I came into my formative years right after he offed himself. I remember where I was when the DJ announced it. Waiting in the parking lot in my father's car, alone so I could listen to any station I wanted. At the time it meant precious little to me. The name was familiar, how could it not be, the biggest rock star on the planet despite all he could do to rebuke it.
Let's extrapolate that. I know not a single artist today that doesn't suffer from American Idol syndrome. Every single whore who grabs a mic or straps on a guitar, lives and dies by the spotlight. I grew up having a hero who publicly announced disdain for everything status quo. He denounced a clean cut America. His greatest shame was his vast popularity. He hated his most successful album, and made mockery of his greatest claim to fame. He was punk rock until his image was robbed and homogenized by the main stream. This is how I learned that anything society does not like, it will co-opt and dilute until it becomes fodder for the middle class.
Elvis was public enemy #1 till he started singing surf rock in a Hawaiien shirt. So why would anyone be surprised by the Radio Disney turn rap took in our lifetime.
I came late to the game and fell in love with a ghost. His voice haunting the next few years of my life. This was right before the internet killed music. As much as I might to bullshit myself into believing that Pandora's box opened for the good of the art form, that couldn't be further from truth. Back before Napster picked the lock, we weren't able to hear new artists every day. I couldn't download more music than I even listen to. By necessity, I had to absorb every new record, every single song for all I could. It was an Oliver Twist life, but you were appreciative for each table scrap.
Music has never meant so much since and I'll never love a song as much I had then. (I want to cry.)
To qoute Bob Dylan, "It must have been the weather, or something like that", but something hooked me and never let go. I was recording songs off the radio, and I caught the last couple verses of Lithium. It sounded cool. Real cool. So much so I repeated those 2 minutes over and over again till I had to tell someone at school or have my head explode.
Don Mutthart lent me tape he had made of Brian Marensic's Nevermind album, as well as a couple songs off of In Utero, and the ironic "I Hate Myself, I Want to Die" track.
When I got to my grandparents house later that day, I waited till I was alone in the house, and I played that tape as loud as I could. What I heard that day transcended music, obliterated melody, and transformed my concept of what I had always thought a song was. I never heard a single note that afternoon... I felt emotion, raw, unbridled, and unapologetic.
Truth be told, I find myself seeking that same high that I experienced once back in grade school. Moments come and go, some better, most worse, and feelings like flavors, have never been duplicated in quite the same way.
I'm playing Nirvana's Nevermind on loop, and honestly, it kind of sucks. Lithium surprisingly holds up after all these years. It's simple. Stupid simple. Verse Chorus Verse Chorus other Chorus. The lyrics I once thought deep and profound, are scattered tangents, peppering the scenery his music makes. As a lyricist, his body of work remains best as a whole. It's an autobiography told as a fevered dream, punctuated by night terrors and waking screams. The kind of bad sleep you get when you dream of your own death.
Polly breaks the mold, seeing as it is based on a macabre story that captured his imagination and took this notorious introvert outside himself, only to give him a new way to view himself.
On A Plain can't help but be nonsensical brilliance. It borders the line of being too damn pop to be of any importance, other than a petty grunge footnote, but his growl that closes the song is the reminder one needs to remember why he could never have been, just average.
Underneath the Bridge... it's the only song Butch Vig got right. Almost impossible to record, but worth every ounce of the challenge.
It's nothing new to sully a beloved namesake. Most people seem to struggle to become the monetary embodiment of themselves, doing so post-mortem seems a logical next step. Seeing an intimate hero of mine in an upcoming video game, has me thinking once again of those days of my misspent youth. They've digitized his memory, a dancing monkey for ignorant fools, clacking elementary colored keys, hoping to unlock more hollow, soulless songs.
That afternoon I met with a spirit, in a near biblical sense. Despite my feelings of the money changers who set up shop in the fond memories of my youth, that afternoon I learned that art and life sans passion is practice for dieing. That one vivid memory of enlightenment, that day I realized I must put childish things behind, that moment I lost the bliss of ignorance, that moment I bit the apple and knew of good and evil... that one memory is mine to keep.
Kurt Cobain 1967-1994
Endless, Nameless. Butch Vig mastered a throw away track, better than the entire album.
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