>Is it wrong that I'm really glad I'm too young for Nirvana to have
>been at all relevant to me?

Not as such, although ironically...

>I mean, they were fine music-makers and all. But Christ on a bike,
>Gen-X'ers talk about Cobain like he single-handedly saved music as we
>know it. And it's like "is this a cultural thing? Would I be part of
>your weird cult too if I'd been born in the seventies

... in aping (perhaps inadvertently) that dismissive too-cool-for-school thing the band's anti-fans did at the time, you are plugging yourself into another part of the same cultural phenomenon.

Nirvana was one of those bands that have basically four listener demographics: rabid fans, people who think they had their moments, people who aren't aware of them, and rabid anti-fans. A lot of bands only make it to the middle two, and a vanishingly rare view end up with the top three and not the bottom one, but most of your really influential acts will wind up with all four, in varying proportions.

Me, I was in group two. I have a copy of Nevermind (I think they might have been issued to all Americans in their late teens and early 20s at the time of publication by the government, possibly with reference to census data), and I have particular personal reasons for being amused and nostalgic about digging it out now and again and playing it, but I never got into them enough to buy any of their other albums or learn the names of anybody else who was in the band (I know Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters, and only found out later that he was a Nirvana alumnus).

None of which affects my opinion that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has a rockin' good hook, which, as you may recall was all my original post was about. :)

(Other artists have noticed this. There was Al Yankovic's parody about how puzzling the lyrics were, of course, but I knew a guy who took it a step farther than that - back in the WPI Elder Days, Jim Tyrrell would occasionally play a cover of it in which each of the words was replaced with "blah", simultaneously mocking the original lyrics and pointing out that the song's musically strong enough that it doesn't even really need them. :)

In the spring of 1994, when I was working phone support at Leading Edge, we had a lot of long, awkward pauses in most calls because the Borland Paradox database we were using to track problem tickets was so slow... but the awkwardest by far as the one in which the caller (who had sounded perfectly normal up to that time) asked,

"Hey, man. You hear about Kurt Cobain?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, slightly distracted by the doings on my end. "Tragic, huh?"

"Yeah." Pause, and then, in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone of voice: "It was the CIA, man."

"... Huh?"

"It was the CIA," the caller repeated. "They did Kurt just like they did Del Shannon."

"Um... OK, I've got the next screen now, let me just verify your address..."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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