In a world filled with pretenders and opportunists, Cobain was the real thing, a unique and invaluable voice that stayed in the heads of lonely people everywhere. Friends or loved ones come and go, but he is THAT friend that stayed who screams in my head and also tells me “I am not alone”.
Kurt Cobain died 27 years ago at the age of 27. (A friend of mine, Dr Philip Merry told me to find synchronicity in the numbers: I was born on 17 July 1977). His death on April 5 1994 was one of the most influential and groundbreaking events of the 90s. It took place during a time when grunge rock music was at its prime. Their music videos were super-intense (Heart-Shaped Box still scares me and fascinates me) and MTV brought the world together when the Smells Like Teen Spirit video premiered. My mom and dad, my two sis, and my next door neighbours absolutely hated it when I turned up the volume during Dive, Breed, Scoff, School, Endless Nameless, Scentless Apprentice, Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter, and even the hits like Lithium, Come As You Are and Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Our generation loved Kurt Cobain and his music because it was so different and wasn’t staged - it was authenticity and comes from a place of pain. We have started to feel the effects of anxiety and angst and understood what they were - so to have Kurt Cobain literally screaming into a mic about how f*cked up his head is made people feel good - it was validation for Gen X-ers which our parents didn’t understand. The generations after us ie. Millennials and Gen Z experienced hand-me down stuff (and we’ll feature each generation covering Kurt Cobain songs during the #NirvanaTributeVirtualFestival) but this podcast episode recorded two weeks prior to the batch-taping event on our PodFest Asia - Live In Clubhouse session serving as a precursor, proved that Kurt Cobain was so ahead of his time and spoke to not just my generation but also all the generations that came after. It features spontaneous conversations with fellow podcasters, educators, new bandmates, spanning across generations and geographies and cathartic moments when audiences raised their hands to come on stage to provide their own impromptu rendition of “Come As You Are” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”.
