Frowner: What ever happened to all that "Courtney killed Kurt" stuff that was going around back then anyway?The DNA evidence ended up incriminating Shannon Kringen.
Nevermind: This is hard rock as the term was understood before metal moved in--the kind of loud, slovenly, tuneful music you think no one will ever work a change on again until the next time it happens, whereupon you wonder why there isn't loads more. It seems so simple.
[On MTV Unplugged, Cobain's] secret is sincerity, boring though that may be--he cares less than [Lou] Barlow without boasting a bit about it, tries harder than [Eddie] Vedder without busting a gut about it. The vocal performance he evokes is John Lennon's on Plastic Ono Band. And he did it in one take.1994 Artistic Statement of the Year
The artist of the year made only one significant statement in 1994: he killed himself. Life sucks, he howled, and we all got depressed and made sad little noises with our tongues, as good living beings must. . . . Cobain's death forces us to reexamine the small body of work he had already achieved, to relisten obsessively to his MTV Unplugged one-off and God knows what forthcoming detritus, and to conclude that he had more to tell us than any but the rarest rock and rollers. The joy of his music was its triumph over his own pain. The message of his death is that music isn't triumph enough on a mortal coil that's been getting harder ever since Kurt Cobain was born.Nevermore: What Kurt Cobain did for rock and roll
Taken as a unit, Nirvana's albums are living proof of the subtlety and variety of what conventional musicology still regards as a crude, undeveloped genre.OK, but then:
He was gifted in the visual arts, where he was encouraged by a paternal grandmother whose hobby was carving Norman Rockwell images on the caps of mushrooms with toothpicks. . .
Kurt was encouraged in art by his paternal grandmother, Iris Cobain. She was a collector of Norman Rockwell memorabilia in the form of Franklin Mint plates with Saturday Evening Post illustrations on them. . . Iris even convinced [sic] Kurt to join her in a favorite craft: using toothpicks to carve crude reproductions of Rockwell's images onto the top of freshly picked fungi. When these oversized mushrooms would dry, the toothpick scratching would remain, like backwoods scrimshaw.posted by Herodios at 10:08 AM on April 6, 2011 [3 favorites]
Tore down a generation of he-man cock rock and a whole culture of macho misogyny without saying a word. Cobain was vocally pro-life and pro-feminist, pro-homo to the point of basically saying he kind of wished he was gay, and generally used every opportunity given to him to denounce corporate control of the media and culture, advocate for the weird and unconventional, and tell his fans it was just fine to question authority and assert their individuality. .Also, I never gave Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" its proper respect until I heard Nirvana's version.
b) Dave Grohl proved the devil exists. He did this by selling his soul to the devil. He absolutely did. I will not accept another answer. Contrast Dave Grohl drumming on Lithium and Foo Fighters "I'll be home coming home next year". See?Them Crooked Vultures provides irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Maybe he coulda been. Lennon died at 40.
Take your time, hurry upI had to pull over and break down in tears. There was power in those lyrics, truth even.
The choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest as a friend
As an old
Memoria, memoria
Memoria, memoria
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posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:35 AM on April 6, 2011