I’m A Negative Creep

I know what you’re thinking, “Great, just what the world needs, another douchebag trying to wax poetic about Kurt Cobain offing himself”. And, you know, I’d be inclined to agree with you. But here it comes anyways.

It’s no secret that today is the 10 anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news, at the Elbow Room, a place I used to DJ in college, on my night off, drinking it up. A friend came up to me and said, “You heard about Kurt Cobain, right?” “…..No……” I replied, eyebrow raised. “He killed himself,” my friend informed me. I didn’t believe him at first. I asked around a few other people hard heard this, but nothing definite. So I went home and turned on MTV and sure enough, there was Kurt Loder informing the world. It’s so antiquated to think about how we got our news before the internet.

To tell you the truth, I don’t listen to Nirvana very much anymore. I think the last time I listened to Nevermind all the way through was September 13th, 2001. Molly and I fled the flaming wreckage of downtown New York City to spend the weekend in Massachusetts and I needed something old and familiar to take my mind off of what had just happened. Our rental car only had a tape player and somehow I had found an old cassette of the album. Obviously, it’s hard to think of the band like I used to when Kurt was alive. Last week I picked up Spin’s commemorative issue on Kurt’s death and it really got me thinking of how much I miss what used to be my favorite band, and more important, how much we need them around right now.

We all know how Nirvana changed the landscape of MTV, radio and the music world in general, but the thing I will remember about Kurt is all the tireless promotion he did on behalf of the bands he liked. I think that more than anything else really drew me to his band. It was easy to tell that he was, above everything else, a music lover. It was something I really connected to as my musical tastes were changing from rap to what would become “alternative music”. Rap was going through a pretty stagnant phase around then and some friends had gotten me into R.E.M., Buffalo Tom and Matthew Sweet, and I was hooked.

I remember hearing Nevermind for the first time riding around in a friends car. I was always on the hunt for new music and I could tell from the first time I heard it that the album was really something special. I had just gotten a CD player a few months earlier and that album was one of the first additions to my collection.

Naturally, I started to read everything about the band that I could find, which basically consisted of every music mag in the local newsstand. In every article I read, Kurt would name drop bands that he liked, and more often than not, I would go check them out. He got me into Teenage Fanclub, The Pixies, The Vaselines / Eugenius, and Shonen Knife, (among others) along with all the other Seattle bands that were always mentioned in every Nirvana article (whether Kurt liked them or not). I really think the seeds of my Brit Pop loving self were sewn here. I’m a sucker for poppy guitar songs with “la la la’s” in them, and I think Kurt was too.

I also think about how many bands owe Kurt for opening up the floodgates and proving to the music industry that people wanted to listen to bands other than Van Halen and Whitesnake. With Nirvana, 120 Minutes took on new importance and significance (incidentally, that was where a young information leafblower saw his first Morrissey video) and we wouldn’t have had “The Buzz Bin” or “Alternative Nation”. Of course, we could debate whether that was actually a good or bad thing, but the point is that literally thousands of bands got rich just because of Nirvana. Do you think The Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr., Belly, The Flaming Lips, Beck, Elastica, Pavement, Bjork, PJ Harvey, or a young Radiohead would have ever even sniffed the airwaves without Nirvana, much less sold thousands of records and toured the world? Look at MTV now; it’s a fucking wasteland.

In that issue of Spin, Chuck Klosterman takes a stab at predicting what Kurt would be doing today, often with hilarious results. I’m sure Kurt wouldn’t be very happy with the crass commercialization of his legacy, the state of the industry or the current FCC indecency crusade, and I can’t help but think that it would be great to have Kurt around to rail against this stuff and provide a few choice sound bites. Maybe, for the first time, the “Voice Of A Generation” title he was handed could have come in handy.

I haven't decided if I'm watching the NCAA title game tonight. The game doesn't even start until 9:21 PM. It should end around freaking midnight.

That "meaningless" three pointer Chris Duhon hit at the buzzer of the Uconn game could be worth $100 million.

Everyone chill out, including last night the BoSox have dropped the last four season openers.