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in utero sounds like a brain damaged man collapsing in exhaustion, addiction and madness.
nevermind sounds like the honeymoon period of floating on addiction, just before the burn out.
bleach sounds like a pop band playing grunge covers.
the early stuff sounds like an art rock band who abandoned their experimentation due to financial pressure and the need to make commercial music.
nirvana epitomised almost everything about rock music they claimed to despise. kurt was the biggest diva junkie hedonist, only he was too self aware and ironic to believe that was what he had actually become. they might have changed the style but the drug taking and squalor remained.
this whole liberal purist attitude - ok you're not racist, sexist or homophobic, great. but you won't committ to any kind of meaning either. kurt wanted to have his cake and eat it too. be an underground punk band but also be the biggest mainstream band on the planet. act like a king chosing who is in the in crowd and who isnt. he championed this kind of puritan liberal revolt in the entertainment industry that has intensified today. im not against it, its just a kind of dead end.
his life ends up looking like the sad quest for meaning in a totally shallow place. the niaeve belief in the power of what is not a particularly great art form ends up looking quite pathetic. theres only so much you can do with punk and it was pretty much done before nirvana even started.
nirvana was a kind of weird post modern punk tribute covers entertainment act. they ripped off and plagiarised so much, and desperately tried to make some sort of grand statement out of it all. but they ended up falling into cliches and coming up with this weird proto emo stuff.
i kind of think nirvana werent so much a punk act as a kind of folk act singing about punk.
i mean, ok - are you really so special and different from some other rockstar because you're a hipster and care for excluded minorities? really? how much of this is just narcissism.
axl didnt exactly turn out to be some sort of homophobic racist. 80's mainstream rock wasnt exactly the primary source of oppression for minorities and women. was it really worth taking that seriously that you'd want to oppose it so ferociously? at least kiss and motley crue never took themselves seriously to fall for their own myth. what did nirvana really bring to the table? the undercurrent of the whole thing is nihilism but kurt never managed to truly face the nihilism, or overcome the massively overstated attachment he had to a certain style of music. he believed in what he was doing and tried to find something transcendental in post punk bands and underground music but there's just not anything there.
if nirvana did anything new it was to express something that hasnt really been expressed in culture before, which is this kind of strange inability to escape contradiction, this mixture of bliss and agony. but kurt didnt develop any other interests than drugs and guns and he ended up hating music. he wasnt able to escape the cliches and traps of life, and didnt seem to be able to make any kind of pact with his misery.
in other respects kurts life was a success, he went from being almost homeless to a millionaire. he managed to spare his daughter the pain of divorce which destroyed him, but by committing suicide. he left her with millions.
really in the end i think it was a classic case of destruction through wealth. happens to working class people who become millionaires. this phenomenon has been studied. you give a poor person way too much money at once they destroy themselves. it doesnt happen in every case but its quite common.
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