What to do about Nirvana?

By Matthew

What to do about Nirvana that hasn’t been said, written, or filmed in the past 20 years? And has it really been that long? I’ll go with the personal anecdote:

As a kid, I didn’t enjoy the hair metal, operatic screaming of the 80’s that was so popular. I listened to Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers, and whatever other crap was laying around my sweet, but musically dull, parents’ house. When I first heard Nevermind, I thought, “this stuff is too loud like all that other music” and stuck to "Sweet Caroline." But like so many other addictive things that briefly hurt before they become pleasurable, the album got its hooks into me. It didn’t take long really. There was something electric and different about the music. It was honest, aggressive, and filled with self-loathing instead of self-adulation. That’s appealing stuff when you’re young.

Nevermind threw a heap of fuel onto the fire of my music interest and my god-awful middle school garage band started playing Nirvana covers like they were going out of style. They never will. The stuff is too catchy and too easy to teach in beginning guitar classes. Kurt Cobain (or maybe Courtney Love) also permanently secured the legend on April 5, 1994 with a shotgun blast to the face. Cross my heart, Pet Parasite (our amazingly clever band name), was busily practicing for our middle school talent show performance of "Lithium" when the news came through MTV. We were all stunned silent, watched for about 20 minutes – that’s a long time for a group of 14 year old boys – and then started practicing again with renewed vigor. “This one’s for Kurt!” someone dramatically exclaimed… ha ha.

It’s odd to think of him as being only 27. That’s so young. Sometimes I wonder what would have become of Kurt musically if he hadn’t died. Would he have kept grunge, even as a commercial entity, alive a little longer? Would he still be making albums? What would they sound like? How would he have reacted to the rise of alternacrap like Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit?

Who knows? It’s like how some folks say the Large Hadron Collider will never produce the Higgs boson because it’s being sabotaged by the future – Kurt Cobain just wasn’t going to make it out of that perfect window of time he owned in the early 90’s.