I can't say whether Kurt Cobain's legacy rivals that of Hendrix,
Joplin, etc, or whether he need to be compared with them.
But "Come As You Are", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Rape Me"
have their place amongst the great rock songs of our time.
I think what Cobain did, and/or represented was something that
was needed at the time, and was twofold. One, he brought the
focus back to the singer-songwriter, and two, pulled us out of the
overproduced hair-band music-as-product doldrums of the time.
Granted that Neil Young, as the christened 'godfather of grunge'
had been doing much the same thing for twenty years already,
but it had to be digested and reformed (regurgitated?) by the
neXt generation to seem like something fresh. Taking rock 'n'
roll out of the arenas, and back to the garage! As Martha
Stewart says "It's a good thing".
Now we're back to all this Britney/Backstreet junk, time for
another revolution, what?
RR,
who saw Nirvana once at SF's Cow Palace but was coming down
with the flu, and left after 3 songs (actually I was there to see
L7 who were, like, cool, man...)
Don Rowe wrote:
> --- blonde in the bleachers
>
> > Nirvana and Cobain changed the
> > landscape of music in the
> > 90s and brought back music that was original and
> > music that had something
> > to say. His death is as much a milestone as that of
> > Jimi Hendrix, Janis
> > Joplin or Jim Morrison.
>
> I'm genuinely curious about this. To me, Nirvana is a
> band that produced, at best, one or two half-decent
> albums. In addition to himself, Cobain also managed
> to kill the use of real musical dynamics in rock
> music. The grunge musical equation of "heavy
> distortion = Chorus" is today, as cliche as the guitar
> licks and panty-dancers of the pop-metal bands they
> were reacting to.
>
> In fact, there's a credible argument to be made that
> Cobain & Co. ushered in the precipitous fall of Rock's
> overall appeal as a genre to it's lowest levels in
> history. That the major label publicity machine
> attempted to counteract this by making Cobain's
> suicide look like some kind of martyrdom to rock 'n
> roll creativity, and that so many people subsequently
> bought into it, simply escapes me.
>
> In any case, there's hardly a legacy to equal the
> likes of Hendrix & Joplin ... though I'll grant you
> that Morrison's self-indulgence makes a somewhat
> better comparison.
>
> Just my take on it ... and one for which I'll beg
> forgiveness if I've seemed a bit harsh. I really
> would like to hear what others think about it.
>
> Don Rowe
>
>
>
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