Sunday, February 16, 2014

Nirvana! Overrated?


Thanks to the increasingly deluded insinuations of the conspiracy theorists Nirvana have become the very thing Kurt Cobain despised…a corporate enterprise churning out reduplicated merchandise for the growing masses of ‘new-grunge’ high street hipsters who have rarely heard their music, or worse still, heard it at all. The ever busy Nirvana hype machine rattles out out re-issued albums in a number of glorious formats including the collectors box set, the anniversary editions, the unheard demos, the lost tracks and various other bloated, expensive repackages. T shirts in their uber - produced millions.  Hoodies, badges, patches, mugs, ashtrays, coasters and mountains of more. It’s a tragic fact that Kurt Cobain’s suicide has become the thing keeping Nirvana alive, lifting them to the height of cutting-edge radicals - a label that is greatly exaggerated - and, as a direct result of such, has led to them becoming one of the most overrated bands of modern times.

Nirvana were, quite simply, in the right place at the right time, nothing more than that and nothing less than that. They weren’t ‘legends’ and they didn’t single-handedly save rock & roll either. They were, at best, a prominent band of a specific period in time - mainly the underground indie/punk scene - who made ‘cool’ music with massively catchy sing-song qualities. They never intended to be utterly original and, as history does tell us,  named and copied the bands who influenced them (Sonic Youth, The Melvins, Sex Pistols etc) Kurt Cobain was always honest enough to promote his influences and made no secret of those he ‘stole’ from, neither did he ever claim Nirvana were anything special. He was a very gifted songwriter  (not lyricist) who wrote mainstream alternative rock songs that were lapped up by the MTV generation. He was lyrically childish - as songs like Rape Me prove - and admitted often that the music was more important than the words - which were often pure gibberish - making a complete mockery of the column inches given over to such interpretations. 

If Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself then Nirvana would have disappeared into the footnotes of history - they were pretty much out of ideas and fading fast anyway - their Unplugged session was a desperate and final attempt at rekindling public interest, a marketing strategy -  yet following his tragic suicide he suddenly becomes the greatest front-man in history and his band are the voice of a fucking generation! Where were you all before martyrdom did the honours? As is the nature of our existence we place far too much glorification at the feet of dead celebrities, it’s the martyrdom I mentioned earlier, and we edit and tweak the memories until it is opinions rather than facts that we end up believing to be true.   Kurt was no hero and he is no murder victim. He was a human being with a host of weaknesses, heroin and depression being the main ones, and WAS selfish enough to continue his spiralling drug dependency into suicide rather than fight his demons for his daughters sake and THAT is why the conspiracy theorists continue to deflect from that, because they refuse to believe or accept that he WAS weak enough and selfish enough to leave his wife and daughter behind in such an ungracious and traumatic manner.

Kurt had nothing left to offer musically and, had he lived and Nirvana continued, their output would have been terribly ordinary, not anything worth shouting about - as Dave Grohl has told us on many occasions. So maybe it's time to focus on merit rather than a lost potential? Let them have the place in musical history  they deserve (listen to their debut album Bleach for their true pre-Nevermind edginess) and allow Kurt to rest in peace instead of tarnishing his existence with ignorant bouts of mouthy band wagon jumping conjecture!





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