Art that has long lasting value cannot be appreciated by the majorities. … Here today, gone tomorrow because yesterday’s following was nothing more than a tool in every individuals need for self-importance, entertainment, and social rituals. The conspiracy toward success in America is immediacy. In what reads like the more hopeless counterpart to David Foster Wallace’s meditation on popular taste, Cobain bemoans the American propensity for fads: I like to infiltrate the mechanics of a system by posing as one of them, then slowly start the rot from the inside of the empire. I like to calmly and rationally discuss my views in a conformist manor even though I consider myself to the extreme left. What might at first appear as an inability to embody the ideals of Bertrand Russell, Galileo, and Eleanor Roosevelt regarding conformity, opinion, and conviction is in fact Cobain’s subversive strategy for changing the status quo from the inside: I like to blame my parents generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media & government to deface the movement by using the Mansons and other Hippie representatives as propaganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases, and in turn the baby boomers became the ultimate, conforming, yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced. I like to complain and do nothing to make things better. In another piece, Cobain offers a mediation on culture underpinned by deep self-awareness with undertones of self-loathing: Hello, this is me saying ‘everything is basically raining, dull, and OK.’ The book begins with a meandering letter Cobain wrote to Melvins drummer Dale Crover in 1988, discussing the first glimmers of fame, the mediocrity of late-night television, the superficiality of publicity, and the decision to name the band Nirvana: The posthumously released Kurt Cobain: Journals ( public library) offers an unprecedented glimpse of the modern icon’s inner life, from an anatomy of his eclectic influences - John Lennon, the Stooges, the Sex Pistols, PJ Harvey, Public Enemy, David Bowie - to a chronicle of his tumultuous psychoemotional landscape to sketches and drawings that would later grace Nirvana album covers and that, like those of Sylvia Plath, Queen Victoria, and Richard Feynman, have been acclaimed for their artistic acumen. Twenty-seven years later, after a debilitating struggle with addiction and depression, he took his own life with a shotgun to the head and became the tragic patron-saint of the grunge generation. On February 20, 1967, legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain took his first breath.
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