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| From | kcronin <fiatluxury@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: Cobain + 10 |
| Date | Tue, 6 Apr 2004 07:49:36 -0700 (PDT) |
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--- Dale_ThisIsPop <thisispop@comcast.net> wrote:
I was a little saddened
> (but not totally
> surprised) by his death, but after a few hours of
> MTV's barrage of coverage
> it was actually kind of funny. Not the death, but
> the intense coverage from
> MTV.
Dale - I'm with you on this. I was getting a tattoo
the day this news broke, and I was sitting in this
guy's chair for 4 hours watching Kurt Loder reach deep
into the bag of rock cliche to fill out the daylong
broadcast (or "Kurt on Kurt," as I later began to
think of it) - my tattoo artist kept getting pissed at
me because when I would laugh it would shake my, er,
the area that he was working on.
I fall between Mike B. and Shawn on the time-scale...
I was 17 and Nirvana was a known quantity among my
grungey pals when Bleach came out in '89 (there was an
infamous show that i did NOT see wherein Nirvana
showed up 5 minutes before closing to perform their
headlining set - they thought it was a 2:00 bar.), and
while i liked em okay i did lump them into a bunch of
other rawk acts that my roomies dug at the time: Big
Chief, Monster Magnet, Soundgarden...I would say that
Soundgarden was probably more influential in my grunge
life at that point than Nirvana, but really I just
liked the Flaming Lips. Then in '91 I left town for 9
months, and when I came back Nirvana was on the cover
of Spin. Whaaa....?
This gave a whole new dimension of weird to my studies
abroad, surely, but that disjointed quality made me
feel less like "nirvana is the saviour of my music!"
and more like "whoa, *I've* been really out of touch."
I felt like I totally missed whatever had happened,
but I could tell things were different because of the
attention some of our local bands started getting. I
liked Nevermind, and could probably recite it for you,
but since Nirvana opened so many doors their scene was
less immediate than what they precipitated in my
college town: local faves became our buzz, because
there really seemed like a chance for them to do
something for a wider audience, and of course that
seemed more relevant to us.
all of a sudden i'm speaking in the imperial we.
in any event, this is why i could laugh at MTV's
retarded coverage after Kurt died, and why it still
bemuses me that i see young'ns wearing cobain
t-shirts, etc (first thought: dude, he's been dead for
10 years! second thought: dude, were you ALIVE when he
was?) Kurt didn't seem like a genius - he seemed like
a nice, smart young man with a problem, just like a
lot of musicians i knew in college. What quirk of
timing and undergroundswell that caused him to be the
Martyr of the Age seems immaterial to the person he
probably was, particularly in retrospect.
Oh, and I've never been able to take Kurt Loder
seriously after that day.
ruminatively,
--kelly
=====
arma non servant modum
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