I’m a street-walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm
I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb
I am a world’s forgotten boy
The one who searches and destroys
—THE STOOGES, “Search and Destroy”
Oh, please. This is senseless destruction, with none of my usual social commentary.
—BART SIMPSON, EPISODE 2F18
(“Two Dozen and One Greyhounds”)
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: I went to high school in North Bay, Ontario, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. North Bay is only a few hours north of cosmopolitan Toronto, and it’s a bit too big for the term “small town.” Nonetheless, it was a bland suburban hinterland. We were quite out of the loop. Or at least I was. My high-school years were set to a soundtrack of Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses and the occasional rumour of something more dangerous—something along the lines of a bootleg tape of N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” or “Too Drunk to Fuck” by the Dead Kennedys. (We liked it when they said “fuck.” That was cool. Huh-huh. Huh-huh-huh.) My friends and I wore untucked logoed Polo button-downs and disintegrating deck shoes (which was the style at the time), and we drank too much and then went to the McDonald’s parking lot to hang out, watch the fights and try to avoid getting dragged into any. In my final year, I applied to business school. (Got in too, and did a year and a half before I snapped out of it, for reasons I’ll get into just a little later.) I thought I might like to be a lawyer one day. Own a BMW. Come back to North Bay—just to visit—and drive it down Lakeshore Drive, past the McDonald’s parking lot, show those Neanderthals what real power looked like. It was that kind of time, at least in North Bay.
Also: we didn’t get Fox. The Simpsons was mostly a rumour to me for the first year or two of its existence, and that rumour was mostly Bart. How outrageous he was, how irreverent. How subversive. Bart was dangerous. Some said Bart had to be stopped. The Bart rumour had the same vibe as those murky fourth-generation recordings of N.W.A. and the Dead Kennedys—a vague intimation of real rebellion. I wanted to know more about this Bart Simpson.
The first time I met him was on a T-shirt. It was in the summer of 1990—the Summer of Bart—when Simpsons T-shirts were selling at the astounding rate of more than a million per day in North America. I believe Bart was riding a skateboard, and I’m pretty sure he was saying DON’T HAVE A COW, MAN. It could have just as easily been I’M BART SIMPSON—WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? or UNDERACHIEVER AND PROUD OF IT or simply AY, CARUMBA! Anyway, there he was: a primary yellow, spike-haired Johnny Rotten, Jr. An untamed punk rocker in prime time. If you were too young to have felt punk’s liberating nihilism the first time around or not hip enough to have tracked its reverberations underground during the conformist 1980s—or if, like me, you were both—then Bart was quite possibly your first full taste of punk. And if, as Greil Marcus has suggested, it was “almost transcendentally odd” to discover the slogans of the revolutionary French underground of 1968 being spat into the pop charts of 1976 by the Sex Pistols,1 then it was doubly so to find the same phenomenon riding a full-blown mainstream hype wave in 1990. Bart’s anarchic visage was genuinely powerful, both because it introduced The Simpsons to the masses as an inherently subversive force and because it introduced a subversive force to the mainstream at all. Even if Bart might have seemed like a sanitized version of the real thing to anyone who’d seen the Pistols themselves in 1976 or the Dead Kennedys in 1984, for the rest of us he had some genuine edge to him. After a decade of life in toothless Cosbyland, Bart brought some real bite to the mainstream, even if he was chewing with baby teeth.
More precisely, The Simpsons hit bland TV-land with the propulsive, sarcastic force of a Pistols record. Not just Bart but the entire show felt as irreverent and seditious and scruffy as the fuck-you heroes of punk. The pop world had apparently gone so long without even the vaguest whiff of dissidence that a ten-year-old boy who carried a slingshot and mouthed off to his parents and teachers—“rebellious” acts that were surely routine occurrences in every elementary school in the land—stormed the culture like a pint-sized Che Guevara.
And so it was Bart who found himself at the centre of the maelstrom of controversy stirred up by the show’s early success. Bart T-shirts, for example, particularly the UNDERACHIEVER AND PROUD OF IT versions, were repeatedly held up by America’s moral watchdogs as conclusive evidence that the show was hauling all of Western civilization to hell on a skateboard. This kid—who by his own admission was little more than “this century’s Dennis the Menace,” and who his creator, Matt Groening, acknowledged was based on no more dangerous a figure than legendary 1950s ass-kisser Eddie Haskell of Leave It to Beaver—this seemingly harmless, seemingly standard-issue class clown of a kid surely struck some deep chords in his subversion-starved audience.
Bart was, it turned out, a punk for all seasons. He didn’t excite only those of us stuck in the cultural tundra of northern Ontario. Surfer dudes professed their love for Bart, and so did pious Jewish kids in Bart Simpson yarmulkes. Bootleg Bart T-shirts abounded, everything from Rasta Bart to Bart Sanchez (a streetwise Latino) to Nazi Bart.2 Of particular note—and particular fascination to the media—was the “Black Bart” phenomenon. Through out the summer and fall of 1990, a dark-skinned soul-brother Bart was an unauthorized African American icon, a staple image on the T-shirts hawked by inner-city street vendors nationwide. Bart was depicted as Malcolm X or Michael Jordan; or he appeared arm in arm with Nelson Mandela, denouncing apartheid; or he copped a ghetto attitude, proclaiming in a word balloon, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND—IT’S A BLACK THING. A bratty middle-class white kid had become a highly flexible hero to poor urban blacks—a stunning reversal of the regular flow of cool, one with few precedents in the annals of pop culture. While commentators were divided on the question of why black youth had adopted Bart as an icon—did they identify with his outsider status, or were there not enough legitimate black icons in the mass media, or was this just another trivialization of black America’s struggle?—no one could deny that black kids had accepted Bart as one of their own.
Punk wasn’t dead, as another T-shirt of the era asserted. In fact, it was beaming right into every living room in the land. And it was finding an audience every week far greater in number, and far more diverse in ethnic background, than any punk band had cumulatively played to over its entire career.
Alright then, this Bart dude’s a punk. But what kind of punk is he? Is he a misanthrope like Johnny Rotten? A bored hipster like Joey Ramone? Does he have the ferocious antiauthoritarian streak of American hardcore heroes like Black Flag and Minor Threat? Or the immutable social conscience of the Clash? The answer is a little of each of these, but not too much of any one in particular. Which is what makes Bart such an all-encompassing (if incomplete) emblem of the multivalent forces of the first wave of punk—a harbinger of the boiled-down version of the punk ethos that was the foundation for the self-reliant indie movements that breathed new life into pop music, feature film and the fledgling internet in the first half of the 1990s. Divorced from the unique socio-economic factors that had ushered in its messy birth (the impoverished and rapidly decaying English and American cities of the 1970s), punk became something far more accessible than it ever was as a style of music and dress. Some of the bands that made innovative music and some of the directors who reinvigorated movie-making and damn near all of the pioneers of online content may not have looked or sounded particularly punk. But the overwhelming majority of them were inspired by and (to varying degrees) dedicated to its core values: strident, even nihilistic opposition to all authority; a preference for authenticity over virtuosity; a bias towards extreme subject matter; and, most importantly, a deep faith in the liberating power of the DIY (do-it-yourself) approach—that is, the belief that anyone with a guitar or camera or computer, a strong will and a bright idea could create culture (and the bright idea was optional, actually).
After incubating for more than a decade on the fringe, punk invaded the mainstream wholesale in the 1990s, and conquered it, and was eventually subsumed into it, not just in music but in all media. It became a chart-topping, blockbusting phenomenon. It landed on the covers of mass-circulation magazines and the pages of major newspapers. It provided the soundtrack and tone for snack-product commercials. And before long, it was entirely inside, another costume hanging on the racks of the great department store of consumer identities, a torn, safety-pinned T-shirt tucked neatly between the hippie’s beads and buckskin vests and the disco diva’s sequined blouses.
Of course, punk was—and is—much, much more than this. It was the over-amped crash cart that restarted rock & roll’s bloated heart. It was, as Greil Marcus reckoned, “not a musical genre” but “a moment in time … a chance to create ephemeral events that would serve as judgments on whatever came next.” It remains pop culture’s most strident and enduring rejection of the version of “progress” articulated by the avatars of triumphal capitalism. It was a musical genre—also a tone, an attitude, a fashion statement, a worldview. It was—and remains—malleable. It encompasses the heavy garage pop of its U.K. founders, the fuzzed-up, sped-up, straight-ahead rock & roll of the Ramones, the fractal pop of Talking Heads, the noise compositions of the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, the sloppy bar-band rock of the Replacements, the funkified folk of Ani DiFranco. It doesn’t really apply to Blink 182 (who sound like a punk band), but it likely does apply to Wilco (who only infrequently sound like one). It applies to a genre of science-fiction writing (cyberpunk) and of British literary fiction (the Irvine Welsh–led “Scottish Beats”). It almost fits as a catch-all for the wave of independent film makers (Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, the Boyle/Hodge/Macdonald team, etc.) who rejuvenated a flatlined Hollywood in the early 1990s. And it seems at least half-accurate as a shorthand for the anything-goes spirit of freedom, innovation and entrepreneurship that catapulted the internet from the obscurity of academic research into the fat centre of mainstream culture. Not only is punk not dead, but for a good portion of the 1990s it was far too ubiquitous and multifaceted to be captured in the visage of one ten-year-old prankster.
But reduce punk to a single cohesive message blipped momentarily into the collective consciousness, and it can look a lot like a smirking neon-yellow cartoon face on the cover of Rolling Stone, especially if it’s juxtaposed against a handful of the other pop icons who filled the same space in 1990: Janet Jackson, Tom Cruise, Billy Joel. In such a brief glance it becomes iconic: a dismissal, a categorical rejection—a de-NYE-ul!, a de-NYE-ul!, a de-NYE-ul!, as Kurt Cobain howled over the final crashing chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” So yes: a denial, a raised fist, a middle-fingered salute, a queen with blacked-out eyes, a safety pin or sneering mouth.
Or a catchphrase: Eat my shorts.
Like any good punk rocker, Bart had the nihilism thing down from the very beginning. Though not so much pissed off as extremely undisciplined, the Bart Simpson of the Ullman shorts is either fighting with his sister, inciting his father to murderous levels of rage, executing dangerous stunts that end in cartoonish levels of disaster, or simply spitting snarky one-liners at whatever authority figure crosses his path. This appetite for destruction continued to be the defining feature of the smart-assed kid who dominated many episodes of the first few seasons of The Simpsons—the version that spawned Bart-mania—though his methods and motivations show considerably more nuance than the nasty white-trash brat of the Ullman era.
The Bart Simpson who took the first full-length episodes of The Simpsons by storm is a corrosive force, bad to the bone and dangerous to know. This is a kid whose mother routinely frisks him for weapons before they leave for church, a kid whose parent-teacher interviews require eyewitnesses to recount his “atrocities” using dolls as props. This, too, is a kid whose instinct for disorder is so deeply bred that as a fetus he took advantage of the attention lavished on him by a sonogram to moon the doctor. In fact, the only non-celebrity adult Bart respects is Otto, the perpetually stoned bus driver, because Otto lets the kids throw stuff at cars and tries to tip the bus on sharp turns. When the disembodied voice of a haunted house urges Bart to kill his entire family, Bart simply asks, “Are you my conscience?” And you can tell he suspects that it is. Another time, it’s Bart himself who notes his skill at being “a bit underhanded, a bit devious, a bit—as the French say—Bartesque.” No wonder, then, that Mr. Burns sees in Bart a kindred spirit, “a creature of pure malevolence.” Think of Bart’s mischievous cackle in anticipation of some act of senseless destruction as a training-wheels version of Johnny Rotten’s gleefully malevolent laughter over the opening strains of “Anarchy in the U.K.”
Episode 7F07 (“Bart vs. Thanksgiving”) is a representative example from Season 2 of the way Bart’s constant misbehaviour drives many early episodes of The Simpsons. It opens with Bart and Lisa in a meaningless squabble over glue, instigated of course by Bart. He then mocks the Thanksgiving Day parade his father is watching and attempts to “help” his mother with Thanksgiving dinner—a half-assed effort at something constructive that proves more irritating than helpful. And he finishes off Act One by destroying Lisa’s painstakingly constructed centrepiece with his carelessness. Sent to his room without any dinner as punishment, Bart sneaks out and has a grand old time on the wrong side of Springfield’s tracks, unrepentant, dining on free turkey at a soup kitchen. Only as the meal ends does he admit to himself that he misses his family. But when he returns home, momentarily grateful, he pauses at the door to consider how he’ll be greeted. In a fantasy sequence, Bart imagines himself surrounded by his whole family, who mock him with dark laughter and point accusing fingers even as he tries to apologize, blaming him for all the trouble in their lives. It ends with Uncle Sam himself declaring, “It’s your fault America has lost its way!” Even when Bart allows himself to care about his world, it would seem, the reflexive derision of the whole society pushes him back to rejection, destruction, nullification.
This last, of course—nullification, the embrace of nothingness—is at the core of nihilism as a philosophy, and is generally a bit beyond young Bart’s ken. On occasion, though, he does manage to embody not just the style but the substance of nihilism. Case in point: Episode 7F08 (“Dead Putting Society”), in which Lisa attempts to mould Bart into a master mini-golfer by introducing him to the riddles of the Zen masters. “Embrace nothingness,” she instructs. “You got it,” he replies, faking it, mocking the very idea of the exercise. When Lisa asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Bart smugly replies, “Piece of cake,” displays a single hand, slaps fingers against palm. Never mind the metaphysics, Bart’s got that silly ancient riddle solved.
Bart’s far too clever to be taken in by dusty myths; he’s only interested in tearing them apart. At times, there’s seemingly nothing worthy of exemption from his wrecking ball, as in Episode 3F02 (“Bart Sells His Soul”)—which centres, as it says in the title, on Bart’s sale to the first interested bidder of that part of himself that is purportedly most sacred. Dismissing the soul as a meaningless fairy tale “made up to scare kids, like the bogeyman or Michael Jackson,” Bart peddles his own to Milhouse for five dollars. When he tells Lisa about the sale—the proceeds of which went to buy cheap sponges in the shape of dinosaurs—a second chapter is added to Bart’s Dialectics:
LISA: [incredulous] What? How could you do that? Your soul is the most valuable part of you.
BART: You believe in that junk?
LISA: Well, whether or not the soul is physically real, Bart, it’s the symbol of everything that is fine inside us.
BART: [condescendingly] Poor, gullible Lisa. I’ll keep my crappy sponges, thanks.
LISA: Bart, your soul is the only part of you that lasts forever. For five dollars, Milhouse could own you for a zillion years!
BART: Well, if you think he got such a good deal, I’ll sell you my conscience for four-fifty.
[Lisa walks off]
BART: [calling after her] I’ll throw in my sense of decency too. It’s a Bart sales event! Everything about me must go!
Here Bart is the epitome of the world-weary hipster, using the degraded language of modern marketing to sell off the most sacred parts of himself because he knows that some cheap sponge is more real, hence more valuable, than even the loftiest of abstract principles. Soul, conscience, decency—rubbish. Saccharine fantasies for the deluded masses, who are too unsophisticated to see that they hold no more true consequence than the pitches of a used-car salesman. Imagine him transformed for these dialogues, as in one of the T-shirts he inspired: Poseur Bart, complete with black turtleneck and shades, dismissing the superstitions of the pre-modern age with a blast of bile as quick and easy as the catchphrases that made him famous. Eat my shorts, Thomas Aquinas! Don’t have a cow, Descartes!
But Bart isn’t actually this cynical, and he can’t hold the pose for long. The Thanksgiving episode ends with reconciliation and heartfelt emotion. “The only reason to apologize,” Lisa tells him, “is if you look deep down inside yourself, and you find a spot, something you wish wasn’t there because you feel bad you hurt your sister’s feelings.” He looks, and soon finds it, and proffers possibly his first genuine apology in the series’ history. Same deal with his Zen training: Bart sees right through the one-hand-clapping bit, but when Lisa forces him to ponder the notion of a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it, Bart finds his Buddha-nature right quick. And the loss of his soul soon has Bart dashing around town in a panic, desperate to get it back. In one of the show’s most intense displays of spiritual anguish, Bart is reduced to tears, repenting, beseeching God Himself to return his soul. (In the end, Lisa buys it back for him.) Bart may be an incorrigible brat, but underneath his destructive facade he’s also a believer.
Bart’s world-weariness is not entirely a pose—he, more than any other Simpson, is an exemplary product of our media-saturated, celebrity-obsessed age, with the paradoxical mix of cynicism and adoration that it so often spawns. The cultural vanguard of the 1990s was populated by jaded hipsters sporting similar mixes of obsession and derision. Withering contempt for the most populist segments of mainstream culture (e.g., Oprah’s aphorisms, the saccharine romanticism of Meg Ryan films, the music of bland, bloated chart-toppers like Mariah Carey and Hootie & the Blowfish) was of course de rigueur. But it was usually accompanied by religious devotion to certain other segments of the culture—and not just underground phenomena (the ragged pop of Guided by Voices or Belle and Sebastian, say) but also icons of bygone eras (maybe swing music or the beautiful-loser romanticism of the Beat writers) and even certain mainstream stuff like The Simpsons itself.
Much like these pop-obsessed anti-popsters, Bart has a raging love/hate affair with his culture. First the hate: it is born of mass culture’s relentless repetitiveness, its cloyingly sweet bromides, the fact that it has clearly never met a formula or cliché that it didn’t love (and couldn’t beat into the ground). By its sheer ubiquity, the mass media is guaranteed to spew out something or other to irritate everyone. And so we find Bart driven into a rage when he’s forced to watch Lisa’s beloved Happy Little Elves Meet the Curious Bear Cub video. “Oh, man, I can’t take it anymore,” he exclaims. “But I want to see what happens,” Lisa protests. “You know what happens,” her brother moans. “They find Captain Quick’s treasure. All the elves dance around like little green idiots. I puke. The end.” Or there’s the time that Marge, tucking her son in, quotes Forrest Gump’s legendary needlepoint-samplerism about life being like a box of chocolates. Bart erupts in protest, popping a pail over his head and pounding on it to avoid hearing the part about never knowing what you’re gonna get. It is of course an implicit and ongoing irony in The Simpsons that Bart is irritated by media-generated cliché, given that he himself has released more catchphrases into the pop-cultural ether than any other character on the show3 and was the centre of its most enormous and simplistic wave of hype.
But if Bart finds much to hate in pop culture, he finds plenty more to love. Indeed he finds most of his life’s meaning—its dominant metaphors, its heroes and villains, its wisdom, its very sense of its own importance—in that same pop culture he loathes. Bart is, after all, a kid who sometimes dreams in Warner Bros. cartoons, who suddenly finds a work ethic in pursuit of a rare Radioactive Man comic book, who realizes his purpose in life is to witness a particular episode of “Itchy & Scratchy” in which Scratchy (the oft-tortured cat) finally gets even with Itchy (the sadistic mouse). And who, note, sleeps contentedly under Krusty the Clown bedsheets.
It’s this last relationship—Bart’s deep, multifaceted, abiding love for Krusty—that is the most meaningful. (It might well be the most meaningful relationship Bart has outside of his immediate family.) And Bart’s depth of feeling for Krusty is not entirely unreciprocated—in fact, he gets considerably more face time with his hero than most of us ever will with ours. Indeed Bart often intervenes directly in Krusty’s life and work. With his sister’s help, Bart has resuscitated Krusty’s career after a rival drove him off the airwaves and has reunited him with his estranged father. Bart has been a guest star on The Krusty the Clown Show, and he recruited Jay Leno to help turn Krusty into an observational comic. In a neat bit of cartoon metaphysics, though, Bart’s personal relationship with Krusty never interferes with his starstruck idol worship. His room remains a paraphernalia-stuffed shrine to his favourite entertainer, and he watches the show religiously, without an insider’s jaded eye. In a writer’s wink at the illogic of all of this, Krusty doesn’t even remember who Bart is when they meet again after another career resuscitation. And so Bart’s relationship with Krusty remains governed for the most part by a standard pop-cultural dynamic: Krusty produces TV shows of varying quality and tons of merchandise of almost universally poor quality, and Bart eagerly laps it all up.
In Episode 8F24 (“Kamp Krusty”), Bart displays the impressive depth of his commitment to Krusty after the clown’s abysmal, abusive summer camp finally exhausts his patience. When Krusty fails to show up for a scheduled personal appearance at the camp and is replaced by a weaving-drunk Barney Gumble in poorly applied clown nose and makeup, Bart rises in protest. “I’ve been scorched by Krusty before,” he rants. “I got a rapid heartbeat from his Krusty-brand vitamins, my Krusty Kalculator didn’t have a seven or an eight, and Krusty’s auto biography was self-serving, with many glaring omissions. But this time, he’s gone too far!” Ultimately, Bart is appeased (after leading a full-scale campers’ revolt rife with allusions to Lord of the Flies) when Krusty finally arrives and takes the whole gang to Tijuana (“the happiest place on earth!”).
What’s most worth noting, though, is the staggering breadth of Bart’s encyclopedic knowledge of his favourite celebrity and his willingness to maintain (or at least renew) his devotion through the kind of disappointments that would cause lesser acolytes to lose their faith entirely. Weary though Bart may be of certain preachers and amulets and holy sites, he is ultimately a die-hard, tithe-paying member of the church of pop.
Bart’s faith in Krusty has on several occasions very nearly cost him his life at the hands of Krusty’s criminal sidekick, Sideshow Bob. A full-blown psychopath, Bob repeatedly attempts (usually via murder most foul) to have his revenge on Bart. In symbolic terms, Bob’s hatred for Bart seems to suggest that the show is making two somewhat related points about the costs and benefits of avid worship at the altar of pop culture. The first is that undue adulation of a marginally talented celebrity (i.e., Krusty) might show a weakness of character that warrants—or at least invites—homicide. The second is that Bart is caught in the crossfire of the war between highbrow and lowbrow culture. After all, Sideshow Bob is far and away the most classically “cultured” figure in the entire Simpsons universe. Forget his origins as a big-footed, red-afroed TV sidekick: Robert Underdunk Terwilliger is a one-man temple of the fine arts. First, of course, there’s the voice, rendered as a an anglophilic feast by Frasier star Kelsey Grammer, all rolled rs and pompous elocution. Bob’s a Yale grad, a gourmet given to sipping wine in his dressing room and bemoaning the lack of “a decent local marmalade” in Springfield, a regular reader of The Springfield Review of Books (which he notes can be enjoyed for its “amusing caricatures of Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal” as well as its text). He once built a model of Westminster Abbey in a bottle. He can quickly shift from advancing on Bart with a huge knife to sending the boy to heaven with an accomplished performance of the entire score of H.M.S. Pinafore.
Sideshow Bob’s first televised words—spoken as he takes over Krusty’s show after framing him for robbery—testify to his superior breeding: he announces that he is finally free from “the crude glissandos of this primitive wind instrument” (the slide whistle he “spoke” through on Krusty’s version of the show). And it turns out that his betrayal of Krusty is for the most altruistic of reasons: to transform his crude clown show into a high-minded “Cavalcade of Whimsy,” bringing readings from The Man in the Iron Mask and thoughtful lessons about “nutrition, self-esteem, etiquette, and all the lively arts” to children’s television. In a later scheme, Bob tries to eliminate the “chattering cyclops” of television altogether. Bob is, in short, a snob, a firm believer in the superiority of classical music, old books and all the other refinements of the pre-pop age.
He’s also a raging, arch-conservative Republican, a perfect stand-in for the critics of The Simpsons—and of pop culture’s rough-edged output in general—who stand firm in their belief that America’s children (if not all Americans) need desperately to be saved from themselves. If only the unruly kids were made to take their bitter canonical cultural medicine, they’d surely learn to behave like proper nineteenth-century citizens.
The Simpsons’ writers respond by whacking Bob in the face with a rake, and then another, and again another—nine times in all. Highbrow culture can eat their shorts and then rot away in jail. That particular cultural battle is over, and the fun lowbrow stuff won by a landslide. Punk rock—crude, expletive-laced punk—has had far greater impact on our culture than anything any symphony orchestra on the planet has produced since 1977. It even has far greater artistic merit, if art is understood to be a creative enterprise rather than a finely honed imitative craft, and if it’s also understood to be good art only insofar as it can reveal something new about the nature of existence to its audience. Same goes for The Simpsons, of course—with “new” being one operative word and “audience” the other. The show packs more originality and new insight into a single episode than a dozen hundred-year-old classics on Masterpiece Theatre, and any given episode informs the worldview of a group of people exponentially larger than the total readership of John Updike’s entire oeuvre.
The either/or structure of this debate is, of course, artificial and increasingly irrelevant. “Highbrow” and “lowbrow” were the inventions of a now-eclipsed order that attempted, unsuccessfully, to barricade older cultural forms behind a hierarchy. This point is John Seabrook’s, from his 2000 book Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing—The Marketing of Culture, in which he argues that this old classification system has been replaced by a new hierarchy called “Nobrow.” “In Nobrow,” Seabrook explains, “subculture was the new high culture, and high culture had become just another subculture.” The Simpsons is pure Nobrow, able to slide as effortlessly as Bob himself from slide-whistling slapstick to talk of Susan Sontag, and ultimately oblivious to any prejudicial classifications. It’s not so much that lowbrow bludgeoned highbrow to death with a dozen rakes; it’s that both of them have been subsumed into the one-stop-shopping megamall of pop.
At any rate, Bart is fully on the side of pop. In addition to his dedication to Krusty, he’s a lover of action-movie spectacle and the goriest of video game violence. When the Simpsons steal cable, Bart’s first instinct is to start up an underground porn theatre for his schoolyard chums. He’s an avid comic-book collector, a skateboarder, a budding graffiti artist (infamous across Springfield for his “El Barto” tag). He devours Krusty burgers and the biggest sundaes on the menu at Phineas Q. Butterfat’s 5600 Flavors Ice-Cream Parlor. He’s a sugar junkie, addicted to the ultra-sweet squishees at the Kwik-E-Mart and the Broadway-style-show-tune-singing benders they can induce.
Lisa says it best when she makes the case that Bart is a pure product of the culture’s basest elements. This comes in Episode 5F15 (“Girly Edition”), when Lisa and Bart become co-anchors of a lightweight children’s news program called Kidz Newz. After Bart’s shameless pandering to the lowest common denominator nearly gets him killed, Lisa supplies him with an infotainment-style justification. “In a way,” she editorializes, “isn’t he everyone’s son? For you see, that little hellraiser is the spawn of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda pop, every teacher who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat paychecks. No, Bart’s not to blame. You can’t create a monster and then whine when he stomps on a few buildings.” The pseudo-educational news show is soon cancelled, replaced by The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour. True to form, Bart is immediately hooked on this new pop confection.
It’s a safe bet that Bart truly doesn’t give a damn about what any stuffy old windbag has to say about the distinctions between high and low culture and the rest of it, anyway. We come now to a key point about the punk essence of Bart: that his primary motivation is rarely simple destruction but instead a deep-seated opposition to all authority. What makes Sideshow Bob unique is not that he’s Bart’s enemy, but that he’s the only enemy Bart hasn’t wilfully chosen. The remainder of the long list of his foes are people that Bart has openly antagonized, all but daring them to take him on.
Bart’s pranks, schemes and general disruptiveness4 are of course well known to the assorted authorities in his life, none of whom has ever successfully broken Bart’s rebellious will. His father, whose inability to discipline Bart is a running joke, falls victim to a prank involving a can of Duff beer over-agitated in a paint mixer that blows the roof off the house and puts Homer in a wheelchair. Mrs. Krabappel (Bart’s teacher) and Principal Skinner have tried everything from expulsion to locking Bart in the basement to get him to behave, all to no avail. (Mrs. Krabappel finds dim consolation in mocking Bart openly whenever he fails.) During his brief stint as the Simpsons’ neighbour, President George H.W. Bush feels compelled to spank Bart “for the good of the nation;” Bart’s response is to enlist Homer to help him plague the ex-president with locusts and other nuisances. Even Mr. Burns—a man capable of effortlessly bending judges and federal regulatory officials to his will—can’t force Bart to submit to his authority. When Burns rejects Bart as a candidate to become his heir, the boy immediately sets to hurling rocks through every window of the old tycoon’s house. And when Burns fails to shower the Simpsons with riches after Bart donates blood to save his life, it’s Bart, not Homer, who maintains his righteous anger long enough to mail the nasty letter to Burns that he and Homer compose together. No question: Bart obeys no authority but his own, and snaps back instinctively against any and all others.
Less evident, though, is what motivates Bart to rage against the machine. Is it simply a lack of discipline? Garden-variety juvenile delinquency? An evil heart? Or might Bart’s rejection of authority grow from a profound sense of alienation from the society that it represents? It just might. In Episode 3G02 (“Lisa’s Sax”), for example, we learn that mainstream success has been closed to Bart since the moment he entered institutional society on his fateful first day of school. “School will be fun!” young Bart enthuses as he hurries for the bus. A short while later, still keen to fit in, Bart sits in a circle with his classmates, playing a hand-clapping game. “B-I-(clap)-(clap)-O!” Bart chants. “B-I-(clap)-(clap)-O! B-I-(clap)-(clap)-(clap)! And Bingo was his name-o!” A teacher, clipboard in hand, looks on. “Added extra clap—not college material,” she notes, shutting Bart out of the corridors of mainstream acceptance mere hours after he first enters them. The rest of his first week at school is filled with similar misfortunes, and it’s only when he makes other kids laugh in the schoolyard that he begins to feel like he belongs. Principal Skinner catches him in his “potty talk” and orders him to stop. “You listen to me, son,” Skinner tells five-year-old Bart. “You’ve just started school, and the path you choose now may be the one you follow for the rest of your life. Now, what do you say?” A long pause as Bart considers. And then—speaking slowly, deliberately—he replies: “Eat my shorts.” Bart’s fate is sealed.
Perhaps this explains why, a few years later, once Bart has a few more years of class-clowning and authority-tweaking under his belt, one of the only adults whose logic makes sense to him is Fat Tony, the Mafia boss who gives Bart his first part-time job. This occurs in Episode 8F03 (“Bart the Murderer”), after Bart takes a tumble off his skateboard through the door of Fat Tony’s Legitimate Businessman’s Social Club, and turns out to have a natural knack for picking horses and fixing Manhattans.5 After a few days spent doing menial chores at the social club, Bart is promoted to a more important job—storing stolen cigarettes in his bedroom—which is what first raises his suspicion that his bosses are less than legitimate. The following life lesson ensues:
BART: Say, are you guys crooks?
FAT TONY: Bart, um … is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?
BART: No.
FAT TONY: Suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them?
FAT TONY: And what if your family don’t like bread, they like cigarettes?
BART: I guess that’s okay.
FAT TONY: Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away? Would that be a crime, Bart?
BART: Hell, no!
Thus endeth the lesson. And Bart, fully convinced, takes to wearing “soopoib” tailored suits around the house, singing “Witchcraft” and asking for “three fingers of milk.” But when Fat Tony and his cronies pin the blame for a local murder on “Don Bartholomew”—Bart, that is—even this authority proves unworthy of Bart’s respect. He turns his back on the Mob. Bart has learned that no authority can be trusted.
On a few other occasions, Bart flirts with joining the Establishment—including a brief, appealing taste of fascism when he’s made a hall monitor, mirroring the ease with which punk has found itself co-opted by neo-Nazis. In general, though, Bart’s an outsider and he knows it, defining his entire persona by Springfield’s disapproval.
Bart finds out just how much he craves censure in Episode 1F05 (“Bart’s Inner Child”), in which self-help guru Brad Goodman holds Bart up as a shining example of the “inner child” that the assembled masses of Springfield should be emulating. Goodman asks Bart to explain why he has disrupted the seminar with his smart-ass remarks. “I do what I feel like,” Bart answers. This is adopted as the guiding philosophy of Springfield, and Bart becomes a hero to the whole town. In short order, Bart finds his attempts to crack jokes in class drowned out by the Bart-like one-liners of numerous fellow students, and he can’t indulge in his patented spitting off the overpass because it’s already jam-packed with a mob of gleeful spitters. Bart takes his predicament to Lisa: “Lis, everyone in town is acting like me. So why does it suck?” Lisa, as always, has an insightful answer at the ready: “It’s simple, Bart. You’ve defined yourself as a rebel. And in the absence of a repressive milieu, your societal niche has been co-opted.”
Fortunately, Springfield’s love affair with self-help quickly leads to mass catastrophe: the town’s inaugural “Do What You Feel Festival” goes down like a pop-psychological Altamont, replete with un-double-bolted collapsing bandstands, runaway Ferris wheels and a zoo-animal stampede (perhaps suggesting that even as a role model, Bart can’t help but destroy). And soon Bart can return to his natural place, defying authority figures instead of being one.
That there are traces of an embryonic idealism at work in Bart’s chronic transgressions is confirmed by his relationship with his loving mother. Marge knows full well her boy is no angel, but she remains steadfast in her love and support. In an early episode, she lays out her understanding of her son to Milhouse’s mother, who has forbidden her son to spend time with Bart. “I know Bart can be a handful,” Marge explains, “but I also know what he’s like inside. He’s got a spark. It’s not a bad thing.” She pauses. “Of course,” she admits, “it makes him do bad things …”
If Bart’s not quite a crusading idealist, he does at least have a creative impulse, something worth nurturing. And so Marge thinks of him as her “special little guy”—a misunderstood, marginalized kid with real potential and a kind heart. It’s a faith that’s rewarded by Bart’s repeated redemptions, his last-minute discoveries of a morally sound core in himself. When he violates his mother’s ban on spending time with Nelson the class bully, he winds up accidentally killing a mother bird with Nelson’s BB gun, and then, guilt-ridden, becomes a doting mother hen to the eggs left behind. In Episode 2F04 (“Bart’s Girlfriend”), Principal Skinner executes an elaborate sting to catch Bart misbehaving, using as bait Groundskeeper Willie in full Highland Scots regalia—including kilt sans underwear—in a public display for the sham holiday “Scotchtoberfest.” Bart falls for the sting, fitting balloons to Willie’s kilt to reveal his, um, willie to the assembled crowd. But later in the same episode, Bart refuses to participate with Reverend Lovejoy’s border line sociopathic daughter, Jessica, in a heist of the collection plate money, despite having a high-grade crush on her. “Stealing from the collection plate is really wrong!” Bart tells her. “Even I know that.” There’s no apparent limit to the lengths Bart will go to emasculate an authority figure, but he’s not given to crime for its own sake. For Bart, there needs to be a reason. If he stops short of full-out idealism, well, that’s Lisa’s job.
Bart’s fuzzy politics are quite a bit like punk’s own: the music loud, abrasive, unpolished—maybe even awful to some ears, seemingly devoid of redeeming qualities—the lyrics sometimes crude and profane, advocating sacrilege or riot or even murder. And yet beneath that clamour is a fiercely angry, relentlessly idealistic heart. An idea perhaps as simple and reflexive as this: to tear something down is to yearn to see something else—something better—in its place.
The atomic bomb on Nirvana’s Nevermind—the song that would almost single-handedly obliterate the hair-metallic, candy-popping, brain-dead ’80s aesthetic in pop music and usher in several years of angry rock sludge—was the first track. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” opens with a melodic, hiccupping jangle of clean classic riff rock. It bounces along like that for a full bar, starts to repeat itself, and then, just when you start tapping your foot along to this pretty little confection, right at the midpoint of its second run, the bomb drops: four thundering explosions from the drums, three dense beats each, clearing the way for a ferocious roar from the rest of the band. And incinerating nearly two decades of middle-of-the-road Top Forty pap for good measure.
I remember the first time I heard “Teen Spirit”—and here we take a jaunt back to the pop-cultural hinterland of northern Ontario. It was in a basement rec room during a big booze-soaked Christmas house party in 1991, my last year of high school. The way it lives in my memory (with an asterisk of admission that I was blearily, blurrily drunk), I’d gotten tired of the Super Sounds of the ’70s in the main room upstairs—I think it was either the second full-volume blaring of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” or the third of John Cougar’s “Jack and Diane” that got me moving—and I wandered downstairs, where a small knot of classmates and a handful of collegiate boyfriends of classmates were gathered around a stereo in extremely low light, reverently listening to … something else entirely. Listening to an extraordinary noise. Listening over and over and over again. Hooked by the fuzzy, ferocious guitars, I took a seat, and by the second run-through of “Teen Spirit” I too was grooving along, bouncing my legs, rocking my head. Transported. The legendarily indistinct lyrics were even hazier after a dozen of whatever I was drinking that night, but on each listen another snippet would spring out, hold in my mind’s eye, and then detonate: a couplet about how fun it was to lose and pretend, an oxymoronic assertion that the singer was bad at the things he was best at. The lines that really stuck, though—that would continue to rattle around my mind for days afterwards, with new shockwaves set off each of the thousand times I listened to the song in the coming months, smashing through long-standing barriers in my teenage mind—the real crux of it was found in the howling chorus, in which Cobain bawled about his contagious stupidity and his jaded desire for entertainment. Cryptic? Not one fucking bit. It seemed obvious and enormous and unassailably true: it was an arch-ironic consumerist pose of Homer-esque indolence, a complete condemnation of bored over stimulated teenagehood, a vivid declaration that mindless passivity was the worst place you could possibly be. It was, as Cobain roared in the final line, a denial. Of what? Of potentially anything. The song gave voice to a rage I didn’t know I had, turned the world upside down, brought all prior assumptions into question. A denial? Hell, yes.
Possibly the most famous line in “Teen Spirit,” though, is the last mumbled lyric of the final verse. “Oh well, whatever, nevermind,” Cobain drones, seeming to negate the snarling rebuke of the chorus. The music that would fill the bomb crater left by “Teen Spirit”—which would reluctantly adopt the moniker “grunge”—was unwaveringly gloomy, lending credence to the notion that the youth of the early 1990s were terminally pissed off, disaffected beyond salvation, cynical to the core. The balance of Nevermind brims over with further rejections: of youthful hipness, of romantic love, of the band’s own fans, of Cobain himself. To say the whole album is bile-soaked only begins to describe the disgust Cobain dispenses. And because this rage was so vague and sometimes contradictory, Nevermind seemed to be all but begging to be dismissed.
It wasn’t, of course. Nevermind rocketed to the top of the charts, Nirvana’s home base of Seattle became “the next Liverpool” (so enthused the cover of Rolling Stone), and the loathsome mainstream swallowed Cobain and his indie-rock revolutionaries whole, commodified them and churned them out to the masses, first as “grunge” and later as the more expansive “alternative rock.” The consequences were, at first, quite positive, even refreshing. For one thing, bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins (to name only the trio most frequently associated with the grunge phenomenon) were far superior to the hairsprayed metal bands, teenie pop and fake country they dislodged from the pop charts. As well, numerous artists who’d long toiled in obscurity (three more or less random examples: Sonic Youth, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr) finally saw their first real mainstream success. What’s more, the alternative rock “genre” was loose enough—both as a recording industry and as a fan base—that it embraced hip-hop artists (Cypress Hill, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys), industrial-metal bands (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails) and even its own aging forefathers (Neil Young, Johnny Cash).
But as the media frenzy built and record sales climbed, things got uglier. Trendspotting journalists and major-label publicity departments discovered “the next Seattle” in more places than any sane person would bother to keep track of. Flannel shirts quite famously appeared for a time on fashion-show runways. Fans of this alternative music, meanwhile—in fact the youth of the 1990s generally—were soon labelled “slackers”: disaffected, lazy, apolitical, lost. Some mention might be made in all of this hype about economic decline or moral decay or rising divorce rates. But the possibility that a deeper and more fundamental critique of society was at work, suggestions that the music’s popularity might indicate a degree of free-floating alienation of alarming proportions—these were largely left out of the mass media’s understanding of the alt-rock explosion. To be fair, a significant portion of the audience was into it simply because it was hip. And to be even fairer, and to quote Bart Simpson, “making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.” But what if there was more to it than garden-variety teen angst? What if alternative rock had something in common with, just for example, a contemporary TV cartoon that boasted its own intense social critique?
On the surface, the alt-rock world might seem to have little in common with The Simpsons. The most glaring difference: The Simpsons is extremely funny, which can be said about precious few alternative albums. But if the songs weren’t always funny,6 the musicians often were, especially in their almost invariably mocking interactions with the mainstream media. Many alternative rockers were irreverent, iconoclastic, smart-assed. They professed to hate dogma and detest pretence. They mocked artifice. Ask them a straight question, and they’d answer in the sardonic tones of The Simpsons.
This was most certainly true of Nirvana. Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic even invented a running gag they used during the Nevermind media circus to suss out the intelligence of the interviewer. It consisted of a fake back-story for the band claiming they had met at art college when Cobain expressed an interest in Novoselic’s sculpture. Journalists who fell for the story would continue to be baited for the remainder of the interview.
And then there was the band’s “live” performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the long-running BBC program Top of the Pops, which is simply one of the finest piss-takes in the history of televised rock & roll. Performers on Top of the Pops are expected to pantomime along to a recording of their hit, but because lip-synching was antithetical to everything Nirvana held dear, they pressured the program into giving them the small concession of a live microphone—which then provided the knockout punch in a hilariously inept performance that laid out the artifice of the show for all to see. As the opening riff of “Teen Spirit” played, Cobain gently strummed his guitar, nowhere near in time. Novoselic hopped around the stage like a speed-addled bunny, tossing his bass around in total indifference to the fact of the song, and drummer Dave Grohl simply bashed at his kit randomly and eventually knocked significant parts of it over. But the real gem was Cobain’s live vocal: he crooned his way through the song in a deep, throaty monotone, smiling smarmily as he turned the band’s hit single into the worst lounge-act standard of all time. The deconstruction was total. The band, the song, the program, musical performance on television, TV itself—all were torn apart, laid out in pieces, stripped of their power. It was a masterful piece of satire.
The most Simpsonesque incident in the great alternative-rock explosion, though, was undoubtedly the Lexicon Hoax. This was the moment that Seattle’s alt-rock scene, as if directly channelling Matt Groening and company, struck a satirical chord identical to that of The Simpsons. It arose from a vain attempt by The New York Times to codify the youthquake emanating from the Pacific Northwest. America’s venerable journal of record decided it needed some subcultural detail to round out a feature on the grunge phenomenon. So a Times reporter called the offices of Sub Pop Records, Nirvana’s former label and the indie epicentre of the Seattle music scene, to dig up some colour. The reporter reached Megan Jasper, the label’s publicist, and asked for some samples of grunge slang. Jasper fed the reporter a long list of “grunge speak,” which the Times printed verbatim on November 15, 1992, in a sidebar entitled “Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code.” “Wack slacks,” the Times explained, were old ripped jeans; a loser was called a “cob nobbler;” and the age-old teen pastime of hanging out was referred to by grungesters as “swingin’ on the flippity-flop.7” A fine bit of pop-cultural reportage. Except that Jasper had made up every word of it, more or less off the top of her head. As a high-profile testament to the gullibility of the mainstream media in full hype mode, it was a success beyond measure—a prank so perfect it seemed scripted. Not even The Simpsons could have done it better.
The show did, however, leave its own satirical mark on the alt-rock explosion—in Episode 3F21 (“Homerpalooza”). The episode opens with Homer slowly coming to the realization that he’s no longer hip in the eyes of his kids. In a desperate bid to regain his cool, he takes Bart and Lisa to “Hullabalooza,” a corporate-sponsored alt-rock festival that’s a mirror image of the Lollapalooza festivals that criss-crossed North America every summer through most of the 1990s. Hullabalooza even features several artists who played at Lollapalooza (and who provided the voices for the Simpsonized versions of themselves): Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill. In the episode, Homer is soon invited to join the Hullabalooza tour, sharing the stage with the giants of alternative music as he takes cannonballs to the belly as part of the festival’s freak show. There’s a remarkably natural fit to this crossover. You can see it when Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan approaches Homer backstage to tell him he likes his act. “I’m Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins,” says Corgan. “I’m Homer Simpson, smiling politely,” Homer answers. There’s a sense not of discrete universes colliding (as can sometimes be the case with Simpsons celebrity appearances) but rather of the icons of the same universe finally meeting.
There’s also a knowingness to the show’s portrayal of the alt-rock scene that suggests at the very least that The Simpsons’ writers were far better versed in the music and its accompanying culture than were the overwhelming majority of mainstream journalists. No false grunge lexicons here—even the minor details have the show’s usual pinpoint accuracy. REGISTER NOT TO VOTE reads a sign on a Hullabalooza booth, nailing perfectly the alternative scene’s paradoxical mix of activism and apathy. The most tragicomically precise snippet of satire, though, occurs as Homer takes the stage for his act. Cut to two slouching teens in the audience done up in grunge flannel, their faces perfect masks of boredom. “Oh, here comes that cannonball guy,” the first one says, his voice thick with the laconic derision that was alt-rock’s default tone. “He’s cool.” The second one, in a similar drawl: “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” “I don’t even know anymore,” the first one replies, the irony in his voice replaced with real, anguished confusion.
This is the danger of dedicating yourself to denial: it can numb you to everything. It can even erase you completely. No one demonstrated this more profoundly than Kurt Cobain. There was genuine, passionate idealism in his work and in his life, but most viscerally there was a strain of nihilism so virulent and inward-looking that it was ultimately indistinguishable from total self-negation. “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it / I wanna destroy the passerby”—this self-confident desire to tear it all down summarized the Sex Pistols’ brand of nihilism. By Nirvana’s time, however, Cobain’s loathing had become a far more specific and insular thing, his destructive rage aimed primarily at personal targets: his critics, the celebrity machine generally—and himself. In Utero—the band’s follow-up to Nevermind—was a darker, heavier album. If Nevermind was a single cathartic explosion, then its sequel, packed with scratching and wailing guitars, pummelling drums and soul-sick moans, sounded like the aftermath, an impotent fit amid the rubble, doomed to end in self-destruction. And throughout the album, Cobain yearns for this nullification: he begs to be raped and hated, to be tossed in a fire, to be washed over with blame. In the end, exhausted, he apologizes for anything and everything.
There are many myths about Kurt Cobain, too many myths. Too many lessons tacked on to his suicide. He is an object lesson in the ravages of drug abuse. He was a martyr on the altar of fame, a victim torn apart by the great grinding gears of modern celebrity. He was a helpless man-child, destroyed by an evil seductress. Or he was a poet doomed to self-destruct, a fragile symbol of a dying world. There might be shreds of truth in any or all of these. What is certain, though, is that his work demonstrates an obsession with the connected themes of alienation, destruction and self-negation. In his journals and in interviews he talked frequently about an incurable pain in his stomach, and just as frequently about the tremendous burden of guilt he carried—for being male, for being white, for being heterosexual, for being American. For being born into immense comfort, for scaling the heights of success to a place of ultimate privilege, and for finding all of it completely lacking in solace. His suicide, like any suicide, was a purely selfish act. And his suicide, like any suicide, said first and foremost that he could not bear the pain of his own life. There can be nothing idealistic about the act of suicide, because idealism is predicated on the notion of a community, and suicide negates the interests of the community as surely as it negates the life of victim. I don’t think Kurt Cobain’s suicide symbolized anything other than his desire to be dead, which isn’t a symbol at all—it’s a literal fact.
I’m laying all of this out because I’m about to pivot into a suggestion that identifying with this self-negation has in it the seeds of idealism, and I don’t want to be misunderstood. This is easier to see in a softer light. There’s a streak of self-negation that runs through Bart Simpson’s character, as well, manifesting itself primarily in his wishes and fantasies. An example: when Bart is expelled from school in Episode 9F18 (“Whacking Day”), he contemplates a future spent as a taster of dangerous food additives. In the ensuing fantasy sequence, Bart imagines himself drinking a soft drink called Nature’s Goodness, which causes him to grow into a grotesque monster. He’s excited at the prospect. Another example: in Episode 2F32 (“’Round Springfield”), Bart receives five hundred dollars as his share of a cash settlement in a lawsuit against the makers of Krusty-O’s Cereal (the jagged metal O in his cereal box had made him sick). “I can’t believe it—five hundred bucks!” Bart raves. “Just think what I can do with that money.” Another fantasy sequence follows: Bart is at a roulette wheel. He puts the five hundred dollars on red. Black wins. Bart, back in the present, goggle-eyed: “Coooool!” Even in his dreams, Bart wants to fail, to be deformed, to experience depravity. His only rock-star fantasy is to be a debauched English metal god playing a song called “Me Fans Are Stupid Pigs” and hurling whiskey bottles at his best friend, Milhouse.
Obviously, you have to look closely, wishfully, to find the embryonic politics buried in Bart’s (or anyone else’s) dreams of self-negation. But here it is: if he wants this kind of nothingness, then he has implicitly rejected all conventional notions of success. That’s the idealistic seed. Likewise, although actually committing suicide is an act of surrender, relating to it—identifying with Cobain’s desire to be done with the world, claiming to understand it—is a categorical rejection of the world as it’s currently ordered, and in this there lies a desire for renewal, for some better world built from a new starting point. To project a political argument onto such a resolutely private and wholly destructive act: this is the seed.
This is the idealism of the mosh pit. A thousand sweaty bodies bouncing, thrashing, pounding into each other in a ritual pantomime of the nihilism in the music: it’s an embrace of that message, a commitment to it, an acceptance of the collective will of the crowd to implode, to negate itself as the first step towards dismantling the whole failed society. Or at least this is how it could be, when the audiences were still small enough and their identification with the music deep enough to understand that this was not just a crowd but a like-minded community.
“Punk rock means freedom.” Kurt Cobain wrote variations on this line repeatedly in his journals. And that’s what a mosh pit can feel like: joyful release, the dissolution of self into a larger whole. The intense feeling of community that comes when you stumble and the crowd parts around you to let you back up, or when the guy next to you—who’d just been trading ferocious head butts with a like-minded friend—excuses himself for stepping on your toe. The 1999 movie Fight Club (and the Chuck Palahniuk novel it was based on) describes a sort of exaggerated version of the mosh pit, divorced from the music, reduced to its essence: one-on-one combat between alienated, emasculated men as a form of liberation. Most of the pits I witnessed were coed, but part of Fight Club’s message still fits: that alienation is so widespread and intense that the first step to changing it, the one remaining option, is to connect in the most brutal physical sense, to inflict and feel pain. From this awakening, this rediscovery of self and of community, greater change can come—in Fight Club, it involves destroying the office towers of credit-card companies—but it begins with a ritual of self-negation.
Nirvana’s most nakedly political song, “Territorial Pissings,” also opens with a negation of a sort: a savage, tuneless reading of the chorus of the Youngbloods’ feel-good hippie anthem “Let’s Get Together,” sung by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic. (Novoselic, it warrants mention, became a committed political activist after Nirvana’s premature demise.) The sound of the vocal is fuzzy and distant, as if recorded onto a cheap tape long ago and long since forgotten. “C’mon people now, smile on your brother,” Novoselic yelps. “Everybody get together”—his voice seeming to bottom out on this syllable, exhausted by the strain of making the sentiment sound plausible—“try to love one another right now.” Even before he’s done, a single ominous note of feedback-drenched guitar invades. It repeats four times, waiting. The lyric ends, and a jagged wall of fuzz takes over. A double-time drum roll comes up underneath it, and then the song hurtles into blistering 4/4 punk. Cobain snarls the lyrics, building to a full-blown scream at the chorus as he dedicates himself to finding a better way and then immediately decides instead to put off the search for another time. By the end of the song, the yell has unravelled into a soul-sick howl. Finally—pushed beyond reason, rendered sublingual by his rage—Cobain only screams. It’s a brutal, desperate sound, the sound of threads giving way on the frayed rope that tethers the voice to some dim sense of hope.
This is a backhanded idealism: a plea for change and then, in the very next breath, a retreat. It mirrors the politics of Nirvana’s fans, of a youth culture deeply troubled by the state of the world but trapped by a sense of powerlessness and a deep distrust of elected officials. Activist booths were almost as plentiful as body-piercing stalls at events like Lollapalooza, but this was a generation of young people who were opting out of voting at record-breaking levels. There would be no John F. Kennedy or Pierre Elliot Trudeau to restore their faith in government, and the most serious problems (climate change, global trade and poverty, overweening corporate power) seemed too vast and intractable to even be appraised, let alone fixed. Tellingly, one of the few overtly political movements launched by an alt-rock band—Pearl Jam’s effort to break up Ticketmaster’s monopoly on ticket sales for large-scale rock concerts in North America—ended in failure. And so the idealism turned on itself: the alt-rock legions embraced a highly personal politics.
There’s abundant evidence of this myopia at Hullabalooza—the Simpsonian alt-rock festival indeed serves as a kind of abridged documentary of the generation’s muddled politics. “Generation X may be shallow, but at least they have tolerance and respect for all people,” Lisa notes as the Simpsons arrive at the festival. On cue, they pass a booth labelled BUNGEE JUMP AGAINST RACISM. A short while later, she and Bart voice their outrage in the shrill tones of political correctness when Homer attempts to appropriate Jamaican culture by donning a Rastafarian hat. Homer should have listened: later, when he tries to blend into the crowd, a group of kids accuse him of spreading hate crimes. As punishment, they crowd surf him to the back of the throng. Cut to the heart of the audience, where Bart and Lisa stand amid a crowd of fans swaying half-heartedly in time to “Zero” by Smashing Pumpkins, apparently too exhausted by their disillusionment to do anything more than jerk their limbs slightly with each beat. The explanation for their apathy comes later, after Homer has joined the tour. “You know,” he tells Billy Corgan, “my kids think you’re the greatest. And thanks to your gloomy music, they’ve finally stopped dreaming of a future I can’t possibly provide.” Adding to the audience’s woes is the ubiquity of corporate control, even at this supposedly “alternative” festival. As Lisa observes at the festival entrance, “It’s like Woodstock, only with advertisements everywhere and tons of security guards.” Before Cypress Hill can start their set, MC B-Real has to make an announcement: “We have a lost child here. If she’s not claimed within the next hour, she will become property of Blockbuster Entertainment.”
In the face of all of this—ineffectual politics, a bleak future, corporate co-optation of the one place where they feel they belong—the alt-rock kids have turned inward. Activism is reduced to denouncing the hate crimes and political incorrectness of fellow concert-goers. Freedom is subject to the whims of Blockbuster Entertainment and Ticketmaster. And as for the personal liberation of dancing, of getting lost in the music—who knows, maybe the Hullabalooza mosh pit was too chaotic, maybe security put a stop to it—but the fans do little more than oscillate minutely to the beat.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, there were markedly different beats—beats so dense they were measured by the hundreds per minute—and they had the kids dancing with euphoric abandon, in celebration of the first joyous bloom of rave culture. This new English youth culture hit not with the violence of an exploding punk bomb but with the warm embrace of a deep groove. Funny thing, though: these wildly divergent vectors would very nearly intersect by the early 1990s and then continue in parallel for the rest of the decade.
At first, the rave scene possessed a seemingly boundless, world-beating optimism. Its roots—like those of alternative rock—led directly back to the first wave of punk, but the English strain crossbred in the mid-1980s with the dance-floor beats of house music (born in Detroit and Chicago but buried deep in the cultural underground) and European techno and received an extra boost from an influx of the euphoric drug Ecstasy, brought home by vacationing English clubbers from the Spanish party island of Ibiza. These elements, mixed together in a cavernous warehouse of a club, produced a cosmic explosion. Dominic Utton, describing the vibe ten years on in The Independent, summarized it thusly: “Imagine the optimism, togetherness and sheer belief in the future of the Sixties tempered with the savvy, energy and arrogance of punk.”
By the early 1990s, this new dance culture had spread throughout Europe and to cities around the world, planting the seeds for countless new subgenres of the “acid house” music that had launched the movement. Meanwhile, “Madchester” pop bands—particularly the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays—fused dance grooves to traditional rock & roll and conquered the British pop charts. But prodigious drug use and ridiculous legal squabbling sucked the energy out of the Madchester scene just as it was about to launch the second British invasion of America. British clubs were infiltrated by gangs looking for a piece of the rave scene’s lucrative drug trade, and the optimism of the first flowering of rave soon dissipated. If there’d once been more to it, the movement became primarily about hedonistic escape, about getting off one’s head, about losing oneself completely on the dance floor. Writing in the British music magazine The Wire in 1992, Simon Reynolds described the “’Ardkore” subgenre then sweeping the British club scene in language that could just as easily have been used to describe the mosh pits that were at the same moment becoming ubiquitous in North America. The ’Ardkore dance floor, Reynolds wrote, “is where the somnambulist youth of Britain snap out of the living death of the 90s to grasp at a few moments of bliss.” Note Reynolds’s phrase: “the living death of the 90s.” This is what united the euphoric dance floors of England with the grinding mosh pits of North America: a sense that the status quo was something so degraded and oppressive that it had to be escaped as much and as often as humanly possible.
And another uniting factor: a firm belief that the best tool for escape—perhaps even for change—could be abbreviated DIY.
In Episode 1F08 (“$pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)”), the people of Springfield decide to legalize gambling in an effort to dig the town out of an economic slump. Soon, Mr. Burns’ Casino is Springfield’s social focal point, and even underage Bart is having a go at the slot machines. A casino employee—the squeaky-voiced teenager, Springfield’s ubiquitous service-industry drone—catches him in the act and tosses him out. Bart, defiant to the end, fires off an insult as his butt hits the street: “By the way, your martinis suck!” The irritated casino employee replies, “Oh, yeah? What are you going to do? Start your own casino? In your tree house? And get all your little friends to come? I’d like to see that!” And he dissolves into scoffing laughter. Cut to Bart’s tree house, rechristened “Bart’s Casino,” where a tuxedoed Bart welcomes a steady flow of children into his new gambling den like a Vegas pro. Looking on is the very same squeaky-voiced casino employee. “Well, he certainly showed me,” he admits.
And that, in a nutshell, is DIY.
The initials stand for do-it-yourself, and it’s really just that simple. If the system does not work for you, if it has no place for you, then do it yourself. Start your own record label, produce your own album, organize your own tour. DIY was an inevitable by-product of punk, born of the necessity of providing an alternative to the loathsome (and hostile) corporate mainstream. And yet the by-product actually proved more durable, more adaptable, than the music itself, crossing musical genres, skipping to new media, even instigating fundamental shifts in the way entire entertainment industries functioned. It was an incendiary little acronym.
The DIY philosophy emerged soon after the first wave of punk bands shook their audiences out of the bloated torpor of 1970s arena rock and disco, but it was the American punk scene of the 1980s that proved to be the most fertile ground for DIY ventures. Independent record labels and an independent network of clubs emerged across North America to support the radically marginalized punks, eventually giving rise to an entire indie-rock subculture that played wet nurse to a scruffy young band called Nirvana (among hundreds of others). Beyond that, though, the DIY approach launched an entire parallel media universe. It led to the founding of countless handmade fanzines. It provided the first work for scores of talented artists and designers, who developed their own unique graphical styles designing the handbills that advertised punk gigs. Ditto for young photographers and journalists—and cartoonists. Among these was a young man fresh out of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington—a major centre of alternative culture—who got his start drawing cartoons for the college newspaper. When he moved to Los Angeles after college, he started producing his own little hand-stapled comic book, which he sold to the punks who shopped in the record store where he was working. This is how Matt Groening and his Life in Hell cartoon first found an audience. And since that cartoon was what brought Groening to the attention of big-shot TV producer James L. Brooks, it’s no exaggeration to say that without the DIY-driven punk scene of the 1980s, there’d likely be no Simpsons.8
Groening is a telling example, in that his cartooning (like that of most indie cartoonists) had no real connection to punk beyond the fact that it was too weird and/or subversive and/or unproven for the mainstream. This was the real power of DIY: it eventually gave rise to entire cottage industries with no direct ties to the music. By the late 1980s, for example, zines—independently produced, desktop-published magazines—had become a full-blown subcultural phenomenon of their own. The first of these were straight-forward punk fanzines, focused on record reviews and interviews with musicians, but they soon branched out. Far out. Any place or person or topic was potentially zine-able, and indeed the best of them were often the most esoteric. Beer Frame, for example, was a brilliant journal of pop-cultural anthropology that featured in-depth explorations of the origins and purposes of truly bizarre consumer goods (for example, Kraut juice, a beverage derived from the juice used to pickle sauerkraut). Another gem was Duplex Planet, which was composed of interviews with the residents of the senior citizens’ centre where the zine’s creator worked, and which masterfully maintained a tricky balance between genuine empathy and absurdist humour. And these were just the ones that by luck or skill came to some degree of mainstream attention. Any given city’s indie record or book store had a shelf full of local zines, documenting and augmenting the local culture.9
The same DIY spirit pervaded rave culture, not just in its English birthplace but anywhere it spread. Again, necessity was invention’s mommy: the very structure of raves demanded DIY. Someone, after all, had to find and book and set up a venue, had to spin the tunes, had to produce the graphics for the flyers. And so every rave scene became a de facto training camp for DJs, graphic designers and small-business entrepreneurs. And the music itself—sample-heavy, self-produced, endlessly changeable—is by far the most DIY-friendly music genre in pop history.
By the early 1990s, the notion that culture was something produced far away, that it required enormous stacks of cash and elaborate infrastructure, had been replaced by the sense that all real innovation happened far away from these stifling mainstream trappings. This was punk’s greatest legacy, passed on through rave and alt-rock to the entire culture—and to Bart Simpson, its foremost mass-culture avatar.
Bart’s devotion to the DIY ethos is not as evident as his affinity for punk rock’s spirit of creative destruction, but it’s been an essential part of Bart’s character throughout The Simpsons’ run—at times allegorically, on occasion (such as in the founding of Bart’s Casino) quite literally. Inside the conformist halls of Springfield Elementary, Bart is the consummate slacker: apathetic and disruptive, smart-assed and lazy. As soon as he leaves the building, though, he reveals himself to be self-motivated and ambitious, a ringleader and entrepreneur. Beaten up by a bully in Season 1, Bart organizes his classmates into a militia in order to fight back. In need of money for a rare comic book in Season 2, he promptly sets up a lemonade stand and then makes beer his stock-in-trade to expand his customer base. Bart leads the rebellion against the fascist leadership of Kamp Krusty, he rallies the assault on Shelbyville to reclaim Springfield’s beloved lemon tree, he becomes a faith healer preaching to his very own jam-packed tent of believers. Send Bart down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to hang out with his aunts for career day, and he’ll soon figure out a way to make himself a fake ID and then use it to take his pals on a wild trip to Knoxville, Tennessee.
In a nod to the ambitiousness of Bart’s extracurricular activities, the show’s writers have over the years added semi-professional trappings even to his childish pranks. As he helps Lisa plot revenge on a class rival, for example, an unrelated pranking idea comes to him; he produces a handheld tape recorder, turns it on, makes a note of his idea, and then—after a sober pause—flips the recorder back on to add a few extra malevolent chuckles. On another occasion, he experiences a tortured artist’s moment of self-doubt at the release ceremony for the school weather balloon—he’s worried about the quality of his illicit caricature of Principal Skinner on the side of it. “I don’t think I really captured the eyes,” he frets. “Bart,” says faithful sidekick Milhouse, “if you have a failing, it’s that you’re always demanding perfection.” Another sober pause. “If you have a failing.” A few moments after the balloon’s release, Skinner interrogates Bart about the crime—and discovers that Bart has blueprints for the caricature on his person, not to mention notarized photos of the work-in-progress and an alternate wording for the insult on the balloon. Which is to say, with considerable hyperbole, that Bart works at his mischief. Like many a DIY punk, he’s at his most productive when he’s working outside—indeed working against—the mainstream of society.
Much as Bart has applied the DIY ethos to summer-camp rebellions and school pranks, so too did the DIY spirit inspire revivals in places far removed from the music industry. Hollywood, for example, which had by the late 1980s sunk into a period of intense stagnation, rampant greed and creative bankruptcy. The film industry was in the kind of bloated rut that music had occupied a few years earlier, churning out little besides overpriced, overproduced, brain-dead spectacles. And then out of nowhere came the shoestring-budgeted, myth-making indies, whose tales of how they got their movies made became almost as well known as the movies themselves.
Kevin Smith’s story was typically dramatic and inspiring. In 1991, only twenty-one years old, he drove from his New Jersey home to New York City to see a quirky pseudo-documentary called Slackers—Richard Linklater’s self-produced stream-of-consciousness examination of the elaborately idle lives of young people in his hometown of Austin, Texas. Watching the movie was an epiphany for Smith, and before long he was maxing out credit cards and shooting after-hours at the strip mall where he worked to make Clerks (1994). It was an archetypal indie: ultra-low-budget (talking up its total production costs—$27,575—even became part of its marketing appeal), gritty in appearance, somewhat clunkily acted (mostly by amateurs), but quick-witted and passionate. Similarly rough-edged films with similarly endearing creation myths abounded in the early 1990s. Robert Rodriguez, for example, made his indie debut, El Mariachi (1992), for only $7,000, raising the cash by volunteering for laboratory experiments. And then there was the kingpin of the indie-film movement: a former L.A. video store clerk, a brainy walking film encyclopedia, a lisping, somewhat dorky kid who became the hippest director of his age. His name, as you may have already guessed, was Quentin Tarantino.
In some respects, Tarantino became to indie film what Kurt Cobain was to alt-rock: its poster child, its best-known purveyor, its unofficial spokesperson. Largely on the strength of two gritty, ultra-violent films about underworld thugs whose conversations were long-winded, brainy, weighted with slang and drenched in pop-cultural allusion—his 1992 debut, Reservoir Dogs, and the blockbuster 1994 follow-up, Pulp Fiction—Tarantino became a full-blown icon to the same people who were making Cobain a rock star and The Simpsons a religion. Which was no coincidence: Tarantino’s movies, and indie film generally, mined the same terrain as alt-rock. They were edgy and brash, they felt honest and authentic, they focused on subject matter that was extreme and disquieting or else emotionally intense and thus deeply resonant to a generation awash in dysfunction. And they were as ironic and as obsessed with pop culture as The Simpsons was.
It was perhaps only a matter of time, then, before Tarantino showed up on The Simpsons. And so he did—in caricature, with his famous squeaky voice provided by Dan Castellaneta—in Episode 3G03 (“-Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala-D’OH!-cious”), as the guest director of a particularly stylish instalment of “Itchy & Scratchy” called “Reservoir Cats.” Towards the end of the cartoon, Tarantino enters—as if walking onto the cartoon’s set—to explain the deep meaning of the cartoon’s violence in a bang-on lampoon of the real Tarantino’s caffeinated rants about his work: “What I’m trying to say in this cartoon is that violence is everywhere in our society, you know, it’s like even in breakfast cereals, man.” Itchy then decapitates him with a razor. There’s certainly no other young director (and very few other directors, period, the Scorsese/Coppola/Spielberg/Lucas pantheon excepted) whose aesthetic style, personality and verbal quirks would be identifiable enough to The Simpsons’ audience to be effective in this kind of a parody.
In time, the indie-film boom would seriously reconfigure the structure of Hollywood. Miramax—the production company that backed numerous influential indies, including Tarantino’s—eventually earned a degree of power and prestige in Hollywood that rivalled the major studios before being acquired by one (Disney purchased Miramax in 1993). The other major studios, meanwhile, either bought up the most successful indies or else launched their own pseudo-indie distribution arms to compete. Many of the major record companies used the same approach to deal with the alt-rock boom. Of course, the mainstream film and music industries continue to spew significant torrents of formulaic garbage, but that garbage now exists alongside an elaborate web of DIY indie artists and companies in a sometimes-hostile, sometimes-symbiotic relationship. Little pillars of creativity and opportunity now fill the field around the monolith.
DIY’s most pervasive influence, though, was on the one medium that didn’t already have a monolith to topple: the internet.
The relationship between technology and the DIY movement has always been cozy and causal. The DIY approach taken by alt-rockers and especially dance-music producers was made possible by technological advances that lowered the cost and upped the quality, availability and user-friendliness of electronic instruments, recording equipment and—more recently—professional-quality recording software such as Pro Tools. The liner notes of Nirvana’s indie debut, Bleach, for example, include a proud mention of the total cost of the recording: $606.17. The same is true of the indie-film boom, which would’ve been impossible without the development of cheaper, easier-to-use cameras and editing equipment. And the advent of desktop publishing was essential not only to the birth of the zine but also to the availability, quality and inventiveness of rave flyers, punk handbills and the liner notes of self-produced cassettes and CDs. In each of these cases, though, the DIY upstarts had to compete against larger, slicker, more powerful players.
But the internet was a vast and essentially uncharted wilderness. Anyone with a computer could contribute content quickly, easily and extremely cheaply. And that content was just as readily available to other internet users as the slick websites of the megacorporations. The playing field was at first completely level—or if it wasn’t, then it was actually tilted slightly towards the DIY early adopters, who understood the new medium’s strengths and weaknesses and unique cultural quirks far better than their big-shot competitors. The rhetoric of punk and rave and indie film said that anyone could be a musician or filmmaker or artist or impresario, but there was still the problem of getting to know the right people, finding the right tools, being in an urban centre that had a punk or rave or indie-film community. With the internet, though, literally anyone anywhere could contribute, so long as they had internet access. If there were, at a guess, perhaps a few thousand indie punk and alternative bands making noise on albums or in clubs across North America at the peak of the music’s popularity, there were millions of websites up and running within a few years of the internet’s launch, not to mention millions of other active participants in newsgroups and bulletin boards and chat rooms.
The internet, which soon became an enormously important and influential communications tool, had DIY in its DNA from its very birth. On the internet, not just content production but distribution—by far the most critical and elusive element in any mass-cultural enterprise—is DIY. And this helps to explain why it has managed in a few short years to have a far greater impact on other media in the cultural sphere than all previous DIY efforts combined. After their initial challenges, the indie movements in both music and film were essentially subsumed into the old-guard mainstream, with some concessions and minor changes made to reach a grudging equilibrium (namely, the pseudo-indie record labels and film studios). The internet, though, has fundamentally altered the mainstream.
The strongest example to date is in the music industry, which continues as I write this to fight a battle it has already lost. In 1999, an eighteen-year-old student at Northeastern University—a kid by the name of Shawn Fanning—built a slick little piece of software that allowed internet users to trade songs with each other over the internet. Called it Napster. And that was pretty much that. Whatever equilibrium is eventually reached in the industry, it will be dramatically different from a system in which consumers buy CDs at twenty bucks a pop from huge megastores that carry the produce primarily (if not quite exclusively) of the world’s six largest record companies. The alt-rock boom widened the parameters of the mainstream music business; Napster and its file-sharing descendants fundamentally shifted the ground on which the whole industry stands. Similarly slick little pieces of software will eventually unleash similar sorts of earthquakes on film, television and publishing. The first rumblings have already been felt in all of these industries. It’s only a matter of time before the earth really starts to shake.
At the very beginning of the opening credits of every episode of The Simpsons, Bart is alone in his classroom at school, writing lines on the chalkboard. The lines change every episode. The ones for an episode that first aired in January 2001 read NETWORK TV IS NOT DEAD. It isn’t, of course. Not yet. When it does die, though, its obituary should contain the name of its killer: DIY.
1 A Product Plug: Here, and in several other places in this book, I’m indebted to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s excellent, expansive study of punk music and nihilism in twentieth-century pop culture.
2 Nazi Supermen Are Not Our Superiors: Itchy & Scratchy’s creator may have made Nazi propaganda films, and Mr. Burns, of course, spent the Second World War making the Germans shells that worked, dammit!—but 20th Century Fox is no collaborator. Though Bart’s parent corporation mostly accepted that it was powerless to stop the onslaught of bootlegged merchandise, it drew the line at “Nazi Bart” T-shirts. In May 1991, Fox sued Tom Metzger of the White Aryan Resistance—an American neo-Nazi group—for infringing on its copyright by selling T-shirts sporting an image of a seig-heiling Bart in a Gestapo uniform. Metzger agreed to stop peddling the shirts.
3 Eat Whose Shorts? Apparently, the shorts of some guy in Dayton, Ohio, the city where Nancy Cartwright—the voice of Bart Simpson—grew up. Cartwright was a trumpet player in her high-school band, which would parade from the school to the stadium every Friday night for football games, playing a simple drum march along the way. At the end of each run of the march cadence, the entire band would chant their bandleader’s initials: “D! R! F!” One night, though, for reasons lost to history, the chant was changed: “Eat! My! Shorts!” It stuck—and stuck with Cartwright, who introduced it to Bart’s lexicon, and thus to the entire world. (It should also be noted that the epithet predates Bart: it is memorably employed by Bender, the juvenile delinquent played by Judd Nelson, to tell off his sadistic principal in the beloved 1985 teen comedy The Breakfast Club.)
4 Bart’s Crank Calls: Not counting the staff of Springfield Elementary, the most frequent target of Bart’s pranks is Moe, the cantankerous proprietor of Moe’s Tavern (and at best a pseudo-authority). With Moe, the prank plays out the same each time: Bart calls the bar asking for a fictitious patron, Moe calls out for I.P. Freely or Mike Rotch or Amanda Huggenkiss, and he realizes he’s been had as the bar erupts in laughter. The most amusing part of the prank is the series of increasingly inventive means by which Moe threatens to punish the caller if he ever discovers his identity: “I swear I’m gonna slice your heart in half;” “I’m gonna gut you like a fish and drink your blood;” “I’m gonna carve my name in your back with an ice pick;” “I’m gonna use your head for a bucket and paint my house with your brains;” “I’m gonna shove a sausage down your throat and stick starving dogs in your butt.”
5 Win, Place or D’oh! The horse race for which Bart picks the winner is, incidentally, a fine example of The Simpsons at its multilayered, self-referential best. The call of the home stretch goes like this: “As they come out of the turn, it’s Sufferin’ Succotash by a neck over Yabba-Dabba-Doo. Two lengths back it’s Ooh Ain’t I a Stinker and That’s All Folks. I Yam What I Yam can see them all, but here comes Don’t Have a Cow flying on the outside, and coming down to the wire it’s all Don’t Have a Cow!” It’s a race between cartoon-character catchphrases, with Bart’s own “Don’t have a cow!” victorious over Popeye’s “I yam what I yam,” Porky Pig’s “That’s all folks,” Bugs Bunny’s “Ooh, ain’t I a stinker,” Fred Flintstone’s “Yabba-dabba-doo” and Sylvester the cat’s “Sufferin’ succotash.” The whole gag is over in a few short seconds—an incidental detail turned into a lightning-quick homage to the classics of American animation.
6 Kurt Cobain, Humorist? “I Hate Myself and I Want To Die”—a Nirvana song that appeared on The Beavis & Butthead Experience (1993), a tribute to the popular MTV cartoon—is probably the strongest evidence of the band’s robust sense of humour in its entire discography. The title in particular is pure self-parody, Cobain having fun with his media image as the ultimate tortured soul. In case the parody of the title was too broad, the song also features a softly spoken monologue by Cobain deep in the mix of the guitar break after the second chorus. It goes like this: “Most people don’t realize that large pieces of coral, which have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.” The line is lifted from “Deep Thoughts” by Jack Handey, a recurring series of absurdist aphorisms that appeared on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s.
7 Harsh Realm, Dude: For the record, here’s the full lexicon of grunge as published in The New York Times:
Wack slacks: Old ripped jeans
Fuzz: Heavy wool sweaters
Plats: Platform shoes
Kickers: Heavy boots
Swingin’ on the flippity-flop: Hanging out
Bound-and-hagged: Staying home on Friday or Saturday night
Score: Great
Harsh realm: Bummer
Cob nobbler: Loser
Dish: Desirable guy
Bloated, big bag of bloatation: Drunk
Lamestain: Uncool person
Tom-tom club: Uncool outsiders
Rock on: A happy goodbye
8 Random Nugget of Matt Groening Trivia: The record store in Los Angeles that Groening worked in—and where he first sold copies of Life in Hell—was called Licorice Pizza.
9 Full Disclosure: In the fall of 1993, I co-published a zine with two friends. It was called Stun. It lasted for two issues. It had really, really cool covers. One had this line drawing of Greek philosophers lounging on the steps of this classical lyceum, all of them gathered around this monolith, and we cut-and-pasted a baby’s head onto the top of the monolith. It was awesome. The less said about the content inside—particularly my pretentious record reviews and rants about how the ’60s were like over, dude—the better.