No, this isn’t another Athieist/Theist thread. Its’ just that in ten days someone is bound to start a “Kurt Cobain would have been 40 today” thread, so I wanted to start one now so that mine will quickly sink and be long gone by then.
When KC committed suicide, I was over thirty working at a Kinko’s with a bunch of people in their twinties: Cobain’s supposed “target demographic” - his same age group, most of whom had gotten the shit end of the stick when their selfish baby-boomer parents had divorced. But unlike the weepy girl denigrated by Andy “you think this is sad? You shoulda been at Omaha Beach” Rooney, my coworkers had no sympathy whatsoever for Kurt Cobain. They said some pretty nasty things that would have given even Andy Rooney pause.
As I said, I was on the wrong side of thirty at the time, so the message for me was “you keep away from our Grunge. you just stay back there with your Duran Duran.” Well, although I was never that demographic - I did politely stay back there, but rather with my Sex Pistols, not any New Romantics, thank you.
So it was my generation’s Andy Rooney, namely Johnny Rotten, who appeared soon after on Conan and remarked that KC had not appreciated what a precious gift is life indeed. Good point, but I must differ: IMHO the ability to cherish life is the gift, not the raw material itself.
But now Kurt and I are in the same fifth decade of life, so I can listen to all the Nirvana I want. Such a mean age, one’s twenties - it’s like the junior high of adulthood.
Sorry to nitpick but Nirvana only covered “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.” It was originally done by The Vaselines.
I was still in my 20’s when Cobain died in 1994. I identified more with the music that came out during that period than I did with the stuff that came out when I was in high school ten years before in the early 80’s. I probably would’ve been deeply insulted if some little jerkwad told me to “stay back there with your Duran Duran” (a group I detested in the 80’s and the 90’s and still would rather have a root canal then listen to).
One must further consider that Kurt Cobain suffered from chronic and clinical depression so–as you said–his ability to appreciate and cherish life was impaired. (The fact that he used heroin–a strong depressant–probably also didn’t help.) To conclude Cobain killed himself because “he couldn’t take the fame” misses the point about his affliction. Someone who suffers from depression can go into deep suicide-inducing troughs regardless of their circumstances. Even if he hadn’t hit it big, there’s a good chance he would’ve ended up doing the same thing.
You would probably recognize “Smells like Teen Spirit,” if nothing else (“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous. Here we are now, entertain us…”)
Some others you might recognize are “Come as you Are,” “Lithium,” and “Heart-Shaped Box.” Nirvana actually had quite a string of radio friendly hits. Chances are you’ve heard them without knowing who they were (and the song titles aren’t always the best clues to whether you’ve heard them. The titles sometimes had nothing to do with the lyrics).
Not only don’t he want you for a sunbeam, he drop-kicked you through the goalposts of life.
Though Cobain was supposedly the minstrel of my generation, I had no idea who he was when the news hit that he’d capped himself, though I had a shaky understanding that a musical group called “Nirvana” existed, somewhere.
Shit, I always thought Kurt was younger than me. Oh well, FWIW I saw Nirvana three times - once in Edinburgh (with Tad?), and twice at the Reading Festival. I guess that’s two Bleach-era and one later. Dave Grohl is a good lad to sit in company and have a beer with. I didn’t know who he was until after.
Wow, Slithy Tove, that surprises me. He died less than a week before I turned seventeen, and I remember a lot of people my age being quite upset about his death. I knew I was…I was finally old enough to drive but I was never going to see Nirvana! Seriously, though, a lot of people were bummed out. I guess a handful of years older gave your coworkers the cynicism you saw. Or maybe you worked with a bunch of jerks. They weren’t big Pearl Jam fans, were they?
I was in the 7th grade, playing basketball in my friend’s driveway. His mom stepped out to tell us the news and my friend - who was older and I looked up to - started crying. That doesn’t seem like 13 years ago . . .
Fuck, Kurt 40? There’s something I’ve never thought about. He died just before I turned 12, but I listened to them constantly for the next few years, and I still do once in a while these days.
I had just turned 23, and was attending the state university at the time. On that day, I was working at my school library, at the south checkout desk. I had my Walkman on 'cause I knew my boss was out that day and heard the DJ mentioned Kurt was dead. I was so bummed. A few minutes later, during my break, I went out to the CD vending machine at the student union and bought a copy of In Utero; I’m not sure why. I guess I just wanted a memento of the day. I remember thinking of myself as just a “bandwagon” fan because I didn’t even own Bleach and just a tape copy of Nevermind. I also remember mentioning Kurt’s death to an older friend, who grew up in Washington state, as it turned out, and used to play with Krist Novoselic as a child (or maybe he was BSing me, I don’t know).
I was 13 or 14 and I was staying over at a friend’s house, and my mom’s friend called me and asked if there was a guy named Kurt in Nirvana, and I said “yes,” and she said “he’s dead.” For some reason I knew what she was going to say, so I wasn’t completely shocked, but it bummed me out for quite a long time. My teenaged mind couldn’t deal with it.
I was 15 in 1994. It was rough on me. It was the first “rock star death” I had experienced - my folks had Jimmy and Janis and Lennon and that seemed like a part of THEIR lives to me but wasn’t a part of mine until then.
I also remember being exceedingly pissed because I was left at home the Halloween before he died while my brother and all of the older kids saw Nirvana in Akron, and I had very unfairly missed my only chance to ever see Nirvana.
I was 24, and I hate to say it, but it didn’t mean much to me. I remember thinking (cynically, I suppose) “Oh, the guy who sang ‘I Hate Myself And Want To Die’ and was in a coma a few months earlier from ‘drug complications’ and was married to that junkie shrew committed suicide? What a shock!”. I owned Bleach and Nevermind, but it was the same stuff I’d already been listening to since '84 - it certainly didn’t change my world as it did with many indie/punk fans, because my world had been changed much earlier. To me, they were just a band near the end of the continuum of that type of music, and not even the best at it. I appreciate that Nirvana was the first real contact a lot of people had with such music, and there’s no denying Cobain “meant it”, so I understand his death meaning much more to them. But personally, I didn’t feel we’d been robbed of an innovative genius - just a decent, if derivative, fellow traveler.
I am three years older than Cobain and I did like his music, especially the MTV Unplugged versions. I remember being at my then wife’s work and her younger co-worker comparing him to John Lennon. That annoyed me to no end. I informed her that he was going to be remembered more closer to a James Dean than a John Lennon and I think I was right.
I was 14 when he died, and I remember very vividly how MTV covered it - it was, like, all interviews, some of them with people who didn’t know yet, and they’d ask them what they think about Kurt Cobain and the subjects would say “Oh, yeah, I love his music” and the interviewer would say … “did you know he died?” and people would just be crushed. It was my first rock star death. I was pretty bummed out about it, not just that he died but that he’d killed himself, especially with a family and a little baby. I guess I hadn’t really “known” anybody who had committed suicide at the time.