I kept flipping through the channels. That's what I remember. A hangover, a story due for a workshop, the need of another drink to forget about the hangover and the story, and I couldn't bear to turn up the volume to hear what had happened. His face was everywhere. News breaking like one of his guitars after a live set. I think I decided on the drink before unmuting Kurt Loder. Then again, I'm pretty sure I just decided on the drink. Even without volume, it was easy to see that Cobain was no longer around, that something had happened to him, probably an overdose or a car wreck, maybe even Courtney Love. The real news could wait.
And it waited until my drive to Kinko's to make copies of my story for class. A somber DJ repeated the news between songs of a marathon Kurt tribute slash therapeutic call-in show. Nothing shockinng really, but I seemed to be the only one not surprised. Why? Too young? Too soon? Come on, I thought, this is rock n roll. He's just another part of the twisted novel of this strange musical genre, a main character lost to the margins, immortalized in the footnotes.
I hadn't been the biggest of Nirvana fans. No doubt I respected them, found their music engaging, but I didn't jump on the bandwagon, never felt the need to genuflect at the grunge alter. I was having a hard time forgiving them for opening the doors and letting all the wrong people into the party. Snobbery? Sure, but also youth and idealism. We'd given them U2 and R.E.M. The Cure had even found some measure of mainstream success. Now this band was turning the music I loved into a frat party favorite. I enjoyed the irony and contradictions of it all, but still, this wasn't something to toy around with.
That night, the workshop was more a goldfish bowl than a shark tank. Earlier that semester, a fellow grad student had committed suicide by running his car off of a bluff. He'd shown so many signs, enough so that few of us were really surprised when we learned of his death. Cobain was a distant concern, a passing ship in the celebrity ocean, an event to stir up sad memories of the recent past.
Little was said in class or at the bar afterward. And it would be years before I would give in to the Nirvana legacy, before I would grow out of my snobbishness. Today I can listen to them with a distance healthy enough to admire what they did. I've still yet to be overwhelmed by them musically, but the fact that they could alter the landscape of popular music enough to allow the before under-appreciated acts to at least briefly flourish is enough for me to grant them a place in my CD collection.
But it was a different story ten years ago (and a day).
Related: the dark side of Nirvana's legacy
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