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April 5th is the 7th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide.
So I'm going to take this opportunity to say something that
is not exactly "cool" to say in many circles now
days: I both liked, and like, Nirvana. I think they were one
of the greatest bands ever to become popular  enough
to be a unifying force for a large and varied number of young
people. The fact that MTV destroyed them and their sound through
overplay and overhype is not a disgrace, but a badge of honor,
for that wretched network has destroyed many once great sounds.
The original spirits of both ska and techno, recent causalities
of Empty-V, are quite admirable. But saying that is probably
another uncool blasphemy.
There is another of Mind-numbingly Total Void's recent casualties:
punk. Nirvana was, you see, a punk band. But before you burn
me at the stake, let me defend my heresy. Nirvana represented
a different side of punk, a side that took time to emerge.
When punk was slowly brought kicking and screaming into this
world and beheld its sickening state, in a rage it declared
that things would have to change. It also angrily demanded
to know why things had not changed already, including why
the hippies of the sixties had failed. But by the late 80s,
what had punk succeeded in changing? Not a whole lot. Two
responses to this second failure of rock music to change the
world were prevalent.
Both involved the disturbing thought that maybe things can
not be changed, maybe things will never get any better than
this. Eventually many bands would turn away from the agonized
world and try to find happiness in being silly losers, but
first there was Nirvana and like-minded bands, who, truer
to punk spirit, continued to face the world by joining it
in its depression.
If punk was dead, Nirvana was a funeral dirge. Is punk dead?
Perhaps not, but it was definitely down in the early 90s.
Nirvana was the emotional down of a movement that had not
yet accomplished its goals.
Of course, there have always been and always will be great
punk bands who continue in the original revolutionary spirit
of the movement, but at one time the likes of The Clash and
The Sex Pistols were well known and influencing a large part
of a generation. By the early 90s, though, the most widely
listened to alternative to pop rock was big haired glam metal.
Nirvana deserves credit, if for nothing else, for purging
our televisions of that travesty.
Punk, in Nirvana, had grown depressed and esoteric. Nirvana
was not the first band to reflect this side of the negative
emotions to a fucked up world that is punk, and maybe they
weren't the best to do so. But they were the band that was
in the right place at the right time, a time and place when
a large number of America's youth were feeling the same thing.
But what did they have to be depressed about? They were rock
stars. Well, they weren't rock stars when they recorded their
first album, Bleach, and they barely were when they recorded
Nevermind. Maybe they should have been happier when they recorded
In Utero, but clearly they weren't, because if the emotional
content of that album was faked, Kurt deserved an Oscar (far
more than that shite Gladiator).
Accidie,
apathy; anomie, valuelessness, alienation from society and
its norms; and ennui, boredom. These are the socio-psychological
diseases of the First World. According the existentialist
novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, vertigo is
not the fear of falling, it's the desire to fall. Perhaps
the angry desire to make the world better is more admirable,
but punk is four sided, both passive/aggressive and manic/depressive.
And I like it that way.
At
the time, a lot of other people liked it that way too. And
so Nirvana became a legend for a large portion of a generation,
so much so that many wore t-shirts with the years 1969-1994
written on them, so much so that theory circulated like mythology
concerning Cobain's death. Someday Kurt Cobain will be on
a U.S. Postage stamp, for the day he died ranks with the day
Rage Against the Machine broke up in the history of why radio
sucks and will continue to suck until more bands can plant
mainstream punk back into its two negative sides, properly
balancing the happy, happy pop punk (and hopefully destroying
the degenerated form of rap/metal/punk that's followed RATM)
that fills our "alternative" radio waves. Well,
whatever, nevermind. 
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