Kurt Cobain's legacy

Cafe Society
1

Since today is the 10 year anniversary of his suicide, a lot of newspapers and media outlets have retrospectives on Kurt. How did his work impact your life? Were you a Nirvana fan? Where were you when you heard about his suicide? Also, do you think like these people, http://www.boston.com/ae/messageboards/cobain_10th/messages1.shtml, that he was an over-rated coward?

I remember the first time I heard Nirvana and the feelings of excitement and disbelief that a band could sound like that. That whole time in music just seems impeccable and frozen in time for me. “Alternative” rock, grunge, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains etc. That was high school for me and I think alternative rock made high school a more egalitarian experience somehow. Everyone looking like lumberjacks probably cut into the whole clique thing. :smiley:

I was in my living room when I turned on MTV where they had the news about his suicide. I immediately told my brother, without realizing how devastating the news was to him.

I am amazed how many people on that message board think he’s an over-rated coward. Oh wait, these are probably the same kids who fueled the boy band era. Now they are feeling ashamed so they decide to post jaded, hyper-critical messages. Because if you grew up in the 90’s, how can you not acknowledge the importance and legacy of Nirvana? Someone please enlighten me.

2

That means I’ve been in my “new” apartment exactly ten years!

I remember sitting on the front steps waiting for the real estate agent to show up with the keys, and reading in the Times about Kurt Cobain.

3

my sister told me over the phone (i had no tv) it was shocking because i knew how “big” he was but i wasn’t really into the music until after he was dead. I mean, I liked ‘nevermind’ but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that i started to realize was a great band nirvana was.
Bleach is a awesome record, just brilliant!

4

He’s OK as a musician. I wouldn’t call him a trailblazer or anything. I don’t think his sound will hold up the way Jimi’s or John’s will. And the “grunge” look wasn’t really his thing, either. Flannel shirts were made famous by the likes of Neil Young and other old hippie types. We wore them all the time in the early 70s.

I wouldn’t call him a coward, though. Shit. The guy was troubled and he killed himself. Anyone who equates suicide with cowardice needs to get their fucking head examined.

5

I really dug Nirvana’s music (still do, I guess). I think part of it was that it sounded so different from everytihng else popular at the time. Remember, this was the time of Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, C&C Music Factory and their ilk. Nothing else sounded like them at the time. I remember listening to a band in the basement of a college bar late in '91. They played “Teen Spirit” 5 or 6 times that night. Normally, the crowd would get pissed off by that kind of repetition. Not that night. The crowd went more and more nuts each time they played it. I remember thinking that that must’ve been what the Beatles were like. Even a cover band playing their tunes could bring down the house. Of course, $0.25 tap beers probably contributed to my unusual insightfulness.

Anyway, people who think Nirvana wasn’t influential are just being dumb. You could argue that they shouldn’t have been as influential as they were, I suppose, but you really can’t deny their influence (both + and -) over the next decade.

I’ll freely admit that Nirvana’s rise coincided (nearly) with my college years, so I might be biased. I think the tendency is to equate everything related to your college years with the best, most intense experiences of your life.

Lastly, Cobain a coward? Suicide is the ultimate cop-out I guess. Still, he obviously had problems that went way beyond the average “poor me” rock star. I just wish he could’ve found something that he thought was worth sticking around for. Like his daughter maybe.

my 2¢

6

if the OP is asking how not to acknowledge Kurt’s importance I would answer, though this is not my opinion, that his music was plainly derivative (Cobain admitted so much, conceding he was just ripping off the Pixies) and not particularly adventurous.

However, as anyone with VH1 and 2 hours to kill can tell you, Kurt Cobain and Butch Vig singlehandley (can 2 people do something single-handedly?) slew the hair metal beast and dethroned the horrifying Dangerous from the top spot, all in one month in the winter of 1991.

Love 'em or hate 'em - Nirvana and Radiohead are the unrivalled titans of 90s rock, calling Kurt a coward won’t change that.

not to mention, I’m not convinced he commited suicide

http://www.justiceforkurt.com

(the site comes with a tinfoil hat)

7

I was a huge Nirvana fan from about the age of 14, and worshipped the ground Kurt walked on. I had numerous posters, all the albums, and even saw them live with the Breeders and the Melvins in Portland right after In Utero came out. I had a very large crush on him, and wished black death on Courtney Love from the very first moment they got together. In short, I was a teenybopper, and Kurt was my muse.

I will never, ever forget the day I went to a neighbour’s house to smoke a little hash, and when we came back and walked in the front door of my friend Nicole’s house, her mother said to me “You know that musician guy you like? Kurt something? He’s dead, he killed himself and they just found him.” I didn’t hear anything else for days. I remember one of my friends giving me a cigarette and looking up and somehow it had all burned and I was holding a long string of ash and had been for several minutes. I remember my friend Joe holding me and offering to get me drunk. After he had done so, I remember my friend Sarah, who was a cutter, cut her arm just for the hell of it and I freaked out on her, after which I sobbed for hours in front of a fireplace and tossed flower after flower from the bouquet on the coffee table into the flames to watch them burn. My friend Angel came and told me it hurt him to see me cry, but all I could do was sob. He took a Sharpie marker and helped me write Nirvana lyrics all over my entire body, culminating in a beautiful piece across my back:
“Hate your enemies
Save your friends
Find your place
Speak the truth.”

I didn’t bathe for several days, and the marker stayed and faded to a smeary brown. All my friends were worried about me, and even my friend Nora who was goth and who dispised Nirvana wept with me. I wrote poem after poem for Kurt, kept every magazine that dealt with his death (eventually I had like 50 magazines piled up on my headboard), and eventually, somehow, I woke up and rejoined the world.

But it still hurts, to this day. I don’t blame him, I don’t think he’s a coward. I have been in similar states of mind and I know how easy it would be to just cross that line from thinking about ending it all to actually doing it. He’d been in horrible pain his entire life from some sort of stomach issue, and then his heroin addiction just made everything worse. Being that fucked up, a lot of things seem like a good idea, or the only option, when they are not. And frankly, if I was married to that harpie, I’d kill myself too, but that’s probably a mean thing to say.

At any rate, whether he died by his own hand or was murdered or whatever the latest conspiracy theory is, it doesn’t matter: he’s dead. And the world is a little emptier without him and always will be. So tonight I will be having a drink for Kurt, and I will put on my old albums and probably cry a little, both for him and for the me that I was ten years ago, when this shattered my world apart. I don’t think, if it happened today, it would wreck me like it did then. But because it did, I always remember it with an extemely painful twinge.

8

Once you are into middle age (like me), you tend to lose track of current musical trends. I was middle-aged when I heard Kurt Cobain had committed suicide, and admittedly I barely knew of him or of Nirvana. I then began to be very interested in his music. His music had a hard-edged highly emotional quality. It had that raw “garage band” sound of the sixties (think of “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen or “Just Like Me” by Paul Revere and the Raiders). As I’ve said, rock and roll must have that ‘I don’t give a damn, screw you’ kind of attitude which I think Kurt Cobain managed to resuscitate. Also, he kicked that garage band mentality and sound up a couple of notches for the nineties.
Although I’ve been playing guitar for decades, I hadn’t played or listened to any new stuff until after Kurt Cobain’s death. Some message boarders think his music will not stand the test of time. If nothing else, I believe Kurt Cobain’s music will always be regarded as a significant turning point in the history of rock and roll.

As for Kurt Cobain being a coward? I think it takes guts to point a loaded shotgun at yourself and pull that trigger. (or jumping off a bridge and diving 250 feet into the water, etc). I think he had serious problems and thought this was his only way out.

9

Nirvana was a good band. Kurt Cobain could write a catchy tune, although his lyrics were usually mediocre. They were in the right place at the right time and got heard by the right people with the right amount of money. That’s all any band can ask for. I don’t know who’s been calling him a coward, but I certainly don’t think of him as some kind of savior of rock. The people who think that Curt Kobain’s music was so original when it came out irritate me a little because to me it just shows that they weren’t listening.

But rabid fans aside, Bleach was a great album.

10

I was 15 when Cobain died… I remember being surprised, but not shocked, nor particularly upset. I mean, I thought that Nirvana was an important band, but certainly no more important or groundbreaking than Soundgarden & Pearl Jam, the other bands of the Seattle trifecta.

As for the question of cowardice; I think that Cobain wasn’t a coward, but a man who got sucked into nothingness & couldn’t find his way back to something, so he chose to off himself.

11

I hate to say it, but killing himself was about the best thing he could have done for his career, in all probability. I’m not sure an increasingly drug-addled, pussy-whipped, and bitter Kurt Cobain could have done much to top “Nevermind” and “In Utero”, either commercially or artistically, unless, like his wife, Kurt made such a pathetic spectacle of himself people bought out of lurid curiosity. I mean, I think I heard someplace he was thinking of following up with an all-accousitic collaboration with Michael Stipe, ferchrissakes. REM was past the point of lameness well before Kurt offed himself, so I can only imagine how awry that little plan would have gone.

He simply should have quit the business, divorced his psycho bitch wife, and spent the remainder of his days meditating in a Nepalese sanga. I genuinely liked some of Nirvana’s music, and was sincerely unhappy when I heard Kurt was dead. But I simply can’t understand the hyperbole surrounding his alleged genius (which probably contributed considerably to the mindfuck the poor man endured), nor the feeling that he would have gone on to solidify his position as one of the greatest of the greats. The sad fact is, once attaining fame and fortune, he rapidly degenerated into a severly depressed professional junkie and emotional codependant. He wrote some catchy tunes, married a sociopath, did a lot of drugs, and blew his brains out. There’s nothing redemptive to be found in this story. It’s just plain sad. That’s his legacy, so far as I can see.

12

My perspective: I hate Kurt Cobain. Sure Nirvana had some good songs, but his legacy was to make it “cool” to be depressed and faux anti-pop. He had a kind of reverse pretension that really makes me sick. A Holden Caufield type deal where everyone is fake except him. His suicide was selfish (he left behind a kid and wife after all) and, I’d say cowardly. Guess what, if you don’t wanna be a rock star, don’t start a rock band. I hate it when people whine about celebrity when they can easily make it go away by just quitting and living off the fortunes they’ve made. Nirvana was overrated. I was a fan when he died, but in retrospect I’ve actually come to hate Kurt Cobain as much as one can really reasonably hate a celebrity that they’ve never met.

13

It’s subjective I know, but REM were still riding the high of what is considered to be their masterwork “Automatic for the People” when Kurt killed himself. I believe it was even on his cd player when he killed himself. Their next album “Monster” has a song for him (“Let me in”).

Otherwise…when I first heard of his suicide my thoughts were more towards the “what an asshole for ditching his family” line. I liked and admired his work but not with the joy and interest I do now as an adult. I see him as a being selfish and inward but it’s fairly amazing how all the peripheral bullshit hasn’t taken one iota of credit due away from his music. That really says something I think.

14

To the best of my knowledge Kurt Cobain’s legacy was making it hip for non-farmers/hunters to wear a flannel shirt.

That’s about it. I’m surprised that 10 years after the fact people still even know who he is.

15

I was actually going to write a lengthy post and then I re-read Loopydude’s excellent post and re-considered.

Best 10yrs-too-late eulogy for the man that I have read.

16

To address the OP, rather than Kurt Cobain’s merits:

When I heard about Cobain’s death, I was driving back to my office after lunch. I worked as a music critic and editor, for a liberal independent paper in a medium-sized Midwestern city.

I was stunned. I walked into the office and asked the art director (one of the other music fanatics there) if he had heard the news. He hadn’t, so I told him what I’d heard on the radio. He thought I was joking.

I had written an unflattering review of a book about the band several months before, so I didn’t feel right about writing any sort of Cobain piece for the paper. One of my writers did a nice tribute/obit to him, and I was happy enough to publish that.

But just the other night, I saw a segment on some TV newsmagazine show (Dateline, I think) that suggested that his death was not a suicide, but was orchestrated by his wife. What muckraking. Sheesh, does his legacy have to go the route of Elvis Presley or Jim Morrison? Sad story, but let the dead rest in peace. Ten years after the act, I see no reason to drag his widow (and daughter) through the fall-out.

Yeah, I think he, and Nirvana, had some impact on rock ‘n’ roll, and I think it will be a lasting impression. As revolutionary as The Beatles, perhaps not – but there is a distinct mark on the music of a decade, with Nirvana’s imprint.

Just my thoughts and impressions… Hard to believe it’s been 10 years.

17

Bingo.

Yeah, Nirvana was a far cry from “Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, C&C Music Factory and their ilk.” Maybe they did “slay the hair metal beast and dethrone the horrifying Dangerous from the top spot.”

But who was listening to that shit anyway?

I guess Nirvana may have seemed really shocking and different and revolutionary to a top-40 fan, or to a person who just didn’t know what was going on. But for those of us who were rock fans, they were just another new band–and frankly, not a very interesting one. There was no shortage of bands with unique and exciting sounds at the time. Fishbone, De La Soul, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blues Traveler, Jane’s Addiction… I was in Pittsburgh at the time, and Rusted Root was our local band. We all liked Nirvana and Pearl Jam’s hit songs, but the music as a whole was kind of boring and derivative.

Yes, Nirvana was an important band. Nirvana was a good band. But I’d hardly call it genius, and I’m not even sure it was that influential, especially when looked at with the broader context of rock music. The OP suggests that those who disparage Nirvana and Cobain are too young to “get it.” I’m 32. Am I too old to get it? Or could it be that I, a lifelong rock fan with very broad taste, just don’t think Nirvana was all that great or all that important in the grand scheme of things. Nirvana was critical in sparking the great rock revival of the '90s. But so what? When looking back over 50 years of rock history, Nirvana seems pretty small. Even looking back over the past dozen years of rock history, Nirvana doesn’t seem as important as other bands.

By the end of the '90s, the pop scene was worse than ever. Britney Spears? Destiny’s Child? N’Sync? Gah! Manufactured crap. Rap and hip hop were literally hemhorraging all over the place. The so-called Latin Invasion never materialized. Pop music was boring as hell. And what little rock was heard on the airwaves was just retreads of the same old crap.

And today? People are getting all hot and bothered over…Norah Jones? John Mayer? Snooze. Janis Joplin must be spinning in her grave.

If anything, Nirvana was important because they created and environment where more innovative and creative bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers could find airtime. Bill Haley and the Comets paved the way for Chuck Berry, too. Who was more “important?”

To me, the importance of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain were how important they were to their fans. The fact that they had such an effect on so many people means that they have to be counted among the most noted bands of all time. NailBunny’s beautiful post illustrates this perfectly.

But I do think they’re overrated. The OP asks how people can not acknowledge the “importance and legacy” of Nirvana. I think the OP should consider that her personal feelings about the band are probably causing her to vastly overestimate Cobain’s and Nirvana’s influence.

18

Funny, I’m watching the MTV special about Cobain’s death right now.

I admired Kurt Cobain’s music both then and now. He was never my favorite, and I was more of a Pearl Jam person 10 years ago, but “Smells Like Teen Spirit” definitely had the whiff of Generation X zeitgeist-- “Here we are now, entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious” has the ring of truth to me. Still does.

However, one of my best friends is absolutely in love with him and idolizes his memory. Eerily like Nail Bunny, she carries a picture of him in her wallet, wants to name her son Cobain, stuff like that. She thinks his suicide was heroic and redemptive. I think that’s unwarranted and Cobain himself would hate it.

I do think he took the easy way out. He had a daughter, and as hideous as his pain was, I wish he’d stuck around for her sake. I agree that his musical legacy would probably have suffered by his continued deterioration, but I really don’t care about that so much as the kid he left behind.

As for his music, I think it has that quality of crystallizing the spirit of a generation and for that, he should and will be remembered. Mostly, I am sorry for the loss of him, listen to his music with fondness, and am bewildered by his deification.

19

I was ten when he killed himself, and I don’t remember a thing about it. I didn’t listen to much current music untill I was eleven, and was introduced to silverchair & Green Day. When I started buying CD’s, at around 13-14, I picked up a copy of Nevemind. Loved it. I have a few of their albums now, mostly live ones. I’m rubbish at judging music - the best I can do is my imprecise measurments of ‘wouldn’t pay more than $20 for the CD, but would pick up any album for less’.

20

What Green Bean said.