The Alternative Number Ones: Nirvana’s “All Apologies”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

On The White Lotus a few weeks ago, there was a beautiful little scene where Tim Ratliff, the wealthy North Carolina businessman played by Jason Isaacs, goes to talk with a Buddhist monk. Tim's daughter has decided to spend a year in a Thai monastery, and her mother thinks it's the end of the world. Tim is going through his own personal apocalypse, and he's sleepwalking through his time in paradise, barely responsive to the people around him. He's talking to this monk at his wife's urging, and with the walls closing in on him, he doesn't think the monastery is necessarily a terrible idea. Maybe that's why he asks the monk a question that hangs over him all season: "What do you think happens when we die?"

I'll be thinking about that monk's answer long after the rest of this fraught little cultural moment has faded from my mind: "When you're born, you are like a single drop of water flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down. You die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated. No more suffering. One consciousness." Onscreen, drops of ocean spray fly up in slow motion, falling back down and illustrating the point. I'm sure that's not a new idea, but I'd never heard it phrased quite like that before. I found it terribly comforting. All in all is all we are.