Yeah, dude's been embracing/milking it for years now. I'm guessing he's either strapped for cash and attention or he fell in with the some charismatic idiots who convinced him he was victimized.
Firstly, I'd like to say Nirvana had some pretty good music. Secondly, Kurt was a genuinely sweet guy who suffered from depression and the outcome from when it solidifies its hold in a person's life, and thirdly, we got Dave Grohl out of the deal, and if any of you don't like Dave Grohl, fuck you, I'll not have you besmirch his good name! Now, onto the topic itself: Asshole's going to hole (no relation). This will go nowhere as it's clearly retaliation for not being able to advance his career from it. He was literally fine with it up until a couple of years ago, and I just don't see it going anywhere. Plus, if that's child pornography, then Anne Geddes is about to have her house SWATted.
Yeah.....not so much. They were loud, really distorted, and played a lot. They made way for the frat boys to pretend they were alternative and created the popularization of being an outsider. A little distortion, a lyric randomizer, and some 100 dollar distressed flannel shirts and you had the nirvana poser society. Hair metal was all an act, but at least it knew it was an act. There was much better music coming out aside from the grunge movement. Back in the day one of my friends had a picture of the band where I looked just like the drummer. However, do you know how many people went on the emotional blackmail suicidal tour because of Kurt? Him killing himself was not really the problem, it was that the pied piper of leading the popular kids to their deaths. I could have respected that had it been on purpose. A few years later all the people jumped onto the maralyn manson venga bus because not gothic (AKA hot topic) told them it was cool. Give me a fucking break. This is what the fandom was always about. It is like how the boomers are all now yuppies who do not want brown poor people in their gated communities. The woodstock generation is now all the warmongers who are angry we are pulling out of the middle east. These were the same hippie idiots who supposedly gave a shit until the value of their houses was threatened. Really, I think kurt saw what was coming and got off during a good moment. He saw pop culture losers dressing in grunge and pretending he was a god. If he was anything real he saw his work being eaten up by the industry of shame and jumped ship before he saw GWB, Obama, Trump, or Biden use his music at one of their rallies to entice a bunch of gen-x pop brats cheer for the things that depressed him. There are music forms with talent, but grunge was a movement of more simplistic music. The guitar playing is something I can do, which really says something. Kurt's voice was nothing special and his lyrics were not meaningful. Their music was hard but pathetic in it's simplicity. Any shitty garage band could cover it. He popularized the decline in quality where you could pretty much select any pretty boy band and put them on stage to mass produced bullshit and killed rock.
I get what you mean about the music and meaning being co-opted by corporate labels and commodified creativity, and I agree, but we definitely disagree on the music itself. For example, in this video, acoustic, Kurt sings "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" what is essentially a cover of an old folk song ("In The Pines," one I know quite well), and he put his own spin, and while the taste can be something that differs, he nailed the fuck out of the performance. (edited: the video didn't show) That said, he *was* disappointed that people saw him as some kind of rock god, because that's not at all what he wanted. There was this whole issue he had with feeling isolated from other people, and if there's anything that will isolate you further, it's this kind of fame. That's why I felt so bad for him. He really did have the soul of an artist, and regardless of how the record label wanted to sell him, he wanted to create art the best way he could. (This is where I also say fuck capitalism for commodifying human creativity into a dispensable, on-demand product that takes away the humanity and turns it into soda pop).
I do not consider simplistic music to be pointless. I am a huge Billy Joel fan, but where he has written tons of popular songs and can still sell out venues in seconds, his music is pretty simplistic over all. Especially his popular songs. He is capable of much higher levels of composition. In his case you do have certain songs which do have skill involved. One of my biggest problems with kurt is intentionally random lyrics are not deep. They are just random. Also, acoustic playing might be nice, but it is just a WGWAG. It is nice and pleasant, it might make a party more interesting, but it is what you learn in guitar class. I was in elementary school when I learned to play acoustic guitar. I was never terribly impressed with MTV trying to make shit out of acoustic versions. If you look at someone who is explorative and lyrical like Peter Gabriel you can see the difference between random lyrics and random poetry and a meaningful prose of symbology and creativity. Not to mention, if you actually want to go down into some introspective depressing psychological works there is a lot more than sledgehammer and shock the monkey in Gabriel's library. I do not even consider Nirvana to be near the best of the grunge genre which they brought into the mainstream. I never cared much for Alice in Chains, but they were more talented than Nirvana. Bush was more fucking talented than Nirvana, and they had a song about breathing. Weird Al played Nirvana's music with kazoos and it was not different. When your music can be copied note for note with a kazoo you just were not that talented. The Lyric sheet is so hard to find What are the words Oh Nevermind.
Kurt nailed every song in that concert. Some speculate that he was singing for his own funeral, I don’t know if that holds up.
I love Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, AND Weird Al. As for Kurt, he was more the contemplative type. As @Federal Farmer mentioned above, he sang and acted like he was planning his own funeral, like all of this was very temporary, and he was going to leave any time he wanted.
Weird Al makes what he does look easy, but he's a genius. Like, genuinely, IQ wise. He chose to use his abilities to be be a clown, but but he actually gives Prince and Bowie a run for their money.
I've always felt that grunge boiled down to self-indulgent whining along the lines of "Life sucks and I hate everybody." That's not to dismiss the talent of the grungers. The music simply never resonated with me. I found this Neil Young/Nirvana cover of "All Along the Watchtower" and it absolutely smokes! So it really does boil down to taste, not talent.
I will admit my dislike for nirvana comes more from what they became rather than what they were. There was a lot of stuff that came around because of them. I was hitting college right at the time grunge broke out. It was so full of wannabe introspective posers, and all of them were the popular kids looking for something new to latch onto. I would imagine that kurt's best was probably lost in the deluge of shit popularity that hit him. I just ended up jumping off into the industrial area. NIN turned out to be much more real. Bands like KMFDM had the more rebellious fuck the system lyrics. Gabriel was still producing some great songs that were OMG fucking awesome. For new "rock" music I was looking to things like counting crows and more ska material. I get that there was a huge movement started with Nirvana, but I never saw them as so awesome to bring it about. Too many of the critics and media credited them when really the industry was falling away from another glamfest. His suicide did not stop them from taking nirvana and making it the lead for making their new wave. If you are going to crash the band, then crash the band. He just stepped the fuck off and gave them control. What they slammed down our throats eventually turned into angry boy rock like korn, limp biscuits, and Marilyn Manson. How does Nirvana compare to bands like Rush, Zepplin, Floyd, and yes who produced memorable melodies of multiple types along with lyrics that amaze? How do they compare with people like Billy Joel, Elton John, Bob Seger, Bruce Springstein, Madonna, and those hugely talented people who wrote some awesome pop songs that we all know? They are not the most complicated, but they hit multiple times with some "generic" songs that are awesome. Is Kurt a lyricist poet like Lenin, Don Mclean, Neil young, or Peter Gabriel? Not even fucking close. How the fuck did this band make it so damned big? And are they really that big, or were they just first with a sound that others did better?
To do what he does he has to understand music style and sound enough to properly do it justice. That is not to mention his lyrical ability. But it is still kazoos. The way I see the humor in the moment was he chose such a simplistic musical device to recreate the sound, meaning it is simple. At least metallica tried to add a fucking orchestra to their work. It was not what I was there for, but it was much more complicated than kazoos.
Funny thing, first time I heard Nirvana, it wasn't Nirvana, it was guys from my high school doing a cover for assembly. Their cover was better. I wish there was a recording out there, but I doubt home videotape would have survived this long.
Pretty much. That's why it had an even shorter shelf life than disco. I did enjoy Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the rest of the clones were pretty forgettable. That's how musical fads normally go: One group breaks through with a new sound and next thing you know everyone is copying it until it gets ran into the ground. But I do think that had Kurt Cobain not died, Nirvana would have been THE band of the 90s.
It was a new sound. Just like the Beatles and the "British Invasion," it was novel, new, and the people singing it were generally young and good looking. Whether you like the Beatles or not, their mark on music history has left an indelible print, just like Elvis, who introduced Rockabilly to white people, and so on and so on. The new sound from the new person who looks good and sounds good (enough) will often get high praise, but as time moves on, later groups have to work harder because the sound isn't new anymore. Grunge came along at just the right time for the fall of the Soviet Union, the "choice of a new generation," and the revelations of open and blatant corporate control of music. So it was a political, commercial, and social nexus right at the moment Nirvana appeared on the stage. I'm not even a big fan of Nirvana, I just happen to grok the underlying reasons as to why they became popular. That and I both love Dave Grohl, and feel sadness about Kurt's suicide. It's more emotional than music, but then music is emotion. The best music is both a sucker punch to the gut and a soothing balm for the soul. For a few brief moments, any band can actually achieve this, and Nirvana just happened to do it at the right moment, lit the fuse, and boom went the dynamite.
