Just curious. I have no clue what teenage youth culture is like now. A kid born in 1994 when Kurt died would be 15 now.
I was born in '73, so its odd to think think Kurt Cobain is almost as old to a 15 year old today as Jim Morrison was to my peers in '88.
I don’t think kids today have the same sense of history that our generation had.
Maybe not, but music is more accessible to everybody regardless of when it was made. Does somebody out there know how popular Nirvana downloads are on iTunes?
Everyone I know knows who Kurt Cobain is. And Nirvana. I guess he’s probably an icon, depending on your definition of “icon.” I don’t know about numbers, but everyone I know could identify a picture of him if asked.
Once again, that bastion of teen culture, Hot Topic, shows up the way.
And searching their website for Nirvana items brings up a half dozen shirts and a few other odds and ends. So yes, I’d say the kids today know who Nirvana (and by extension, Kurt Cobain) is.
Then you also have to remember that Dave Grohl and the Fighters of Foo are pretty popular with the teen set as well. So it doesn’t take much to figure out Grohl was in a different pretty big band once before.
I was in high school around the turn of the century and me and a good number of friends were very into Nirvana and other early 90’s bands like them. My brother is in high school now and it seems that a few of his friends like the band. I think Nirvana is pretty popular with teens now because its old enough to have a left a legacy and still feel modern, but not too old that their parents would have listened to the band, so young people today still are able to claim it for themselves.
I passed a teenaged boy in a parking lot a few months ago who was wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt – the one that you saw a lot shortly after he died, with the large portrait of Cobain and the years of his birth and death.
I have to say, I felt pretty old looking at this kid and thinking “Were you even BORN in 1994?”