number one hit song: This just in!

aww dana, i was hoping i could come here for some relief from the whole kurt cobain thing! no luck. everybody's like "where were you when it happened?" and then telling some story about how it deeply changed everyone around them.

so since i can't avoid it, here's my story: i went over to my dealer's house to buy a bag, and he's sitting on his couch with a pained look on his face. he says, "have you heard?" "Heard what?" says i. "kurt cobain committed suicide today." Me: "Sweet, where's the bong?"

i honestly didn't give a fuck. am i an asshole? definitely, but not because i didn't care about cobain's death. i mean, just because his music "spoke to me" (as some like to say) doesn't mean i had any kind of connection to him. the way i figure it, if i'd blown my head off, would cobain care? no f'n way. so why should i care? really, i had plenty on my plate caring about the people i personally knew and loved (okay, to be honest, i was really only concerned with getting laid--it was college, after all).

see, to me, Nevermind was pretty good and all. but it also commercialized everything that was previously cool about alt.rock. to wit: all the jocks and cheerleaders in my school loved it. not because they could identify with cobain's (and mine and our) sense of alienation and outsiderness (they most assuredly did not identify with it). it's just they liked to rock out with their cocks out.

neither was his music particularly fresh. in fact, it was pretty derivative even then, as cobain himself admitted freely. but i'll return to that topic later.

at the end of the day, it seems like cobain is really important to those people who hadn't heard the first and most awesome of all grunge songs (and bands), Mudhoney's Touch Me I'm Sick. that is to say, nirvana finally packaged teen angst in a way that made it accessible for the MTV set. "you mean there's something other than Paula Abdul and C&C Music Factory?" Nevermind was only mind-blowing if you had no knowledge of its influences. if Nevermind was your first taste of rebellion, then yeah, you cared.

the way i see it, cobain just took that sound we loved and gave it over to the teenie-bopper set. and the aftermath was this: Green Day, Blink 182, Linkin' Park, Train, Nickelback, and all that other witless music that manages to be heavy--and totally inoffensive. if it weren't for nirvana, the radio wouldn't be full of soulless, unchallenging, cojones-free, frat rock.

which is why most of the really, really good underground music in the late 90s and early 00s was synthesizer based--Disney stole our fucking guitars!

but thank god good guitar music is back, maybe now i can stop being angry at poor ol' kurt...

okay, back to politics...

Posted by: Smells-Like-reeves-Spirit at April 5, 2004 03:18 PM