In Memoriam (to a contemporary, lost too soon)

Anyone out there have digital cable? Hidden amongst the seeming endless stream of sports stations and permutations of the Discovery Channel (Discovery Wings, Discovery Science, et. al.,) there is hidden the gem called VH-1 Classic.

(Load up on guns and bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's over bored and self assured
Oh no, I know a dirty word)

For those not in the know, VH-1 classic is what old MTV used to be, only without commercials. (Actually, the original VH-1 was designed as "MTV for those over 30", but it's now sort of morphed into another version of (current) MTV, playing mostly formulaic TV programs with some vague connection to music culture. They just don't play as many lame videos as MTV does). I haven't exactly discerned what the formula is for the selection of videos they play, except to say that it seems they've tapped a wire into my brain (a la "Being John Malkovich") to play only videos Scooter seems to like.

(Come as you are, as you were,
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend, as an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
The choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest as a friend as an old memory)

It's gets even better, folks. They play the videos in hourlong blocks based on various genres, introduced by a short animation at the top of each hour - "The Sixties Generation," "We are the 80's," "RockFest" (mostly old metal), "Pop Show" ('70s, '80s and '90s top 40 hits), "All Star Jams", which plays just about anything, and the newest offering, "Alternative," which seems to sing to me the most.

(He's the one who likes all the pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means)

Watching the Alternative hour the other night while Katrina was at Awana, I caught videos by David Bowie (a live version of "Jean Genie" from about 1973 or so), a song by The Jam I'd never heard before (and that was somewhat hard to believe), "True Faith" by New Order, a live video of Marshall Crenshaw playing "Cynical Girl" (one of the first songs I mastered on the guitar), "American Music" by the Violent Femmes and, to round out the hour, Nirvana's "Come As You Are."

(I'm so happy because today I've found my friends...
They're in my head
I'm so ugly, but that's okay, 'cause so are you...
We've broken our mirrors
Sunday morning is everyday for all I care...
And I'm not scared
Light my candles in a daze...
'Cause I've found God)

I don't know if Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, dead these ten years from a shotgun blast to the head, ever really found God. I've read he spent some time with a Christian family as a teen. I can't recall if it was some sort of foster home placement or whatever, but I do recall reading that they did have a positive impact on him to a certain degree. Of course, none of us will know until Heaven.

(Truth covered in security
I can't let you smother me
I'd like to but it wouldn't work
Trading off and taking turns
I don't regret a thing
And I've got this friend you see
Who makes me feel and I
Wanted more than I could steal)

This isn't really about Kurt's final reward, though that is worth discussing. What I want to talk about is his impact here, in the 27 years he had on earth. And, yes, I do, in fact, believe that there was and is something very fishy about his death - the man had everything to live for, especially in the form of his newborn daughter, Frances. There are a number of Cobain conspiracy theory sites out there, look 'em up yourselves. I personally think that hellion of a gold-digging wife of his, Courtney Love, was behind it because he planned on breaking up the band and divorcing her (thereby ending her source of money). Notice, also, that all the songs on the first two Hole albums (Courtney's band) bear the unmistakable mark of Kurt's writing style. Many people (myself included) believe she had him offed because he was worth more money dead than alive, then had the unmitigated gall to take unrecorded songs of his and to use them to buy more heroin and speed. Loser. But, I digress.

(She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for a week
I was drawn into your magnet tar pit trap
I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black)

Watching Kurt, poor Kurt, with his undiagnosable stomach pains that he used as an excuse to fill himself with heroin, swinging back and forth on a chandelier in the "Come as You Are" video, I was drawn back to 1994, and the announcement of his death. I can still remember all those teenagers in Seattle, standing in the rain, burning their flannel shirts in anguish at the death of their reluctant spokesman.

(Teenage angst has paid off well
Now I'm bored and old
Self-appointed judges judge
More than they have sold)

I also remember the moment at which I decided that one of my favorite commentators was full of crap. "Sixty Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney aired a screed a couple of weeks after Kurt's death in which he remarked that he knew for sure that the popular culture had passed him by because someone with Kurt Cobain's stature and popularity could come and go and he (Rooney) not even know who he was. He displayed a picture of Cobain, and commented on the holes in the knees of Kurt's jeans, stating that it was likely Kurt had never worked hard enough in his life to have actually worn holes into his jeans, and that he probably had 20 more pair just like them in his closet. He also derided Cobain (and with him, an entire generation, including yours truly) by stating that young people in their twenties didn't really know what hard times were like, having never gone through the Depression and World War II. Someone in their twenties in the 1990s never had it so good (in my day, if some long-haired torn-jeans wearing freak like this "Curt Cobane" person showed up in our town, playing his loud music, challenging authority, we'd a blah blah blah blah blah).

Basically, a primer in missing the point entirely.

(I wish I was like you
Easily amused
Find my nest of salt
Everything is my fault
I'll take all the blame
Aqua seafoam shame
Sunburn freezerburn
Choking on the ashes of her enemies)

I've always felt an affinity for the World War II generation, having been raised by parents of it. I still do, point of fact. I often find myself railing at the absurdities of the modern world, and fantasize about melting into a sepia-toned version of World War II reality combined with 1980s movie and music video fantasy - sort of combining pieces of Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night" video with "Raiders of the Lost Ark," along with the stirring (synthetic) strings of Ultravox's "Reap the Wild Wind." (As far as sepia-toned fantasies of a World War II era that never existed, you've just gotta see "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." If that movie had come out when I was 12, I would never have left the theatre).

(All in all is all we are)

But, at the same time, I am a child of my generation, a contemporary of Mr. Kurt Cobain, who would have been 37 this year. And, despite his not wanting it, he did become a spokesman for a generation, or maybe part of a generation - the disaffected, sad part. The part of me when I'm far from Christ. The part of me that was swallowed up in depression throughout my twenties, that came back for a return engagement in my thirties.

I credit my older brother, Bob, with, for lack of a better term, giving me permission to feel sorrow over the loss of Kurt. I heard so many voices in those months after April 8, 1994:

For your average 70's "classic rock" radio station, or hip-hop radio station, or oldies radio station, or country music radio station, Kurt Cobain didn't only not die...he was never even born.

Whatever he was, he was no Jimi Hendrix. Or Jim Morrison, for that matter.

I happened by Bob's house one day that spring, and we had a long chat - about life, about music, about my impending move to Washington State. I shared with him my feelings of, well, confused sadness, I guess, over Kurt's death. I shared with him some of the derisive things I'd heard from representatives of his generation (the baby boomers) and that of our parents (the Depression/WW II generation). What he told me sticks in my mind to this day:

You know, don't let them take him away from you. It doesn't matter what they say. To tell you the truth, to this day I still hurt over the death of Jim Morrison.

(I'm not like them
But I can pretend
The sun is gone
But I have a light
My day is done
But I'm having fun
I think I'm dumb
Maybe just happy)

RIP Kurt Cobain, 1967-1994