Thirteen Years On
Today is the anniversary of the death of one the icons of the modern era. You may or may not agree with me, but to me, Kurt Cobain was a truly life changing and inspirational individual.
13 years ago today, Kurt Cobain took a 20 gauge shotgun and walked out to his greenhouse, in the back of his Seattle home. And every year, on the 5th of April, without prompting, I remember this. It just pops into my head. I might not have listened to a Nirvana song in a year but somehow, I just wake up and know, without even thinking about it.
For me, Nirvana was more than just a band. It was a life changing experience. It just happened to conincide with a time life wher you start to develop your own tastes and personality (i.e. your teens) and for me, it just clicked. Honestly, before Nirvana I had no musical taste. I don’t mean I didn’t have good taste – I mean I literally had none. I just listened to whatever the radio played and didn’t really care.
To be honest, for me, Teen Spirit changed all that. It introduced me to a slightly more mainstream and acceptable version of alternative music, which in turn lead me to less and less mainstream music until I became a fan, for a time, of only alternative music. As I grew older, other music came back in and now I have a wider taste again (but still refuse to listen to commerical radio – I have 18 FM channels in my car stereo and all of them are tuned to JJJ!), but I spent much of my late teens and early twenties only listenting to a particular brand of music.
So now, 13 years on, I still feel I owe something to someone I’ve never met and never will. Thanks in a large part to Nirvana, I learned the guitar, joined a band and had a really great time doing it. When I felt down in my teens, I had Nirvana to fall back on. I understand a tiniest portion of what Kurt felt when he talked about the devastating situation of having his music taken from him by commercialisation. For a time my music was what I had to fall back on and, in that time, if it was taken from me, I too may have felt like I had nothing.
Fortunately for me, I had many other things in my life. Unfortunately for Kurt and countless others like him, he didn’t have enough.
Kurt Cobain ~ 05/04/1994.