"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was released in 1991. It's now 2003. In the intervening years I have heard it, I would estimate, five thousand times.

As I neared home at 10:30pm, after eight and a half hours of teaching at various sites in Massachusetts and Connecticut, it came on the radio. I headed up my driveway just as the second verse began. And found I couldn't bring myself to turn off the car until the song was over. It's still that good, after five thousand listens.

When Kurt Cobain's journals were published a few months ago, some wondered why anyone would care about some junkie who's been dead for nearly a decade. This is why.

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