Friday, December 3, 2004

Archive: The orchestrating of Kurt Cobain

April 5, 2004

NPR's Morning Edition this morning included an unbelievably pretentious "retrospective" (get real--I think even Jimi Hendrix's career lasted longer) on grunge-rock legend, heroin overdose victim, and fellow Pacific Northwesterner Kurt Cobain on the tenth anniversary of his death.

It was truly amazing. One of Cobain's biographers (plural? as in, the subject requires more than one? again--get real) compared Nirvana to the Beatles and compared Cobain himself--I am not making this up--to J.D. Salinger. The latter comparison, of course, was based on the fact that Cobain wrote a lot of variations on the same four-chord song about how much it sucked to be a misunderstood middle class white junkie teenager. (Good lord. They do know--don't they?--that Holden Caufield narrated Catcher in the Rye, but he didn't write it--that it was written by an adult, ironically using the voice of an angst-ridden teenager?)

It sounded to me like the same sort of obvious play toward the younger demographic that apparently led to Bob Edwards' recent faux promotion. Well, if today's twenty-somethings plan on running things in a few years, they'd better know the hard truths now. So NPR--lucky NPR--got this letter:


Dear Morning Edition:

Re: Marcie Sillman's appreciation of Seattle grunge legend Kurt Cobain (4/5/04):

With due respect to the claims of artistic and social significance by critics and fans of Cobain's music, I'm afraid the real test is yet to come: Twenty years from now, will people who came of age listening to Nirvana discover, to their horror, that they're humming along to an easy-listening orchestral version of "Sliver" in the frozen food aisle of their supermarket?

After all, kids, even Bob Edwards was young once. We'll see if it gets read on the air.

(Update: 4/9/04: Got home to find a phone message from a nice but time-pressed NPR production person, wanting to talk to me about using some of my letter. Hah! Unfortunately, after two days of phone tag, I missed my 15 minutes of fame--this time.)


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