Chicken Little

Music always reminds me of times in my life. Once I heard a teacher say that for a particular generation, they will always remember when JFK was shot. For me, I will always remember the moment I heard Kurt Cobain was dead (and less than a decade later, when the twin towers fell). I was hanging out in my best friend’s basement, the place where I first saw Dune (the old one) and listened to my friends’ love of Ween. There was a huge old TV in that room and I was just lying on some cot behind the couches when the news came on at 11 pm. Now I’m listening to Nirvana and it feels so bittersweet. A flood of old MTV comes back, when I loved Liquid Television and Aeon Flux (the cartoon) and waited for Smells Like Teen Spirit to play or long-haired Anthony Keidis to sing (I had the biggest crush on AK when I was 16). It reminds me of every generational battle of “turn that noise down!” when you only want to turn it up because otherwise you can’t find yourself. And this is now called “classic rock”!

Update: Here is a YouTube piece about Cobain. It covers that early 90s era briefly and does a good job of describing how life was like back then (basically, lack of internet and games were pixelated still).