Your Kindly Uncle William gives a fuck. I just can't hide it. Nirvana wasn't the band of the century, and Kurt was a mumbling shitwit and a record company stooge, but the point is, he was one of us.

Seriously. Nirvana wasn't supposed to make it. They were a talented garage band from a cow-town. They made some solid, tuneful records. This happens all the time and no one pays much attention. There was some glitch and all of a sudden every dirty, miserable fuck in Seattle had a camera in his face. All of a sudden, Kurt Cobain is supposed to be the voice of a generation. All of a sudden all of his friends who don't do anything notable enough to warrant media attention hate him. Nieman-Marcus starts selling pre-fucked up flannel shirts. This is not Kurt Cobain's fault. This is the result of a hideously bored nation of teenagers being force fed the same 2500 Classic Rock Tunes of the 60's and 70's from every direction and finally snapping under the strain. Grunge was new and it wasn't Michael Bolton. Everyone smelled something fresh and charged, now we have a nation of bored, dirty teenagers who look like the Brady Bunch meets Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids under the refrigerator. I'm appalled, you're appalled, but let's maintain our dignity here.

The worst-case scenario here is that the marketing dogfuckers who sold us Mr. Cobain in the first place are going to try to deify him now that he's never going to get old and bloated. There will be books, Box Sets, Kurt-sightings, and worse. We must close ranks and refuse. Listen to the his lyrics. We have enough problems without the world thinking this man was our poet laureate. He was a pop musician. He was not the best and brightest we had to offer. He was a junkie and a blithering idiot. He left behind a baby daughter. He was a fuck up.

My point here is that we are going to have to read the headlines every time we go into the 7-11, and they are going to say, the John Lennon of Generation X. The James Dean. The Bob Dylan, even though he's not dead yet. And this is bullshit. We do not need to be resold a dead man; we do not need him explained patiently to us as our second-rate version of some Boomer archetype. The man was not our Hendrix, our Morrison, our Janis fucking Joplin.