Like many of the Saints in quarantine, one of my coping mechanisms in the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns was to make a playlist. It started off playful enough, what with some rather on-the-nose gallows humor like REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by the Police, “Corona” by the Minutemen, and etc. I thought I was still being playful enough when I also threw on Nirvana’s sensible bit of social distancing advice, “Stay Away.”
Yet when I gave the playlist a whirl, I swiftly realized that the songs from Nirvana Nevermind, for all their overproduction and overplay over the past 30-odd years, still resist being reduced to a mere gag-track in a way that ostensibly more serious acts do not—the pain there is a little too raw, the intent a little too real. Try and smile at how juvenile Kurt Cobain’s sentiments may seem to us now through the jaded eyes of adult experience, but nevertheless the fact remains that he was not posturing, he really did seem to mean what he says. In short order, “Stay Away” had me seriously re-listening to not only Nirvana’s entire discography for the first time in ages, but the whole spectrum of early-to-mid ‘90s Alternative. To my consternation, I discovered that far too many of these acts—Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, and, just, like, so much Smashing Pumpkins, what with their manifold rats in cages and “Let me outs”—now resonated far more deeply with me during the pandemic lockdowns than they ever did when I was an ostensibly moody teenager. Suddenly I found myself forced to do something I hadn’t done since the Gordon B. Hinkley era: take ‘90s Alternative seriously.
LDS Gen Xers and Millennials of a certain age will recall with me a rather curious social ritual from the ‘90s-to-early-2000s that we have perhaps blocked from our collective memories out of sheer embarrassment: the swapping of urban legends about which ‘90s Alt-Rockers were secretly ex-Mormon. Around Boy Scout campfires, in the back rows of Youth firesides, at Stake Dances, and even during missionary District Meetings, we swore to each other up and down that (and this is just a partial list off the top of my head) Billie Corgan, Trent Reznor, Kurt Cobain—and of course Pop-outlier Christina Aguilera—were all once on the membership rolls of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Evidence cited included the band-name Nine Inch Nails supposedly referencing the length of the nails that crucified Christ, the Smashing Pumpkins song “Zero” declaring “God is empty/just like me”, and so on and so forth.
Now, like many a faith-promoting rumor, this was all of course complete nonsense: there’s no hard evidence that the name Nine Inch Nails refers to anything other than its ability to form a cool-looking logo; Corgan’s religious vocabulary is much more obviously explained by his Irish-Catholic ancestry; and the basis for Cobain’s baptismal records rested on the flimsiest of evidence of all—namely his 1994 MTV Unplugged cover of the Vaseline’s “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam.” (Hearing that last one recited by a missionary from Ogden is how I finally began to cringe and quit repeating these rumors myself). But my purpose here is not to debunk such obviously silly rumors, but nor is it to smile at the folly of youth, either; rather, I wish to meditate a minute on the much more interesting question of why we ‘90s kids wanted so badly to believe those rumors true in the first place.
Certainly part of it was out of a sense of simple teenage rebellion: when one’s early-morning Seminary teachers keep repeating cautionary tales about Elder Gene R. Cook of the Seventy sitting on a plane next to that fiendish Sympathizer-with-the-Devil Mick Jagger himself, then listening to Trent Reznor—and even claiming him as a fellow Saint—can feel deliciously subversive. But we also weren’t entirely disagreeing with our Seminary teachers when we claimed these artists as ex-Latter-day Saints, either; we had, after all, been drilled since childhood about how those who have left the faith “lose the light”, become “past feeling”, have “hearts turned to flint”, and “grope about in darkness at noonday,” with greater blindness than if they’d never been enlightened by the Holy Spirit to begin with, and hence have ever since sunk into everlasting misery where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, for “wickedness never was happiness.”
I say all that half-jokingly, but only half: for our matter-of-fact assumption at the time was, I think, that only those artists who had once enjoyed the greater light of the Gospel could possibly sink into such depraved and despairing darkness as to produce the music of the Grunge era. Ipso facto, they must clearly have been ex-Mormons.
That is, there was a certain sense of Mormon Exceptionalism and Chauvinism about those claims, weren’t there: a feeling that only ex-Mormons could’ve created the most popular Alternative Rock of the ‘90s, since obviously Mormons alone—endowed as we are with greater light and knowledge and power from on high—could and would make the very best of everything. It was a feeling long rooted in tradition and history: “We will yet have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own” went the old 19th century prophecy, and we mayhaps felt that prediction at least partially fulfilled by means of our entirely-imagined predominance in Alt-Rock.
The 1990s, after all, was also the era of boundless Hinkley-inflected optimism, massive Temple building programs and unprecedented global expansionism, when we were practically inundated with feel-good statistical studies and Harold Bloom quotes assuring us that we were in the midst of unstoppable exponential growth, one that would inevitably result in ours becoming next major World Religion by next century’s end. Hence, we couldn’t help but see our image stamped on everything around us—yes, even upon the supposed darkness.
That aforementioned Pop-outlier Christina Aguilera of course fit into this model as well: we wanted her to be Mormon not only because we were a bunch of hormonal young Priests and Deacons who not-so-secretly day-dreamed of being sealed to her in the Temple, but also due to the fact that (at least compared to her chief Pop rival Brittany Spears) she clearly had the superior set of pipes—for even with her mere tangential connection to the Church, she would obviously have the superior set of everything. Since the days of the Osmond’s in the ‘70s clear up through David Archuleta at the height of American Idol, the Saints have prided themselves on their over-represented achievements in the realm of Pop Music; and during the Church’s imperial era of the 1990s, those musical achievements were projected (at least fancifully) onto the Alt-Rockers, too. “We claim all truth as part of the gospel”, Brigham Young oft declared, and even the miserable truths of Alternative Rock we would feign claim for ourselves.
In some ways, that same Church-wide success is what may have even fueled so many of our youth’s draw towards Alternative Rock; for just as many as these same acts sang about the suffocating traps of stardom (e.g. Nirvana’s In Utero opening with “Teenage angst has paid off well/now I’m bored and old”—or Smashing Pumpkins’ smash-hit “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, which is really just about a burnt-out band being asked “to fake it/for just one more show”, after all), the Church’s run-away success sometimes felt a little smothering, too. Hence, when we Youth of Zion were surrounded by all statistical evidence and assurances that the Church would always continue to grow and surround us for the rest of our lives, no matter where we went or how far we roamed, we couldn’t help but occasionally feel that that growth wasn’t a little oppressive. We perhaps felt that we could never escape the Church even if we tried. Just as the saying “God is always watching over you” can sometimes feel as much a threat as a promise, so too did the rise of the Church in these Latter-days begin to feel just a touch ominous a-times. In the ‘90s, it was Zion that we secretly feared would crowd out the world, not the other way around. Hence, to cope, the Youth of Zion sometimes listened to Punk, Indie, and Nirvana.
It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that all those silly “did you know he’s an ex-Mormon?” rumors began disappearing around the same time that the Church’s self-assurance in its inevitable expansion began to seriously plateau as well. Both trends, in fact, were likely influenced by the same factor: the internet. Still in its infancy during the ‘90s, the ascendancy of the internet in the 2000s finally forced the Church to start posting Gospel Topic Essays to address a whole host of thorny theological issues that could no longer be quietly swept under the rug. Similarly, claiming that Kurt Cobain once unironically sang “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam” as a Primary child loses its last shreds of credibility once you can just ctrl+f “Mormon” in his Wikipedia page and come up with nada.
But perhaps an even greater reason for why all those Alt-Rock ex-Mormon rumors ceased entirely is because actual ex-Mormon Rockers began to emerge in the 2000s: Win Butler of Arcade Fire (whom I have written about previously); Brandon Flowers of The Killers (who even returned to full activity!); Provo-native Bert McCracken of The Used; and of course Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees, who cut all ties formally after the November ’15 Exclusion Policy. One no longer needs to posit or invent ex-Mormon rockers when there are real ones in front of you. Moreover, the rise of actual ex-Mormon artists also pointed to another key difference between the 1990s and 2000s: whereas before the kids felt trapped, nowadays they all assume that if they want, they can just leave—and if our current youth retention rates are any indication, they frequently do. Kurt Cobain once screamed himself hoarse on Nevermind, “Gotta find a way, a better way, to get away”, but then the kids realized they actually could get away—and that quite simply. The Smashing Pumpkins’ “despite all my rage/I’m still just a rat in a cage” gave way to Arcade Fire’s “I don’t want to live in my father’s house no more”. Sometime after the turn of the century, the Youth of Zion discovered that if they felt trapped in a cage, they could just walk out of it.
But what exactly did we all feel trapped by, that lead us all to either rage against it or just leave it? It is worth here remembering that a common critique of the entire ‘90s Alternative era was, simply: what earthly reason did they have to be so miserable about? Seriously, they were living Post-Cold War, pre-9/11, during the Pax Americana of the longest peacetime economic boom since WWII; the 1990s were a bona fide Shangri-la compared to what was to come! It’s difficult not to assume the whole scene was a rank imposture when these millionaire rock stars objectively had it so much better than us, and still had the nerve to mope about it. Yet what Kurt’s suicide starkly reminds us, even after all these decades, is that they weren’t just posing, that so many of them and us really did feel trapped, that something in fact did not quite feel right.
Because the plain fact has been that something was not right; even during the post-Cold War Boom of the Clinton years, we all had this vague sense that we were living on borrowed time. This should not surprise us; even the faithful are apt to forget that ours is an apocalyptic religion—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—that Joseph Smith said he could see DESTRUCTION written in capital letters upon everything he saw. “Cleave unto charity, the greatest of all, for all things must fail—” warned Mormon himself, a man who knew what it was to watch all things fail. But even without prophetic vision, the unsustainability of our wasteful and destructive economy and its disastrous effects upon the environment had been apparent even well before the ‘90s; and the cracks and the fissures in the American empire were already apparent. The warning signs were imminent, such that the Prophets and the Alt-Rockers alike could sense it, intuit it; they were kindred spirits without even realizing (which perhaps is another reason why we wanted to believe them fellow Saints so badly).
Yet there was also something paradoxically liberating about those old Alt-Rock songs about feeling trapped, wasn’t there—we bought those CDs not just to express our feelings of dissatisfaction and entrapment, but to transcend them. I mentioned earlier that I think kids today no longer feel trapped quite like my generation did. There is great danger in this realization (as shown by our retention rates), but I would argue also great potential. The War in Heaven, we are repeatedly told, was fought over free agency, and on my best days I believe it. People must feel free to leave the Church at all times if their decision to stay is going to carry any moral heft at all. The convert who joins in spite of, not because of, our growth numbers, is the one with a “sincere heart” and “real intent”; and the life-long member who remains despite, not due to, our retention rates, is the one with a more sure foundation. (This of course is the chief objection against the BYU honor code–that is coerces an obedience that should only be freely given–but that’s a topic for a different day.)
I was reminded of all this on my mission, of all places. During a standard round of interviews with my mission president about 6 months in, I confessed to him that I was feeling a deep and persistent burn-out as of late, like I’d lost my fire already. I was bracing myself for some pep talk on how to keep the fire alive, how to put my shoulder to the wheel and grind it out even when I didn’t feel like, when he surprised me with, “Elder, that’s fantastic!”
I looked up at him quizzically; it was clearly the reaction he was going for, because he quickly said something to the effect of, “Up till now, you’ve been serving a mission to please your parents, to please your ward, perhaps even to please God, I don’t know. To be clear, these were all very good, very acceptable reasons to serve! Wonderful reasons, even. We pump you kids up with this fire all throughout your Youth and Mission Prep years, and bring it to a fever pitch in the MTC, and then”—here he clapped his hands—”off with the horses.
“But it doesn’t last, does it. Oh no. Eventually you burn through all that fire—well, not eventually, you actually burn through it rather quickly, don’t you. Like a rocket in lift-off, the first stage burns out and leaves you behind. Oh yes, we all knew that you were going to fail.” He said all this with a warm smile.
“So, is this it?” I began to say with a choke in my throat, “Am I finished…”
“What? No, of course not!” he said, “All that burn-out means is that now you are going to have to lay a-hold of the next stage, of something that never faileth…”
“Charity,” I blurted out, and it was the answer he was fishing for.
“Before hand, you were being impelled on by others—and these others were very good others, mind you, people who love you and whom you loved back,” he continued, “You were externally motivated, and that’s a good start, but it only gets you so far. But now you must have better reasons—now you must be internally driven.
“This is a very dangerous time for you on your mission, Elder, don’t get me wrong; this could easily be the moment when you settle into burn-out and fall back into the sea, to simply float along and drift for the rest of your mission. Many missionaries do that, you know who they are, I don’t need to point them out to you, and you understand them now, and no longer resent them or judge them, don’t you.
“But there is another possibility now that you had not yet considered, and that is that you must no longer serve to please your parents, not to please your family, or you ward, certainly not to please me, and not even to please yourself—but simply out of your sheer, unbridled love for these people. Then you will no longer need to force it; you will serve them not because you have forced yourself to, but because you desire to, without compulsory means, forever and ever…”
It was a small moment at the time, but it obviously stuck with me, and in retrospect was a turning point on my mission; I still reflect on that most unusual conversation years later, cause I’ve yet to hear another one like it. It was the first time I sincerely, genuinely, didn’t feel trapped or restricted by my religion, but opened up by it, released by it, like my “soul did begin to expand.” It was the sort of teenage moment where one feels just a little bit infinite, but in a way that gestures towards the possibility of expanding this feeling even beyond one’s teenage years.
Not coincidentally, it was also the first time in my life that—for however much I might still enjoy it nostalgically in the years to come—I no longer felt the need to listen to ‘90s Alternative.