Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)

It was twenty years ago today that rock musician Kurt Cobain, unable to deal with the pressures of fame and mainstream success in popular music, shot himself to death after his band, Nirvana, had shaken rock and roll to its foundations by rebelling against the safe, artificial and contrived MTV pop of the late eighties.  Nirvana had come along at the right time, debuting with a raw, basic sound that slowly built up a following under the radar screen of the music "industry."  It then took the country by storm and gave voice to a generation of disenfranchised, disaffected Americans - my generation - who hadn't been heard from before because too many people wouldn't listen.

I've discussed at length how Nirvana shook things up with their Nevermind album in 1991, so I won't run over that same old ground.  But I'm beginning to second-guess my own observation of how the pimps and purveyors of pablum pop eventually took over once again and returned popular music to the miserable state of being it was in back in 1990, as if Cobain and his band had never existed, and how rock has been slowly disappearing from the airwaves and from what few record stores remain these days.  Because if you dig deep enough, you'll find several rockers who still make brutally honest music that speaks for the disenfranchised and the downtrodden.  And Nirvana's music still speaks to them twenty years on.

One regrettable fact I've never been able to express verbally, lest I choke on the words, is that Madonna changed popular music irrevocably in the 1980s by making the promotional video more important than the music it was supposed to promote and also making it possible for performers like Britney, Miley, and Gaga to pollute the airwaves with their mindless, artificial, synthesized dance-pop for years to come. Although Nirvana ultimately couldn't reverse the trend of style over musical substance (which also allowed toxic "boy bands" to prosper), Kurt Cobain still became a hero for people for whom music meant more than just inconsequential noise or a dodge and a hustle.  He remains in death the conscience of rock and roll that he was in life.  And no matter how bad twenty-first-century pop gets (and there's more of it each year!), there will always be rock and roll bands who, despite lack of airplay in today's rock-unfriendly radio establishment, will not be silenced and will not stop until they are heard.  And not even then.  They'll keep on keeping on, and they will not waver, if only to pay tribute to the rocker who inspired them to do so . . .even if Kurt Cobain was too fragile a soul to keep on going himself.