GRABBINGSAND

I am younger than most here; I am sure. That day at LFO the freaks sat on the benches and cried there black eye liner off, consoling themselves as it ran. My friend, director of WLFO, played a short video memorial. The redneck girl beside me complained about “the hippies running the t.v these days. It was bizarre, but I didn’t really care, just news to me that day. But for some reason, just after my migration to Atlanta, I cried heartily when Shannon Hoon died. To me, he was a different spirit, rock stars die graphically like Cobain, its part of the glam. Hoon’s death just struck me as unneeded, like the next door neighbor who accidently drinks too much one night, just a kid, just a kid who didn’t think much, but always grinned when he saw you.

I was on my way to work the back way from Marietta to Sandy Springs. I ended up getting the day off due to lack of concentration. I still have the conspiracy in my head that Courtney had him killed. I will always believe that..For the simple reason HOLE SUCKS..and it was the day before their album was to come out. She will never be as famous as he was in 4 years.

i have no idea where i was when. nor can i find it in myself to care. the word “genius” is out of place when describing nirvana’s music, methinks. to write a nirvana song, come up with some mundane lyrics, write a melody that takes a specifically, expectedly unexpected turn halfway through the line, then repeat that line at least twice as many times as needed because you’re so proud of the interesting melody you’ve just come up with. i listened to the entire album “nevermind” only once, and i found it so mind-numbingly repetitive and predictable that i took it immediately to the used cd store for $4 credit.

it wasn’t the music that made kurt cobain into a god. it was the production. butch vig is deserving of the term “genius” for his work on that record. the sound was like nothing that came before it, and it was immediately seized upon by the other major grunge acts of the day. that’s what was so influential about nirvana. the sound. the ear candy. not the songwriting. not the image, which was nearly identical to that of any other seattle band of the day. it was the sheen of the music, the simple pleasure that comes from the huge guitars and drums all over the record. it’s why i still enjoy listening to ‘smells like teen spirit’, especially the first 20 seconds. it’s why “nevermind” was number one on the charts whereas their previous album, “bleach”, peaked at 89 (*after* “nevermind” came out, mind you).

but nothing makes a hero like a suicide. guy offs himself and suddenly he’s a poet. suddenly he’s maybe a dylan or a lennon. no. eddie vedder, billy corgan, those guys are poets. they were voices of a generation, capturing all the generation-x misery that nirvana did, but with universal appeal and, ahem, *better music*. it’s the difference between artistry and whinery. too bad for these fellows, they’re still alive, so they don’t get the recognition they deserve.

i would have hoped that all the people my age (grabbingsand’s age) and slightly younger who dressed their mourning up in years of dour faces and t-shirts would have outgrown their melodrama and gotten lives by now. and mostly they have. but a younger generation has picked up the torch now, many of them too young to even remember hearing “smells like teen spirit” on the radio and having their ears tweaked in an exciting new direction. certainly they were too young to buy the album when it came out. they’ve simply picked up on the myth. perhaps every generation needs its own tragic hero, and lacking one they’ve borrowed ours. personally, i think lennon would be a better choice – the music is better, and there’s more of it, and that guy was a poet.

one day, surely, they’ll grow out of the kobain thing, too. we can only hope that the next generation, who i guess will be our kids, don’t grab the baton and run with it. do we really want to be confronted with “i hate myself and i want to die” t-shirts 10 years, 20 years from now? revelance is stretched thin even now, only 10 years later. won’t it be stretched so thin that it will eventually break?

Kurt Kobain a poet? Maybe. *The* voice of his generation? No. It’s not possible for any one person or band to carry that title. I think that people’s continuing interest (obsession?) with Kobain, and Nirvana, comes from a lot of places.

Today’s audience hears Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters or Queens of the Stone Age and want to know more about his work beforehand – Nirvana is the obvious next listening choice if you don’t already own the discography. Dave Grohl is a good artist; some would argue one of the best these days, and to say he contributed none of that to Nirvana is too dismissive. The drums are production, sure, but theyre also Dave Grohl and hes a one man band, in the best sense of the term.

Weve hashed this out a few times between ourselves, but for better or for worse, Nirvana became the visible figurehead of Alternative back when it might be an actual alternative, instead of the silly, sophomoric drivel that we hear now. Kobains pain was real. He wasnt sixteen and angry at his father. I dont know what he was, but it was deeper than that, or else Im giving him too much credit. Chronic stomach issues, heroin feels like the only solution the love of your life is Courtney Love? For Gods sake, the man was messed up. And in a certain sense, he was the archetype (the caricature?) of what we all feel like on some days. Were hurt, were tired, we dont know what the hell were doing or why were doing it anymore, but were going on in the only way we know how.

Not to say hes a role model for coping with your life, but on your most screwed up days, you might be getting a taste of what Kobain was emoting on stage. And feeling screwed up (or like a screw-up) is a crap feeling, and if you want music that encompasses crap-feelings, well, you have Nirvana. But its not just the down-ness its the rage that goes with it. People identify.

But, all that said, should be pretty obvious I don’t know where I was “when it happened” either. I know I heard about it on Channel One News, and it was probably the most interesting thing they ever covered. I probably didn’t care at all at that time, but when I heard the MTV Unplugged of Nirvana, I realized why people had cared, or why I might have cared had I known to at that time. Sure, there are always overly-obsessive people who are going to over-identify with an artist, and I think that a lot of the “mourners” were probably of that type. But I really dug what I heard on the Unplugged album, not because I was suicidal, and not because I thought it was “Great Music” but just because I dug it. And I was sad because I’d've liked to have had the opportunity to hear more.