Anniversary: My Generation, Still Coping

It's April 5th, which for a solid number of Gen Xers is a melancholic anniversary. I wrote this ten years ago:

But it was a little-heralded band out of Washington state - part of the Seattle music scene that soon became known as "grunge" - called Nirvana that blew the speakers out of every teenager and college student's sound systems that year.  A song - "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - that was part Ramones up-tempo rock, part metal, part protest - just hit the right damn notes with the Gen X age group.  From epic opening riff to the fading scream of singer Kurt Cobain shouting "A denial...", it spoke to a generational apathy of teens and college students who wanted to unplug from a crazy world, couldn't, and just had to cope.

Nirvana went from a garage band that traveled to shows in beat-up vans to a headlining act filling packed arenas and stadiums.  Cobain became the iconic grunge rocker: dressing in hand-me-down flannels, with shaggy hair and three-day beard growth, walking about with a dazed look in the eyes and a knowing grin.  Everyone thought it was cool.

Except for Cobain.  He never asked to be a hero or a rock star.  He wanted to be a rocker, sure, but someone who plugged in, played a few chords, moved on.  He had his own heroes - other post-punk and college radio bands that he eagerly talked up in interviews, which gave them brief bumps in popularity - but he also had his own demons...

Cobain didn't expect so many people to get into what he was doing, and was dismayed a lot of his work was getting overplayed... or worse played out of context.  One of the things that haunted him was finding out his song "Polly" - a disturbing tale of an unconcerned man raping a girl, based on a real-life serial rapist who haunted the Pacific Northwest - was being sung by two rapists assaulting their own victim.  Cobain got disgusted finding out that as Nirvana got more popular they were attracting the same jerk jocks and frat-boy bullies that made his teen years a living hell, many of them not even getting the fact that a lot of Cobain's own songs were raging against them.

Not helping matters were Cobain's history of drug use - some of it psychiatric, some of it to cope with a chronic stomach ailment, some of it recreational with the hardest of them being heroin - and getting into a volatile relationship with Courtney Love.  Due to the couple's drug use, they temporarily lost custody of their daughter Frances Bean and he continued to live under the fear of losing her again.  In this environment, a handful of drug-using moments seem to turn into suicide attempts.

By the end of March 1994, Cobain was confronted with an intervention and convinced to put himself in detox/rehab in Los Angeles.  He only stayed for about a day, then hopped the clinic's six-foot wall and fled.  By April 2nd, he was spotted in a few places around his stomping ground Seattle.  By April 5th, he ended up at his big secluded home.  His body was found April 8th, shotgun to the head, body pumped of heroin, a suicide note nearby...

Man, I've been blogging so long even my articles are having anniversaries. But I digress.

As I've noted before, my generation - X - remains an odd, almost schizophrenic grouping split between overly aggressive conservative wingnuttia and the apolitical disaffected. Caught between the hypocrisy of the Boomers and the confusion of the Millennials, we've become a rather cynical, disconnected lot. Cobain's fate seems to echo down the years for us.

We're in our fifties now, well into aging parenthood with OUR kids graduating college while we're sitting around wondering where our MTV went (music videos are mostly on YouTube anymore). We're a bit miffed that CDs are getting phased out for streaming services, unable to place our Nirvana albums on any sound system that might still be in our living rooms. At least vinyl is making a comeback.

Time keeps moving. We're further away from April 1994 than ever before, and next year will be farther still. Frances Bean is in her 30s now, just married her second time and trying to get on with her life, and it's just a sad regret that Kurt didn't stick around to see if she's happy or not.