars, catchy hooks, easy drive-along pace. But something in it doesn’t sit right. Beneath the polish lies a wound that never healed. The song is not a statement of recovery; it’s a relapse masked as pop. And once you start noticing, you can’t unhear it.

It begins with the line: “Crash and burn / all the stars explode tonight.” Already, we are in the climax. Not building up to it - there. The sun has already gone down. The stars are exploding. The catastrophe is not coming. It’s ongoing. The song opens at night - both literally and metaphorically - and the rest is a haze of flashbacks and echoes.

In the first verse, the subject seems to be pleading with herself: “Come on, be alive again, don’t lay down and die.” And then, almost immediately, she sings: “Drive away from Malibu.” It sounds like an escape, a promise. Like she’s willing herself to leave the symbolic space of death and detachment. You think: Okay, this is the arc of recovery. She’s making it out. The structure suggests a chorus, but no real release comes. Instead, we sink back into another verse. The song’s architecture refuses catharsis.

By the second verse, the identity of the addressed “you” begins to shift. The lines now feel unmistakably directed at Kurt: “Cry to the angels / I’m gonna rescue you / I’m gonna set you free / Tonight.” That tonight - the very same night that opened the song with stars exploding - is the moment when she was supposed to let go, to grieve, to survive. Instead, she slides into delusion. She hasn’t accepted his death. She’s still trying to save him, or rather, to inhabit the fantasy that she could have been the one to save him, if only. In the next lines - “We are all watching you / We watch you slip away” - there’s no ambiguity anymore. She’s witnessing his suicide, retroactively. She confesses: “I knew love would tear you apart / I knew the darkest secret of your heart.” And then, the devastating final turn: “Hey, hey, I’m gonna follow you.”

At this point, the song reveals its structure: it’s a loop. Not a narrative of healing, but of haunting. The second verse is a relapse into the traumatic event itself. Love is not singing from recovery, but from within the impossibility of recovery. The fantasy of Malibu as a place for stars to get well collapses into the fantasy of saving Kurt posthumously. She has projected her own pain into this space, trying to become the one who took on the rehab he refused. But it doesn’t work. The sun goes down again. The loop starts over.

That one line - “And the sun goes down” - quietly undoes the whole track. Because the song began at night. The sun never rose. If we thought we were heading toward a redemptive sunrise, it was only illusion. Instead, the sun goes down again, and we realize we’ve been circling. Nothing has changed. There was no movement, no healing. Just a return.

The voice tells the whole story. It’s subdued, strangely restrained. There is no scream, no catharsis like on Live Through This. The guitars shimmer like daydreams; the production is tight, overglossed. But the voice is haunted. She’s too exhausted to scream. She doesn’t explode. The emotion leaks through the seams, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

In the end, “Malibu” isn’t a celebration of recovery or survival. It’s a stunning portrayal of the inability to move on. It’s not a story with resolution but an echo chamber, circling around an absence that cannot be filled. The polished production makes it seem palatable - something to sing along to on the radio - but underneath, it is a tragedy.

Edited June 12 by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

13 hours ago, Nilsi said:

After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Courtney Love went to Malibu to recover. Celebrity Skin, the Hole album released four years later, is the first major artistic expression to emerge from that period. “Malibu,” its lead single, seems at first like a breezy radio-friendly track - sun-drenched guitars, catchy hooks, easy drive-along pace. But something in it doesn’t sit right. Beneath the polish lies a wound that never healed. The song is not a statement of recovery; it’s a relapse masked as pop. And once you start noticing, you can’t unhear it.

It begins with the line: “Crash and burn / all the stars explode tonight.” Already, we are in the climax. Not building up to it - there. The sun has already gone down. The stars are exploding. The catastrophe is not coming. It’s ongoing. The song opens at night - both literally and metaphorically - and the rest is a haze of flashbacks and echoes.

In the first verse, the subject seems to be pleading with herself: “Come on, be alive again, don’t lay down and die.” And then, almost immediately, she sings: “Drive away from Malibu.” It sounds like an escape, a promise. Like she’s willing herself to leave the symbolic space of death and detachment. You think: Okay, this is the arc of recovery. She’s making it out. The structure suggests a chorus, but no real release comes. Instead, we sink back into another verse. The song’s architecture refuses catharsis.

By the second verse, the identity of the addressed “you” begins to shift. The lines now feel unmistakably directed at Kurt: “Cry to the angels / I’m gonna rescue you / I’m gonna set you free / Tonight.” That tonight - the very same night that opened the song with stars exploding - is the moment when she was supposed to let go, to grieve, to survive. Instead, she slides into delusion. She hasn’t accepted his death. She’s still trying to save him, or rather, to inhabit the fantasy that she could have been the one to save him, if only. In the next lines - “We are all watching you / We watch you slip away” - there’s no ambiguity anymore. She’s witnessing his suicide, retroactively. She confesses: “I knew love would tear you apart / I knew the darkest secret of your heart.” And then, the devastating final turn: “Hey, hey, I’m gonna follow you.”

At this point, the song reveals its structure: it’s a loop. Not a narrative of healing, but of haunting. The second verse is a relapse into the traumatic event itself. Love is not singing from recovery, but from within the impossibility of recovery. The fantasy of Malibu as a place for stars to get well collapses into the fantasy of saving Kurt posthumously. She has projected her own pain into this space, trying to become the one who took on the rehab he refused. But it doesn’t work. The sun goes down again. The loop starts over.

That one line - “And the sun goes down” - quietly undoes the whole track. Because the song began at night. The sun never rose. If we thought we were heading toward a redemptive sunrise, it was only illusion. Instead, the sun goes down again, and we realize we’ve been circling. Nothing has changed. There was no movement, no healing. Just a return.

The voice tells the whole story. It’s subdued, strangely restrained. There is no scream, no catharsis like on Live Through This. The guitars shimmer like daydreams; the production is tight, overglossed. But the voice is haunted. She’s too exhausted to scream. She doesn’t explode. The emotion leaks through the seams, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

In the end, “Malibu” isn’t a celebration of recovery or survival. It’s a stunning portrayal of the inability to move on. It’s not a story with resolution but an echo chamber, circling around an absence that cannot be filled. The polished production makes it seem palatable - something to sing along to on the radio - but underneath, it is a tragedy.

Live Through This is one of the great grunge records: raw, alive, falling apart in real time. For me, it stands right next to Nirvana’s Nevermind (though In Utero is still the genres untouchable masterpiece). You can still hear the urgency in Courtney Love’s voice. 

By the time Celebrity Skin comes out, everything’s different. It’s post-grunge - which really just means post-Kurt. The production’s glossy, the songwriting cleaner, but underneath it’s haunted. It’s not healing - it’s holding it together.

That’s the thing with post-grunge, and you hear it in the Foo Fighters too: it never fully integrated what happened. Kurt Cobain’s death wasn’t just the end of a life - it broke something in the genre. Grunge didn’t evolve the way Britpop did after its peak. There was no smooth transition, no next phase. What came after just circled around the loss.

So post-grunge ends up feeling suspended - full of energy, but somehow disconnected from what came before. It’s like the scream got buried under good production. The wound never really closed. And that’s still audible.

Anyways, here‘s the real deal:

Edited June 13 by Nilsi

[Schizophonia]

 

[daydrinking]

 

[Jehovah increases]

 

Edited June 16 by Jehovah increases

[ZhenZhenZhen]

 

[Cireeric]

 

[PurpleTree]

 

[Nilsi]

I’m not usually a Leonard Cohen guy - too gloomy, too suffocating. (Though I do have a soft spot for the sleazy Death of a Ladies’ Man album.) But „So Long, Marianne“ hits different. It’s strangely luminous, even ethical - offering a kind of joy that doesn’t deny sorrow, but folds it in.

That chorus - “Oh so long, Marianne, it’s time that we began / To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again” - is repeated six times. Not as a static refrain, but as a kind of mantra. And with each return, the arrangement intensifies, almost imperceptibly. By the end, you’re not just listening - you’re remembering. Singing along. Thinking of your own Marianne, whoever or whatever that was. And you really do laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

That’s the beauty of it: the way love, longing, memory, and repetition begin to blur. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a way that affirms how each return - each re-meeting and re-leaving - makes the whole thing heavier and lighter at once. The song becomes less about loss and more about the strange fullness of continuing to feel.

Edited Saturday at 01:26 PM by Nilsi

[Nilsi]

Sam Fender is a fascinating case. On the surface, it’s just heartfelt, straightforward music - no irony, no knowing wink, no self-aware posturing. Just personal, emotionally grounded songs about adolescence, loss, class, family. And yet, it works - it resonates. That’s the point.

What’s strange is: this kind of raw sincerity probably wouldn’t have landed 10 or 20 years ago. It would’ve felt like dad-rock. But now? The air is electric. Young people show up, they feel it, they need it. And it’s not because Fender is “daring” to be sincere. It’s because he is - without signaling it.

This isn’t a strategic play against irony. It doesn’t seem reactive or self-conscious. It just moves forward, like a clean vector. The culture around it is already soaked in ambiguity, irony, and detachment - but Fender’s music doesn’t confront that. It doesn’t reject it, parody it, or play with it. It bypasses it. That’s what makes it feel real. Not because it’s pre-ironic or naive, but because it doesn’t make irony its concern.

And in a culture saturated with ambiguity, that kind of directness doesn’t feel obvious - it feels like a rupture. Not by design, but because the conditions around it have changed. The irony is ambient. Sincerity can now slip through as something else entirely.

[Nilsi]

4 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

Sam Fender is a fascinating case. On the surface, it’s just heartfelt, straightforward music - no irony, no knowing wink, no self-aware posturing. Just personal, emotionally grounded songs about adolescence, loss, class, family. And yet, it works - it resonates. That’s the point.

What’s strange is: this kind of raw sincerity probably wouldn’t have landed 10 or 20 years ago. It would’ve felt like dad-rock. But now? The air is electric. Young people show up, they feel it, they need it. And it’s not because Fender is “daring” to be sincere. It’s because he is - without signaling it.

This isn’t a strategic play against irony. It doesn’t seem reactive or self-conscious. It just moves forward, like a clean vector. The culture around it is already soaked in ambiguity, irony, and detachment - but Fender’s music doesn’t confront that. It doesn’t reject it, parody it, or play with it. It bypasses it. That’s what makes it feel real. Not because it’s pre-ironic or naive, but because it doesn’t make irony its concern.

And in a culture saturated with ambiguity, that kind of directness doesn’t feel obvious - it feels like a rupture. Not by design, but because the conditions around it have changed. The irony is ambient. Sincerity can now slip through as something else entirely.

Just a couple days ago, I was walking home from the office and passed a house where a few handymen - guys in their 40s or 50s - were working in the garden with some crappy portable radio. Just as I walked by, Sam Fender’s „People Watching“ came on, and one of them said, “Turn it up, I love that song.”

That moment stuck with me. There’s something in this kind of raw sincerity that cuts through. Not just across generations, but across sensibilities. You’d be hard-pressed to ever hear a boomer demand the radio be turned up for a Sabrina Carpenter song.

It’s not for everyone - but when it lands, it really lands. No irony. No performance. Just something felt.

[samijiben]

@Nilsi leopard Cohen is original g

[Puer Aeternus]

21 hours ago, Nilsi said:

Sam Fender is a fascinating case. On the surface, it’s just heartfelt, straightforward music - no irony, no knowing wink, no self-aware posturing. Just personal, emotionally grounded songs about adolescence, loss, class, family. And yet, it works - it resonates. That’s the point.

What’s strange is: this kind of raw sincerity probably wouldn’t have landed 10 or 20 years ago. It would’ve felt like dad-rock. But now? The air is electric. Young people show up, they feel it, they need it. And it’s not because Fender is “daring” to be sincere. It’s because he is - without signaling it.

This isn’t a strategic play against irony. It doesn’t seem reactive or self-conscious. It just moves forward, like a clean vector. The culture around it is already soaked in ambiguity, irony, and detachment - but Fender’s music doesn’t confront that. It doesn’t reject it, parody it, or play with it. It bypasses it. That’s what makes it feel real. Not because it’s pre-ironic or naive, but because it doesn’t make irony its concern.

And in a culture saturated with ambiguity, that kind of directness doesn’t feel obvious - it feels like a rupture. Not by design, but because the conditions around it have changed. The irony is ambient. Sincerity can now slip through as something else entirely.

I enjoy the thoughtfulness and detail you always put into your messages on the forum here.

It's consistently very nice to read! 

[daydrinking]

 

[RendHeaven]

 

[samijiben]

 Would listen to this song walking around the poignant and intense streets of Srinagar. Oh, what nostalgia! 

Edited yesterday at 02:57 AM by samijiben
Edit

[daydrinking]

 

[samijiben]

 

 

[Aaron p]

 

https://youtu.be/-9-poV6opE8?si=GmGRUZV0Hfdog-Oo