How many voices of their generation have you known? I’m 57 years old and I’ve known two: Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain. You can say whatever you want about grunge or Nirvana, or Pearl Jam, big or small, whatever. But those are the only two who actually, undoubtedly, spoke for their generations.
I am not saying Cobain was better or worse than Dylan or any one else, I have no doubt that the Beatles were bigger and – or more important but I have only even known two bands that undisputedly spoke to and for their age group.
What Cobain said, what he found, was how difficult it was to retain his decency in a world trying to drag him, and his generation, down to zero. The grunge generation saw what was right but they took it for granted, race and sex equality, transparent democracy, hard work. They seemed like the finishing end of the baby Boomers –after Grunge it was a new millennium.
Cobain was the picture of this frustration to do the right thing, he was the confusion of a generation, “whatever nevermind” was the punchline to “come gather round people wherever you roam”. The search for authenticity (in Cobain’s world at least, musical authenticity) lead to rejection and eventual suicide.
Even his voice sounded like his generation, a pained tender rasp of terror and aloneness, it sounded like somebody breaking down before your eyes. It sounded like that boy in “Sliver” but panicking for the world.
It is nearly impossible speaking for your generation, it is so rare it barely exists. Dylan and Cobain and that’s it. One didn’t make it to 30, the other was forever transformed before he reached 30.
