The Ghost of Kurt Cobain 3

Kurt Cobain / Photo Courtesy Alice Wheeler, April 2004

So how does it feel now, when you're driving down the road at night, past Blockbuster and Applebee's, and, just as Trapt's "Headstrong" fades out on the radio, you hear those first strums of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? Is it awesome? Does it totally fucking rock? Or does it feel a bit jarring and sad? "When anything by [Nirvana] comes on the radio, you almost have to pull over -- still," says Seattle-based producer and former Fastbacks guitarist Kurt Bloch. "Since he's not around anymore, the music becomes a stronger reminder of that time."
Nirvana may sound somewhat like today's modern-rock playlist, but their music feels very strange. The songs elicit perplexing emotions. For one thing, it's hard to headbang to a saint. And this guy's image pushes some hard-wired buttons. I mean, look at him. The striking clear-blue eyes. The sharp, nobly set features. The thousand-yard smirk coming out of the photos and videos. The unkemptness almost makes him more dusty-prophet biblical. And listen to the oblique, electrifying lyrics and airy vocal lines, the way they waft on surprising harmonies over a neo-heavy-metal roar, leaving melodic vapor trails. In a way, the cynicism you feel you should have about all the grunge mythologizing smacks of a naysayer's denial.

Then there's the story. The book of Saint Kurt has it as follows: Our sad, sensitive little Pisces-Jesus man is born in the wilderness of Washington, grows up among the heavy-metal heathens, hears the gospel of punk rock, forms a trio to make a joyful noise, is seized by the hypocrites, forced into superstardom, and martyred. "Their music became popular at a time when everything else sounded so stale and manufactured," says Jonathan Poneman, cofounder of Sub Pop. "Nirvana always sounded pure -- even at their most compromised, which by most others' standards wasn't compromised at all."
Because of this, many have attributed an almost divine purity to Cobain himself. And after the ensuing decade of chest-waxing Vedder clones and bling-blinging Cribs goons, he looks downright otherworldly. He couldn't have swum in the same crass, commercial water as the rest of us, could he? Goldberg, for one, says yes. "He didn't like all the consequences of fame, but he chose to come to Los Angeles and to sign with a major label. Other artists haven't done that. Fugazi didn't do that. Superchunk, Pavement -- all sorts of artists didn't do that. He was going for it; he didn't only write the songs, he designed the T-shirts, he wrote the scripts for the videos, he rewrote the bio."
Consider "Smells Like Teen Spirit," the song that just happened to rock the reigning order like a force of nature. But look at the journals -- there, Cobain's description of the video reads more like a giddy culture campaign: "The first one, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' will have us walking through a mall throwing thousands of dollars into the air as mallgoers scrambles like vulchers [sic] to collect as much as they can get their hands on, then we walk into a jewelry store and smash it up in anti-materialist fueled punk rock violence. Then we go a pep assembly at a high school and the cheerleaders have anarchy A's on their sweaters and the custodian-militant-revolutionarys [sic] hand out guns with flowers in the barrels to all the cheering students who file down to the center court and throw their money and jewelry and Andrew Dice Clay tapes into a big pile, and then we set it on fire and run out of the building screaming. Oh, didn't Twisted Sister already do this?"
Cobain's journals are filled with his analysis of the waning generation gap, a sense of the rebellious possibilities in his peers, and a real concern for how he fit in with people his age. Unlike, say, Jack White, who has one foot in some gothic Delta/Nashville past, Cobain was fixed in the here and now, maybe fatally. "He sometimes hated himself for wanting [stardom]," says Goldberg. "He was a complicated guy, and there are things you don't always know you're getting into. But he became a rock star on purpose. He hired me to do that. No one put a gun to his head. He put his own gun to his head."
This is an older part of the ghost story. You may want to be rich and famous, you may want your music to reach millions, but you don't want to be Generational Spokesperson. It's like, if you're in a Greek myth, you don't want to be the most beautiful heroine or the mightiest warrior. Pretty damn beautiful or mighty freakin' strong is fine. But not the most. That's the one the gods fuck with, the one they enlist as a plot device for wars and mass murders. Odysseus or Eddie Vedder might turn out okay. But Achilles?  Kurt Cobain? No thanks.
In the headline of its front-page obituary, The New York Times bestowed on Kurt Cobain the ridiculous title "Hesitant Poet of 'Grunge Rock.' " Sociologically, the term "grunge" echoes "punk" -- another vague, contested, commercialized catchall applied by various segments of society to a huge array of ideas, sounds, styles, and personalities. It's ridiculously imprecise and inadequate, but that's the unholy deal you cut when you want to make a big noise in the world. You detonate the explosion, change things forever, and the meanings scatter.
A whole generation of musicians was picking through such scattered meanings in the long march from "punk" to "indie" to "alternative" -- before Nirvana came to represent the entire decade-plus tradition in the mainstream. From adamantly underground bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Minutemen, and Big Black to major label signees like the Replacements and Dinosaur Jr. to countless other arty or freaky institutions, the music scene was very much the "little group" suggested in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It was a complex, long-percolating mixture to so suddenly spurt up in a single super Venti cup of Seattle sludge.
But what about now? Has Nirvana's legacy -- their irrational rock exuberance -- been purged? Or worse? Have we returned to the George Bush/Michael Jackson administration of 1990 -- only in a newer, creepier version? As we speak, Nirvana's moment is being packaged for your nostalgic enjoyment, in something that sounds like a late-'90s Saturday Night Live skit; "alterative gold," a paradoxical new radio format pioneered by KZBT in San Diego that plays all you favorite grunge hits. It could be an update of the infamous ad for a classic-rock compilation that aired in the mid-'80s. Two hippie dudes sit outside a van as their boom box blasts the opening riff of "Layla." "Hey, is that Freedom Rock, man?" asks one guy, perking up from his private purple haze. "Yeah, man," replies the other. "Well, tuuuuurn it up!"