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Freaky.
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" is my favorite song, and it recently occurred to me that it will always be my favorite song. See, when I was in high school, we all listened to stuff like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Doors — and we were not the Class of 1970 but of 1990. The idea that music as good as this, or better, might be released during my lifetime was inconceivable to me: the best music I remembered firsthand was the new-wavish stuff they played on the Mighty 690 back in 1983-84, and even that, while fun, was pretty gimmicky and frivolous. And it got much worse from there: by my freshman year of college, while I was listening to nothing but the Who, the top acts were New Kids on the Block, MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice... and Guns n' Roses, whom I actually did listen to at the beginning of my sophomore year, figuring them as the best of a bad lot. Then "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hit the airwaves and made GNR look like a bad joke.
I'll try not to spend too much time dancing about the architecture here. Suffice it to say that here were instruments like a driving storm, vocals that bore the force of a scream but right on pitch, deeply stirring chord sequences and dynamics... it sounded like the beginning of the world and the end of the world at the same time. And the lyrics! For a quarter of a century pop culture had been dominated by the baby boomers, tracking them from their hippie youth in the 60s to their yuppie cashing-in in the 80s, and it looked like a good bet that the media was going to continue to obsess about them indefinitely while the next, as yet unlabeled generation came of age in obscurity. Then, out of nowhere came this anthem, our anthem at long last — Here we are now! — which, a moment later, dropped the hammer: Entertain us! That's what we have to say, that's what'll go down in history as our rallying cry: Entertain us! I'd heard flowery idealism and attempts at poetry in music before, and I'd heard absolute tripe, but here was something new: chillingly vicious sarcasm and self-loathing.
Let me repeat that: here was something new. It was new, it was from my generation, and it was good. It was amazingly good. Will there ever be a song whose chords or drumwork I like more, which I think is better sung, whose lyrics I prefer? I wouldn't bet on it, but it's certainly possible. But it won't hold the same power. It won't come out when I'm seventeen years old.
Nirvana was not a one-song phenomenon. The rest of the album was good enough that I started tracking down all their stuff — obscure singles, Japanese imports, compilations with Nirvana tracks. I watched the TV appearances, read all the interviews. Kurt Cobain turned out to be a refreshing change from misogynistic, homophobic louts like Axl Rose (recently reincarnated as Eminem); however, that's not really saying a whole lot, and while he was orders of magnitude more talented at his chosen art than I could ever dream of being, he was also hardly a genius otherwise (bright, sure, but no more so than most people I know) and seemed direly lacking in... wisdom, judgment, whatever faculty it is that allows one to figure out that getting hooked on smack might not be the best lifestyle choice. But I idolized him anyway. The same way you might idolize a fucked-up older brother who is clearly headed for serious trouble but nevertheless seems so freaking cool. The main reason that I started playing guitar was in order to copy him. I learned the songs (the first 20 songs I learned to play were Nirvana songs — "About a Girl" was the first, and I learned the chords by staring at his fingering on my tape of the Unplugged show and reversing it in my head), took on the accent (even when I started writing my own stuff, "ay" sounds became "ah-ee-eh" and "oh" became "ow-oo"), and mimicked the gestures, looking up at the points where he looked up, coughing when he did. This was just a starting point, of course — as I became more confident with the instrument, I started doing my own thing. But still, the fact remains: if not for Kurt Cobain I would not own a guitar.
After Kurt Cobain's suicide, Rolling Stone published a special tribute issue. One of the letters on the letters page asked, "Kurt Cobain was just a digital voice on a shiny CD. So why do I feel so sick and out of breath?" I didn't know the guy; I never even saw the guy with my own eyes, just in pictures and on TV; we had nothing in common, and I'm sure he would've hated me; he was, like the letter-writer said, just a voice on a plastic disc.
And I felt like I'd lost a sibling. Again.
My sister was still a baby when she died. When I visited her grave for the first time in 1993 (I would've gone sooner, but it's kind of hard to jet off to Virginia when you don't even have a car) my mother gave me some baby toys to place on it. Which I did, but it struck me as odd, because to me she wasn't a baby — she was sixteen, three years younger than me as always. I think of her as 24 today. When I'm 100 I'll probably think of her as 97.
Kurt Cobain may have died at age 27 years 44 days, but even as I reach age 27 years 45 days tomorrow, and then 27 years 46 days after that, and eventually lap him by months and years, will I still think of him as seven years older than me?
I guess I'll find out.
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