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i can see the sexism in nirvana - women as angelic saviours of the emasculated male.
i still don't see what exactly nirvana did apart from repeat some sort of gesture of hedonistic nihilism. everything else is "shit" but they were good, or something. i really don't see what the hell these 'punk' gestures do but reaffirm a commitment to settling for the shittiness of entertainment culture, cos like, everything sucks man! that's why we need our heroin.
and my point wasn't that nirvana didn't do enough charity work. it's more like kurt never resolved the question that obsessed him which was basically what was he doing and what could music mean and be in our culture. you can't say they didn't explore these questions, but i think they knew they were painted themselves as the doomed romantic failures, keepers of the flame of authenticity in a corrupt world, and it's just another part of the posturing that makes up far too much of the story.
the truth about nirvana was that it was a pretty miserable and squalid experience, a lot of people leeched it and made some money off it, but the ugliness and suffering that kurt inflicted on himself is hardly heroic.
in the end, he wasn't prepared to turn his self awareness and sense of irony onto himself, not to the point where he could have just accepted his fate. that nirvana weren't really that important. that the stuff he wrote in his babbling suicide note is just insane, like it was worth dying for. like this immediate and niaeve feeling of connection to his music was really worth shooting himself to preserve. he could hate himself but he doesn't seem to have been able to laugh at himself in a way that wasn't psychotic/masochistic. in fact i think there's something very sick about his attitude, and the attitude of much indie music before and since then. that we can just have this direct emotional connection to the childlike purity and innocence of self expression. and this is what redeems us. i think its a load of shit.
i think buzzo was right and i saw the melvins live, and it was probably the best musical experience i'll ever have. of course it doesn't remotely translate to their recorded material. nirvana was ultimately a pop band. kurt ultimately did not escape the cliches because he was more fooled by them than he thought.
im critiquing them on their own terms. obviously that's not acceptable, since it implies a greater respect than simply saying they weren't "shit".
the quasi religious messianic cult worship some people have for that band is really a testament to everything bad about them. kurt deliberately played to this and he became a kind of post modern christ figure for the entertainment industry. his entire life was made into this romantic drama and the whole thing is a load of fucking bullshit. the stupid stories and mythologisation. it became a whole industry of idiots spouting off about the importance and artistic vision of what was really a very sad man who met a very sad end and had already collapsed intellectually and artistically long before his death.
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