I’m grateful to Charles R. Cross for pointing out in Heavier Than Heaven, his wonderful biography of Kurt Cobain, that Spank Thru is a song about masturbation. I’d been too distracted to make the link with spanking the monkey and also missed the fact that Cobain uses the word “masturbate” in the song, albeit in an exaggeratedly, slurred drawl which makes it difficult to catch. This may have been a deliberate obscuring of the word, so as not to affect the already slim chances of the record receiving airplay on American daytime radio channels.
Spank Thru was one of Nirvana’s earliest issued songs and was chosen as their contribution to the compilation EP, Sub Pop 200, released over Christmas 1988.
Listening to it, one is initially struck by how funny the first verse is. Singing in a lower register, Cobain sounds like an old style balladeer conveying a mood of romanticism, almost like he’s taking his love out for a picnic in the countryside. It quickly becomes apparent though that the relationship has been long dead and that Cobain still yearns for it both in his heart, but more especially in his loins. Thank God, that we still have that as a means to relive (and relieve) emotions for past love affairs. The song is refreshingly free of feelings of guilt or self-disgust and its closing lines suggest that Cobain has got VERY good at it, while the end squall of feedback does indeed dribble out like an aural suggestion of the song’s subject matter. Definitely one to file under ‘Music as Lived Experience’ I think.
Video courtesy of Incesticide23
No comments:
Post a Comment