I cried the day that Kurt Cobain died. That night, nine Aprils ago, friends and I lit candles and listened to “Pennyroyal Tea” as a meaningful, if juvenile tribute. I cried the next year too, playing my guitar as my mother consoled me, even though she had until that spring disdained Nirvana and their lyrical content-unsettling material for an impressionable nine-year-old, I understand.
It seems a bit silly now, as the man has been vacuously memorialized in his recently published diaries, released by the estate over which his wife and former bandmates publicly squabble, and on thousands of T-shirts bearing his mug, the dates that bookend his life, and a handful of detached lyrics. I hate hearing Nirvana on the radio now, not because “I was there from the get-go, before they were famous” or some such bullshit, but because those songs are now so well weathered and interwoven into my past that they have ceased to have any impact. I no longer appreciate the songs whose brooding structures have been etched into my mind so fully that I no longer need to hear them. They mean nothing.
But when it happened, it was new. That doesn’t give me any self-righteous claim to ownership, but it does mean that that day when my friend Nick ran into the drama room with his portable radio yelling that Kurt had died, I listened. I went to my best friend’s house, and listened again to the news, then again to my copy of In Utero. I don’t remember why I cried exactly. Certainly Nirvana had functioned as a sound of continuity as my family uprooted from New Mexico just before sixth grade. “Drain You” aired regularly on Alternative Nation and 120 Minutes as my father crept furtively into the house at 3 a.m. on the occasional weekend when he would drop in unannounced. In Utero and the infamous SNL appearance hit the airwaves as we moved first to a Salt Lake City hotel, and then to the tenement from which he would leave for good in southern Wyoming. Then April 1994, and by December, my mother, brother and I were back home in New Mexico and Unplugged was formally released. Kurt, Dave and Chris were continuity and anger, chronologically embodied.
Claims that Cobain was a “voice of a generation” notwithstanding, for me, the last, tattered moments of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” encapsulated and resonated all of the pulses of fear, anxiety, anger and vertigo that I felt in that compressed, blurry period, culminating in one last move to the apartment in which we would spend the rest of my high school years. As I sung along, stumbled, and broke-all of the invective, the nausea and the empathy in me churned up in one of those first precious moments in which pain and jubilation seamlessly overlap, then bubble over. I didn’t have the words, the experience, or the self-knowledge to express what I felt, but the music did. It wasn’t the loss of “a prophet” in the form of a band leader, as Spin and Kurt Loder suggested, it was everything else that we lost and learned as we stumbled clumsily through the miserable mid-’90s.
I now have the words to express what I was feeling then. I have the cognitive ability, and psycho-spiritual help to cipher all that I am feeling and learning now. In a way, however, many of the tools that we are supposed to develop as we reach adulthood (the same that help us plan for grad school, assess our finances, and worry about our grades) are an impediment to understanding what we always knew was there. Cognition, inextricably linked to self, and emotion can never fully and objectively describe it. We can’t think ourselves into being and knowing ourselves. But songs seem to refract and reflect all that soul without the misleading precision of the psychologist’s chair, the ethnography, the photograph. Neither does beauty, rhythm, fear, love and all the other slippery muck sliding beneath the surface, but whenever I wonder, who I am, my reaction to a piece of music never lies. It’s primal, spiritual, pre-cognitive. I can’t rationally choose that which does or does not move me, nor can I control where it takes me. Sometimes it’s a tool, other times, a curse. But every chord, loop, refrain, hook, beat is a nexus of all that I am, have been, and will be-negotiations and re-negotiations of a theme.
Whether I like it or not, Nelly will always be synonymous with Georgetown for me, just as Danny Tenaglia and Mos Def are the prism through which I remember and project myself in New York-and it’s Kurt Cobain’s murky, grinding Fender that reconnects myself, out a decade ago. I hate those songs now, almost as much as I hate those top 100 countdowns that put “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” at number one, just for legacy points. I don’t know whether that means I also hate that time, that version of me, or that I’m just an asshole music snob. I don’t really want to think about it. I feel it, and I’m realizing with increasing clarity the futility of trying to dissect it apart, examining the roots and remedies. I am always moving and changing, each song and its meaning along with me. We all have different relationships with them, and for my brother, Nevermind and Millencollin are still unfolding mediations of a turbulent time in his life, though with connotations I will never fully understand, even as he describes them vividly to me. For me, Nevermind is tired, useless, excess baggage, and I’m on to Talib Kweli, Thievery Corporation and Dave Matthews. I’m not terribly original. Maybe in a few years I’ll get into Yanni and James Taylor, or dust off that copy of Bleach. I keep changing, feeling and experiencing the inexplicable and new, not always knowing how I got there. It’s comforting to know that I have a mirror with a breakbeat.
Ian Bourland is a junior in the School of Foreign Service and associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. Please address any complaints to Bill Cleveland.
