Kurt Cobain
(NOTE: The only complaint the business people at CBS have about 60 Minutes is that they say it attracts an old audience. That may be true but when I did this on the occasion of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, I got 10,000 angry letters from viewers under 30.)
You know the world has passed you by when your newspaper carries a page one story about the death of someone you never heard of. It happened to me this week. All the papers had it.
“Kurt Cobain,” this story says, “who helped to create the grunge 骯髒 rock sound that has dominated popular music, was found dead at this home. Mr. Cobain, lead singer, guitarist and song writer for the influential band Nirvana, killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head.”
It isn’t bad enough I never heard of Kurt Cobain, I never heard of “grunge rock” or “Nirvana” either.
The story says grunge rock is “the noisy, icon-smashing spawn of punk rock.”
Kurt Cobain’s death at age twenty-seven doesn’t sadden me, it angers me. He must have been a talented person but a lot of people would like to have the years left that he threw away. I’d like to have them.
What’s all this nonsense about how terrible life is? A young girl who stood outside his home in Seattle with tears streaming down her face said, “It’s hard to be a young person nowadays. He helped open people’s eyes to our struggles.”
Please, wipe the tears from your eyes, dear. You’re breaking my heart. I’d love to relieve the pain you’re going through by switching my age for yours.
What would all these young people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II, or Vietnam? Do they work at all? Are they contributing anything to the world they’re taking so much from?
Everything about Kurt Cobain makes me suspicious. This picture shows him in a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee. I doubt that Kurt Cobain ever did enough work to
1 wear a hole in his pants. He probably had ten pairs just like these hanging in his closet – all with fake holes in the knee.
All this fake stuff makes me suspicious of his music. No one’s art is better than the person who creates it. If Kurt Cobain applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it’s reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either.
On a back page of the same newspaper with the Kurt Cobain story, there’s an obituary of Samuel E. Thorne who died at the age of eighty-seven. Professor Thorne was a retired legal historian at Harvard.
“Mr. Thorne,” the obituary said, “was an authority on English legal history dating to the 12th century. During World War II he was a Navy cryptanalyst in the Pacific. He is survived by two sons and his wife of 50 years.”
I’d like to suggest we save our tears for Professor Thorne.
From Andy Rooney, Years of Minutes, pp. 266-267.
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2 Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – April 5, 1994) was an American singer- songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana. Cobain formed Nirvana with Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington in 1985 and established it as part of the Seattle music scene, having its debut album Bleach released on the independent record label Sub Pop in 1989. After signing with major label DGC Records, the band found breakthrough success with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from its second album Nevermind (1991). Following the success of Nevermind, Nirvana was labeled "the flagship band" of Generation X, and Cobain hailed as "the spokesman of a generation".
Cobain however was often uncomfortable and frustrated, believing his message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, with his personal issues often subject to media attention. He challenged Nirvana's audience with its final studio album In Utero (1993). During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with heroin addiction, illness and depression. He also had difficulty coping with his fame and public image, and the professional and lifelong personal pressures surrounding himself and his wife, musician Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, the victim of what was officially ruled a suicide by a self- inflicted shotgun wound to the head. The circumstances of his death have become a topic of public fascination and debate. Since their debut, Nirvana, with Cobain as a songwriter, has sold over 25 million albums in the US alone, and over 50 million worldwide.
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Courtney Michelle Love (born Courtney Michelle Harrison; July 9, 1964) is an American rock musician. Love is the lead vocalist, lyricist, and rhythm guitarist for alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989, and is an actress who has moved from bit parts in Alex Cox films to significant and acclaimed roles in The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999). She was married to Kurt Cobain, frontman of the grunge band Nirvana, with whom she has a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain. In the early 1990s, she also became known for popularising the fashion style "kinderwhore", characterized by torn babydoll dresses and smeared red lipstick. Throughout her career, Love's wild stage antics and subversive feminist attitude have polarized audiences and critics, with Rolling Stone once calling her "the most controversial woman in the history of rock."
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