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| quote: | Originally posted by ShadoWolf
do you know why Cobain shot himself? |
I don't know why that has anything to do with what I said, but someone else wrote this on another forum, I read and understood it all...and fuck if i've got the time to paraphrase (and I really haven't the first idea about Cobain or rock music):
He was the unwilling shotgun ride of a media obsessed with itself, and he hated that. He was simply in the right place at the right time, with the right social inertia working for him. He was made the reluctant spokesman for an entire generation of disaffected, depressed youth, and death was the only way out for him.
In late fall 1990, the kings of rock were Guns n Roses. They had been promising a new album for awhile, and everyone was waiting with baited breath to see what it was going to be about. When it was released, it was not one but TWO albums, both of them filled to the brim with incredible, ambitious progressive rock. Over 150 minutes of music. 9 of the songs on the second disk were over 6 minutes long. Named "Use Your Illusion I & II", it ventured to use everything, from orchestras, piano changes, operatic set pieces, and even straight-ahead goofy 80s ego heavy metal. In short, they were no longer making music; they were making art. And the albums would've gone down in history as one of the most fascinating pieces of rock music and cemented Guns n Roses as one of the greatest bands of all time, except for one thing that no one--especially not them--could have foreseen.
A couple months later, in January 1991, Nirvana released Smells Like Teen Spirit. That one song, and the accompanying album "Nevermind", suddenly made everything Guns n Roses was trying to do--all their excesses, all their extravagances, all their big hair and flashy clothes and massive stadium power chords and squeeling guitars, which had dominated the rock scene for over 10 years--suddenly seem very terribly uncool.
Heavy metal was dead. Grunge was in. Nirvana was the spearpoint of a revolution in rock music, a change in the paradigm of music psychology. The magazines doted over them, the press reportered incessantly about them. Labels scrambled to Seattle to sign similar bands. Everyone started cutting their hair and wearing flannel. The style on the stage was angst, blue-collar, non-showmanship. The very antithesis that rock stood for in the 80s. The hype machine was in full swing, and for the first half of the 90s, everything was grunge, and grunge was everything.
Kurt Cobain hated that. He hated the media circus, the bandwagon jumpers, the punters, the parasites, all the trendies and hipsters who tried to bank on the grunge = cool motif. Teenagers started classifying everything as "suck". Nothing was good enough for anyone anymore. Cynicism was in (something only recently trumped now by meta-sarcasm, or kitsch-ironic cynicism). Most of all, he hated people, and he wanted out. When drugs wouldn't help, a loaded shotgun would.
Does that make him a prophet? No. Does that make him a genius? No. He would've been just as downtrodden without all the fame, but maybe perhaps still alive. What it did do was thrust him as a participant and frontman for a--admittedly, rather trite and derivate--music trend. It had no staying power because it didn't have much of a basis to begin with. After awhile, grunge starts sounding bland and unimportant, and you're eager to move on.
Perhaps that's what Cobain hated most: that the music was really nothing special. And his efforts to understand or even reconcile with all the unwarranted attention it was receiving were obviously in vain.
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Robots, machines, mechanical beings
Automatic and synthetic, we have the means
To take control of this planet and the human race
With our electronic rhythms and the Armageddon Bass
Last edited by Radagast on Sep-23-2004 at 05:25
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Nathan Fake - Outhouse (Valentino Kanzyani Remix) 
