Kurt Cobain, you stupid idiot

It’s one of those moments that doesn’t sink in immediately as being one you’ll never forget, but it still crystal clear all these years later. I’m in Ohio for a high school field trip (long story), another student comes out of her hotel room and says she heard from her mother that Kurt Cobain shot himself, and we all stare at each other under the assumption that it’s probably not true until I finally go find a newspaper rack (that’s how news was disseminated in those days), peek at the headline through the glass which confirms that the idiot had actually done so the day before (yes, it really did take news that long to travel back then), and that was that. I mean, what were you gonna do?

In truth, of the “big four” Seattle bands of the era, Nirvana was my least favorite at the time (of course that’s like saying that the 16 GB iPad model is my “least favorite” iPad), so I suppose I was thinking that it was relief that at least it wasn’t Layne Staley (we’d have to wait another eight years for him to leave the living), or Chris Cornell (one could say that we lost him when he ventured into techno), or Eddie Vedder (who has by default been the one to carry the torch into his mid forties – how many of you knew that would be the case back in 1992?). Still, I considered myself a Nirvana fan at the time; I’m just not inclined to retroactively claim to have been a bigger fan than I was, as is so en vogue these days.

But eventually it sunk in that what we lost was monumental (nothing in comparison to the guy we lost 42 years ago yesterday), but it’s still fair to say that Cobain’s death had an impact on pop culture (or at least on music) that’s probably too vast to even calculate at this point. It’s tough to say what Cobain would have thought of today’s society, today’s music. I do know for sure that he would have hated what we’ve turned him into. He wasn’t comfortable with his level of fame when he was alive, so he’d be appalled at what’s happened to his persona post mortem. He’d be the first one to point out that he only stuck around for three real albums (only the last two of which most people are even aware of), and that he checked out before the music of his generation could really even come to fruition. Instead, we’ve credited him with being responsible for most of the rock music that’s been made since his death – ironic in that if he were to come back to life today and hear some of the present-day music that he unwittingly laid the groundwork for, he’d probably start looking around for another gun.

If anything, Cobain was trying to make each of his albums more of a challenge to listen to than the last (a tactic which kept backfiring, by the way), and while it was never entirely clear whether he was attempting to challenge people to listen to stuff that wasn’t easy or simply trying to get rid of that segment of his audience who was only listening because it was the trendy thing to do, it’s safe to assume that by, say, Nirvana’s fifth album they’d have managed to succeed in leaving some people behind [<--- that was the longest sentence I've ever written; here's to challenging ones audience]. The bands that misguidedly wanted to sound like a less-challenging version of Nirvana were already on their way by the time Cobain checked out, so there would have been no stopping the watering down and eventual death of grunge music in the minds of the public, leaving one to wonder just what kind of music (if any) Nirvana might have been making today. They might well have ended up taking Pearl Jam’s route of making the albums they wanted to make, withering album sales be damned, and largely remaining relevant as a popular touring act.

Then again, he might have matured and eventually learned to stop hating his audience, hating how the world viewed him, and maybe even learned how to enjoy himself. Perhaps we’d be seeing an aging Nirvana hosting Saturday Night Live, or even the latest Nirvana single in an television ad for the iPad (hey, if U2 can do it…).

But in the end it’s all just a fantasy; his heroin addiction would likely have killed him within a few years, even if that gun hadn’t. But that hasn’t kept me from thinking today about just how much more he could have accomplished if he had stuck around, how much more control he’d have over his own legacy today if he hadn’t instead decided to leave it in the hands of revisionist historians, how much more influence he’d have over today’s music if he hadn’t instead left it in the hands of Nirvana imitators who only think they understand why Nirvana’s fans liked Nirvana’s music in the first place. To this day, trying to make sense of it still comes down to the fact that he was simply being a stupid idiot when it came to matter of life and death and caring (or not).