Unask the Question

[create_destiny]

A friend of mine in Buffalo wrote to me recently, lamenting Cobain's demise. I lamented back. Told him I haven't listened to any Nirvana since 1994. Then a few hours later I'm channel surfing and I stop on Nirvana's "Unplugged in New York." I keep it there. The Boyfriend hears this and asks me from the next room, "Do you still like Nirvana?" And......I can't answer that question with a simple "yes" or "no." I launch into a diatribe about Kurt, the spirit of this age, meat-eating orchids, absurdity and surrealism in art and half way into this I'm shaking and crying. That's not a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no.

Tori Amos singing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
This haunts me.

Comments

[mr-ed1966.livejournal.com]

On April 5, 1994, I was delivering my first ever national conference presentation at the annual Popular Culture Association Conference in Chicago. It was on apocalyptic themes in punk rock from 1977-1982. The presentation went over very well. I'd ended it with a nod to the commercial rise of punk-inflected music and mentioned Nirvana specifically. I made the point that I could see, beneath the punk nihilistic pose of the contemporary leaders of the movement, a sense of optimism and fortitude that was lacking in the first wave or two of punk music. Then I went back to my hotel room to unwind a bit and flipped on the tv to learn that Kurt, the fucker, had proved that final point of my presentation so horribly, irrevocably wrong in an act of personal apocalypse. I'm still haunted by that moment.

[createdestiny.livejournal.com]

Man, what an incredible blow that must have been. God.

I was practically in the fetal position suffering from my own existential crisis when I heard the news.

But what were we supposed to believe? He said holding his baby was the best drug ever. He said, "And I don't have a gun." I believed him. I saw something positive in his music too, underneath. I experienced his music as something honest in it's rawness---honest in the same way rotting produce in the dumpster behind the big, bright Supermarket is actually more real than the slick-packaged, perfectly preserved items on the shelves inside. Honest in the way when somebody asks how you're doing you don't say, "Fine, how are you?" but you tell them you're falling apart and it really fucking sucks.