Grunge: 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death: By children for children

What exactly remains of Kurt Cobain?

No mountain range is named after him today. All electronic communication across the globe functions smoothly without his participation. In world politics, one looks in vain for positions that he could have held. He has nothing to show when it comes to new cures for deadly diseases. He is also not a household name in the field of quantum physics today. Criticism of ideology, social theory, political science – there is nothing there. He is not mentioned in Marx and Adorno. He never won at Wimbledon. Children can learn to use Snapchat, Tiktok and Instagram without any intervention. He has not signed a single international peace agreement in his entire life. Modern accounting methods do not originate from him. No recipe from him has been handed down – and by the way, there is none named after him. As far as we know, he doesn’t represent the new workout trend crawling, which translates as “crawling.” No business academy or army barracks bears his name. There is no picture that shows him in a suit and tie, neatly parted and carrying a briefcase next to a national flag. There is also no photo that shows him riding a horse bare-chested. He plays no role in the allotment club scene. His likeness is also missing from all photographs taken at G8 summits and international climate conferences. It is not a significant factor in the current debate about gender stars. Blockchain technology played no role in his life (1967–1994). There is no app for him either. He didn’t know that there would one day be “mindfulness coloring books for adults” to color in. He was never invited to insurance industry conferences. Footnotes in scientific papers, for example on the potential harm of flavorings in e-cigarettes, do not cite him. He didn’t even invent jazz.

Thomas Blum (with thanks to Rayk Wieland)

Cobain may have been dirty, but he was fascinating

One of the most disillusioning experiences of my childhood had to do with Kurt Cobain. If you have parents who became parents relatively young, then it’s likely that there will be a brief moment of simultaneity when it comes to musical taste that acts like a kink in the matrix. When I first became seriously interested in music, I must have been around 13, my parents were in their late 30s. Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged concert was playing on the TV in my room in 1997, even though it was already six years old was. I was disgusted by Kurt Cobain’s greasy hair and even more disgusted by his cardigan. I imagined the typical serial killer like him. The fact that he shot himself in the head with a shotgun only fueled my disgust. Other girls found the hair, the cardigan and the shotgun fascinating. At 13, I didn’t ask myself what was wrong with them, but with me. That was also the reason why I listened to Nirvana. The music was breathtaking: “Here we are now, entertain us,” which was exactly what I wanted. Face the disgust of the world with self-confidence.

When my mother came into the room to ask something about homework-already-done-bla-bla, she briefly saw what I was watching on TV with that seemingly casual parental checker look and then said: I know, I used to think so also great. The world stood still for a brief moment. My mother was familiar with the stuff that I had intentionally made too loud, because I wanted it to be as off-putting as possible to my parents: a dirty guy, definitely a drug addict, as listless as possible. That was actually total bankruptcy for Nirvana and Cobain: my mother liked them. Today I find it rather fascinating that the music must have said something to both a teenager and a mother in her 30s shortly after reunification. Thanks, Kurt.Christine Odes

If you don’t want to be famous, you’re not a real rock star

I never liked Kurt Cobain. It wasn’t because of his music. This came into its own in greasy basement clubs where the dim lighting graciously concealed the fact that they hadn’t been cleaned for a while. “Nevermind” was the soundtrack to spilled beer and crushed butts.

No, I didn’t like Kurt Cobain because he violated the most important rule of the rock business: You go on stage because – damn it! – wants to be famous. World famous. Larger than life and godlike. Like John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Prince. Or for that matter Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, who you can still tell today that he had a lot of fun in his life. Because being famous in the rock business also meant being extremely rich and sexually uninhibited. The full program. Becoming a rock star meant: giving the finger to the lower-middle-class stuff, throwing the planned career path as a plumber, foreman or administrative employee into the trash. The Bremen Town Musicians already knew that we can find something better than death everywhere.

But Kurt Cobain didn’t understand this simple wisdom. That’s why his whining was annoying. Instead of being happy that he was no longer a nobody, he lamented the dark side of celebrity. A Freddie Mercury, to whom he compared himself in his farewell letter, would never have done that in his life. Even on his deathbed he rejoiced: “The show must go on!” Above all, Mercury was aware that as a star you had a role to fill. And if this role became too boring for you, you simply slipped into another one. David Bowie and Madonna mastered such metamorphoses masterfully. Kurt Cobain, on the other hand, was already overwhelmed with a No. 1 album.

His widow Courtney Love demonstrated how to do it right. She messed up a lot in her life (as rock stars tend to do), but she took advantage of every opportunity to become famous.Frank Jöricke

The greatest tension in life comes out of nowhere

Does anyone remember the horror film “Blair Witch Project”? Its scary effect was that you kept waiting for the horror to start. It was like going into the forest at night, lying down and listening to the sounds. And that is more or less the plot of this film from 1999. Six years later, “Last Days” by Gus van Sant was released in cinemas and was supposed to describe the last days of Kurt Cobain. At least that’s what was claimed, because this is about a musician named Blake. He is in a bad mood and doesn’t feel like communicating. Does he take drugs, does he not take drugs? Not clear. He lives in an old castle with a few friends and is constantly restless. He also runs through the forest, but comes back and sits alone in the castle to write something down or make music.

I didn’t hear this music when I watched the movie on DVD alone at home. I didn’t hear anything at all. Did I take drugs? No. I just asked myself: when does the sound start? What I saw were silent images. I thought: ah, this is how you show depression, paranoia and feelings of abandonment. I knew the film was accused of being incomprehensible and lacking in plot. Maybe this calm was a protest against the terror of the entertainment industry? And then he became “the first MTV dead” (“Spex”).

The silence made the images seem casual, but also dramatic: So that’s what it’s like, I thought, when you can’t or don’t want to understand anything anymore. Tension built up inside me for 30 or 40 minutes: when would something be heard? And what would happen then? Would everything suddenly become clear? Could I finally understand Cobain’s death better? But then I realized that I could wait a long time for this. The DVD was defective and had no sound. After that I didn’t bother with Cobain anymore. Rest in peace, er, silence.Christof Meueler

The Legacy: Eternal Youth

There is magic in every ending. Kurt Cobain’s death and its circumstances are the subject of true crime podcasts these days. This and that gigabyte has certainly been written about “Heart-Shaped Box”. An aura that wouldn’t have enveloped Nirvana and Cobain had they gone the Pearl Jam route and moved past their adolescence.

Everyone imagined it in one way or another until it was actually painted in 2012 for the 22nd episode of the tenth season of the right-wing liberal Punch and Judy show “Family Guy”: Cobain, who takes refuge from heroin by becoming a addict and doesn’t blow his brains out , he would have quickly surpassed Jim Morrison in gaining body mass and would have slowly disqualified himself for the Pop Olympus.

Nirvana still had primordial slime behind their ears, so they froze themselves for posterity. The last song that Cobain wrote and even played at jam sessions with Pat Smear and Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson is not a rewind, but rather a conclusion to their eternal youth work: “Do Re Mi”, the first syllables of the major scale in solmization. Major, not minor, after all it is a song by children for children. A boy goes to sleep and is somewhere between crunchy and fed up from the impressive day – the emotional balancing act mapped within the world through a change of perspective: »And if I may, and if I might / Lay me down weeping / And if I say, what is life? / I might be dreaming / If I might, what is right? / Summertime, see me yield / Those years in his body / A phrase from his pocket / In chains from the no-end, lifelong dream.” Now the boy wakes up again, less stubborn, more understanding that he’s being taken into the world Duty takes when he is routinely resuscitated, an anticipation of the elderly and their working world: »If I may and if I might / Wake me up and see me / If I do, and if I lie / Find me out, to see me / And if I’m made, cold as ice / I may have to see me heal / Raised in his own care / Erased from this moment / The change from his socket / That I may need.«Ken Merten