The Belly of the Buddha: Ruminations on the 20th Anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind

1991. I'm sorry, I wrote that backwards. Let me start over. 1991. It was a year of tragedy and triumph. It was the year we lost a young president with so much promise and potential. A president we now know most commonly as the Oliver Stone film "JFK". But, it was also the year, nine months later, that we banded together as a nation and honored his memory by fulfilling his dream of putting the first Russian on the moon.

It was 1991. I was 12 years old and obviously I was neck deep into LA's underground trip-hop scene. Those were strange and heady days. For months my only sustenance consisted of a caustic cocktail of pig hormones, ecstasy, and repeated trips to the plastic surgeon's table. All the while the unborn dreams of unwed mothers danced like heretics through my still developing and ether infused mind.

But one album from one band would change all that crushing the potential nightmarish future of suburbanite track housing plump with the flashes of late night television flickering ridiculous soap ads and ungodly white toothed smiles onto hard dark walls and peach fuzzed surfaces of frozen eyeballs. Only one album would reach into Michael Jackson's intestines and pull out a middle-aged white woman gripping a pocket sized Gideon's Bible in one hand and a larger than life King James Bible in the other shouting, "The Lord is your Salvation! All those who deny their Lord shall burn in the fiery pits of Hell!" forever changing the American political landscape for picket sign writers and altering the legacy of one Elvis Presley.

So what was a young unassassinated boy to do? Dismantle his psyche and leave the bloodied greasy bolts out on the curb for the vultures and badgers to pick apart? Or, disintegrate into the howling scratching growls of a plaid covered cuckold from Aberdeen on the way to his slaughter with a goateed grin and bits of Taco Bell tortilla stuck between his teeth? What were any of us of that time to do, really? He was the only one with any sort of light in a darkened dank din of thieves.