RIP 2010

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

Knowing who Kurt Cobain was in the early 90's didn't mean you knew anything about music. GD mentioned Kobe Bryant - I agree. If you weren't a)in college at the time AND b)in Seattle at the time I might even give you a pass for not being close enough to the affected demographic.

I think you over estimate how pervasive such things are when you're not involved to the geek level. After all, I was a college student. A college student living in dorms. A college student who almost flunked out because I was spending all of my time screwing around with college students and consuming an awful lot of pop culture. None of them were particularly bothered by my cluelessness. It seems only in the hindsight of future years that people are shocked that some icon of culture was unknown. Kind of like all the kids in the '60s who didn't care for Rock and Roll or the other kids in the '70s who never heard about Woodstock until well after it was history.

Yes, it was a gap in my caring that lead to me not particularly knowing who Kurt Cobain was (though I'm sure I would have recognized any Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden (who were much more prominent to me due to their regular appearances on Almost Live) song as one I'd heard before). But up until the moment he died, I think it would have been much more shocking to my peers that I lived in Seattle and didn't drink coffee than that I didn't know who Kurt Cobain was.

It was when he killed himself that everybody -- to my experience -- started acting like he was the central gravitational force of their emotional/spiritual lives. A bigger version of that thing from high school where some kid gets hit by a car and suddenly everybody was his closest friend.

This isn't to say he wasn't an important figure, just that he wasn't an important figure unless you were already steeped in the relatively limited arena in which he was so important.

And this all completely ignores the fact that by 1993 the general sentiment in Seattle was that Grunge was past its time and wouldn't the rest of the country kindly shut up because most of us weren't wearing flannel and knitwear. We even shaved sometimes.