This is "Grunge"
This all happened very quickly - Nirvana released their first album in 1989 and the second album made them international superstars by 1991. On April 5th, 1994 Kurt Cobain died. Essentially, Cobain had helped to pioneer a new genre of rock and create an enormous portfolio of innovative music in just a four year period.
Nirvana's take on the David Bowie classic
I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude. - Kurt Cobain
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| Kurt Cobain, troubled genuis |
One of the earliest memories of one of contributors to this blog was the rock traumas of 1970 - these were remembered collectively as they were seen through the eyes of our elders at the time. Janis Joplin, Jim Morris, Jimi Hendrix - all dead in the same year. And then to top it off, the Beatles split up. These superstars of rock defined that generation and when they passed into history people recognized the significance immediately.
Unfortunately he did have a gun...
Sad to say we didn't originally note the passing of Kurt Cobain the same way - he was a contemporary of ours but was introducing a form of music that we weren't too familiar with and hadn't adopted yet (that took a number of more years to fully appreciate). We didn't know too much about him beyond having seen him on Saturday Night Live. On top of that, things were busy then and the only music we listened to was on the radio going back and forth between places - this was mostly pre-Internet times (yes, they did exist).
Nirvana on SNL
So what made Curt Cobain and Nirvana so special? Well, there's always the 'star as martyr' or James Dean syndrome, but the difference here is that while James Dean only starred in three movies before entering pop immortality, Cobain created several dozen songs and redefined alternative music for the next twenty years.
As the years passed after his death, we began to listen to more and more of what Nirvana had produced over that incredibly short span of time. And because of that we began listening to Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam and together it seemed to us that this music more than anything else began to define the 1990's. Why it did is harder to explain - it's not just because that was the music which we heard playing at the time - it was because there seemed to be certain air of cynicism and depression associated with the 90's - and Grunge captured that sentiment. Why the 90's became an age of uncertainty could be attributed to the fact that the decade began with a Recession and a War - the first major American war since Vietnam. Or maybe there was a general sense of pessimism as the juggernaut of Globalism became the driving force in both the domestic and the global economy. The 1990's saw the partial retirement of the doomsday clock but introduced us to an even worse threat - Global Warming.
In the middle of this were a handful of seemingly awkward, troubled musicians who reintroduced rebellion and rejection of the status quo. Their's wasn't a happy message - but it seemed to be a true one. Yet their ability to channel that negativity lead to some of the brightest Grunge stars dying in self-destructive fits of misdirected rage. It reminds us a bit of 1970.
"I bought a gun and chose drugs instead." Kurt Cobain
One can only imagine how much music Kurt Cobain could have made if he had been given 20 years instead of 4 to express himself...
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