Letter to Kurt Cobain

Dear Kurt Cobain,

Admittedly, in 1991 when your groundbreaking Nevermind album was released, catapulting you to international “punk rock” stardom, I was more enamored of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody of your hit single than of the single itself. But a few years later when, at age 12, I listened to your subsequent effort, In Utero, I was sufficiently glandular and miserable that I could personalize the “angst-ridden” sounds and the images that accompanied them. Glamour combined with pretty good songs; I became obsessive. Then you killed yourself with a shotgun. For the following few years, I feverishly consumed every magazine and MTV special and book and biopic (authorized or not) I could find. I wore Converse Jack Purcells, cardigan sweaters and flannel shirts, my stepfather’s ripped jeans, in approximation of your televisual image. In my room, I limply imagined suicide. Then I started listening to other stuff. Now I wonder if a 12-year-old American – or even an 18-year-old American – would be exactly sure of who you were.

I’m not a member of “Generation X, ” which is probably why Nirvana inspired me to Teen Beat reverie rather than musical evaluation. Notwithstanding, you wrote some valuable songs. Even when I preferred “Weird Al”, the song “Lithium” was mesmerically familiar to me. It reminded me weirdly of the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin'.” And In Utero remains significant for the tired reasons its critics have always cited: it combines a Beatles pop sensibility with all the qualities of your less palatable influences – Scratch Acid, the Raincoats, etc. Where the songs are not always well-constructed, they are still unusual and unusually moving.

But all of this is incidental. Nirvana’s music has always seemed genuine to me. What seems retrospectively disingenuous is your reluctant star performance. Consider your now exhaustively-documented private longings for rock stardom. Weigh them against your public misery at your “unexpected” rise to celebrity. Is this conflict a compelling explanation for suicide? Rolling Stone seems to think so.

That you seemed to believe you could toe the line – living at once in the spontaneous “rebellion” of punk rock and the calculated commercialism of major record labels – made you an unwitting exemplar of the direction both punk rock and postmodernism have taken – a direction away from artistic devices and towards advertising tropes. Reflect, for just one example, on your appearance in the enormous corporate interest that is Rolling Stone wearing a tee-shirt that read “corporate magazines still suck.”

Is it coincidental that punk rock and postmodernism declined more or less simultaneous with your ascension? Maybe it is. Maybe you indicated a cultural trend. At what point did mainstream culture, media, and advertising begin to co-opt both movements? Do we all remember the exact moment at which, e.g., television commercials stopped trying just to sell us stuff, and began winking at us about their intentions to sell us stuff in order to sell us stuff? Of course we don’t. As David Foster Wallace points out in his excellent essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction 1993, collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997), it simply started happening. The anti-mainstream was appropriated by the mainstream; your trademark irony was incorporated and sold back to the public.

Anyway, I don’t mean to get you down, Kurt. Your legacy survives! The ubiquitous Urban Outfitters peddles the ubiquitous flannel shirt. Grunge’s hallmark Dr. Martens boots have returned to vogue. And I have you largely to thank for inspiring me to years of obscure touring, sleeping on hardwood floors, and playing music to small and intermittently enthusiastic (and occasionally contemptuous) crowds.

Yes, thank you.

Michael Friedrich