There’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity.
Kurt Cobain on selling out. (The Commonplace Book Project)
The Commonplace Book Project is a daily post based on Ray Bradbury’s advice to aspiring writers: read a poem, a short story, and an essay every day for 1000 days. These posts start with a quote and go wherever the rabbit hole leads. Follow The 1000 Day MFA publication so you don’t miss a thing.
“I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.” — Kurt Cobain, Rolling Stone
One of these days I’m going to have to ask my kids — my older two are millennials, my youngest is solidly post-millennial — if there is a band that feels like the official biographer of their adolescences.
I think Ruby would say Panic! At the Disco. She’s young enough that I’m buying her t-shirts, still. I don’t know about Adrienne and Nick.
For me though? For me, it was Nirvana. Kurt Cobain’s music did for me what it did for about a gazillion Gen Xers. It put words to my fucked up life. It was something that my parents would never understand. It was mine.
Mine and everyone else born in the late 60s or early 70s.
Cobain hated that.
He was utterly disdainful of his own role as the “voice of a generation”. Central to his message was a rejection of what he saw as the crude, commercial motive of labelling an age group. The “Teen Spirit” satirised in Cobain’s most famous song is a deodorant aimed at young girls.
Sometimes things get bigger than you, I guess.
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The first time I read K.L. Going’s book Fat Kid Rules the World, maybe five or six years ago, it instantly became one of my books. One I knew that I’d read again. A story that shifted something in me.
It’s about a fat kid named Troy and the guitar god, Curt, who decides he wants to start a punk rock band with him. Even though Troy lied about knowing how to play the drums.
I feel like a lot of my career revolves around me trying to fix what felt in my childhood like fundamental wrongs. I’m constantly trying to make Andi pick Duckie or for Elliott and ET to find a way to stay together.
Fat Kid Rules the World fixes one of the world’s most fundamental wrongs. It imagines an alternate universe and saves Kurt Cobain from himself. At least in the space of this one story.
If you haven’t read it, you should.
I also absolutely love the movie based on the book.
As I was writing this post, I started to watch Soaked in Bleach. It’s a 2015 documentary of the days surrounding Cobain’s death. Heartbreaking. And kind of weird, with a definite bent toward the idea that he was murdered.
I don’t know. It made me too sad and I ended up turning it off and putting on Nirvana Unplugged instead. Classic. Kind of fun to see a very young Dave Grohl on the drums.
I found this debate.org . . . um, debate . . . about whether or not Nirvana (and especially Kurt Cobain) sold out interesting.
Here’s one of my favorites from Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach.
And Come as You Are. Seriously. Anthem of my life when I was 20.
Here’s a Time article about a mixtape Kurt Cobain made when he was 21 years old. I wonder if you have to be of a certain age to appreciate the real art of a mix tape.
You can listen to the whole mixtape here. It’s weird. The comments say that it sounds like he was trying to recreate an acid trip. Possible, I suppose. The Time article above lists all of the songs he sampled and it might be kind of fun to listen to all of them in a row one day.
This was fun. Dave Grohl and his mom on Stephen Colbert — Virginia Grahl talks about conversations she had with Kurt Cobain’s mother. Grahl talks about how his mother, who was a school teacher, encouraged his music. Including letting him go to Europe on tour when he was seventeen.
I ordered a copy of Kurt Cobain’s Journals. It’s full of reproductions of his actual journals. I’m fascinated by creative people’s notebooks and this book should be super interesting.
Today’s Poem:
Come as You Are by Kurt Cobain
Come as you are, as you were As I want you to be As a friend, as a friend As a known enemy
Take your time, hurry up Choice is yours, don’t be late Take a rest as a friend As an old
Memoria, memoria Memoria, memoria
Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach As I want you to be As a trend, as a friend As an old
Memoria, memoria Memoria, memoria
When I swear that I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun
Memoria, memoria Memoria, memoria (And I don’t have a gun)
When I swear that I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun No I don’t have a gun
Memoria, memoria
Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.
