I know it cliched around here, but I have recently been renewing my appreciation for Kurt Cobain and his influence on our culture here in the US.
Kurt Cobain became a mainstream caricature of himself in the media, but it is clear from even later interviews, journal entries, musical and artistic directions, that Cobain had remained the ghoulishly satirical, original and innovative person he always was that we saw epitomized in the antics of 1991:The Year That Punk Broke
I recently found Cobain Unseen real cheap so I picked it up. The author Cross is a bit dense and his lack of understanding the finer subtleties of underground reject punk rock culture and the sarcasm of Nirvana and Kurt in particular make his previous work Heavier than Heaven a comical farce not worth reading. But this book is better.. The writing is about as bad as the biography, but the subject material is more focused on the art, and in that it proves a better read. It is a more choreographed walk through some of Kurt's art and the Nirvana experience. Unfortunately Cross himself continues to project his nonsensical suicide king personification of Kurt and makes to much a point to wrongfully pointing out and insinuating Kurt having always been suicidal and constantly depressed blah blah woof woof..
But it highlights a lot of Nirvana artifacts, and has a lot of cool reproductions of flyers, liner notes, hand-written Nirvana stickers, pictures, etc etc and a lot of cool pictures from the Nirvana archives. It also provides a positive glimpse into Kurt's later family life with Courtney and Frances to humanize him away from this Morrissey type suicidal drug king.
In the process, I have renewed my appreciation for Kurt who is truly one of us. The kind of guy who filled up his notebooks with stoner drawings and obscure and sarcastic lyrics in the margins, who had a generally fuck it kind of attitude, was beyond satirical and ghoulishly sarcastic with the media, who had appeared to sell-out at times but actually was consciously thinking about kids across America who grew up poor and in small towns like his own, who needed mainstream access from radio and tv and walmart to get better records the the Top 40 crap of that era..
Kurt was sincere, and he was a lot like us, and we should all take our heads out of our asses sometimes and just appreciate it all. How many "rock stars" on the Top 40 have had that kind of sincerity and were such true anti-heroes? We here in SYG too often give Nirvana the Greenday treatment, and that is hardly fair.
Now that we have all grown up, lets not frown down upon our days of listening to albums all the time, painting and drawing bullshit, playing guitar all day, being ghoulishly sarcastic, and generally enjoying life with an eccentric kind of gusto that the establishment is just to weighted down to maintain..
Much like Jimi Henrdix, mainstream killed Kurt one way or the other, but the glimpse of real-life that Kurt brought to it is priceless..
Sure Nirvana was over, as it should be, but the genius of Unplugged and the artistic direction Kurt and even Dave on his own were going document that Nirvana was going the direction most good underground and indy bands go, splintering off into diverse side-projects and creating good music in the process.
