April 8th, 2009
Kurt Cobain Day
Today is the 15th anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain (or the day he was found dead, anyway; he supposedly killed himself on April 5th, 1994). It’s also my birthday today. But hey, it could be a whole lot worse — I know a few people whose birthday is September 11th. I remember the day he died, I was in college at the University of Maryland and my girlfriend at the time was taking me to dinner and then the circus in D.C. for my birthday. I was sitting around our house with my roommates that afternoon waiting for my gf to come by and the news came on the alt-rock radio station, WHFS. I guess I was kinda bummed, not entirely shocked. And then we went to the circus and I saw elephants and those daredevil motorcycle dudes inside that giant “Cage Of Death,” and everything was okay, mostly.
Back around the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death in 2004, I wrote a piece on the comeback of Sub Pop Records in the decade after Nirvana for Baltimore City Paper, and interviewed both Sub Pop president Jonathan Poneman and the label’s general manager, Megan Jasper. We got to talking a bit about Kurt, and they had some pretty interesting things to say, things that still hold true five years later and 15 years after Kurt’s passing:
“An event like his death is understandable to mark,” Poneman says. “But between that and the anniversary of Nevermind and Courtney [Love] releasing the diaries and [former editor of the magazine The Rocket] Charles Cross–who never gave a shit about the band when they were up and coming in Seattle–writing his book, it never fucking stops.
“It’s a really incredibly painful part of my life, and in saying what I’m about to [I mean] absolutely no disrespect to Kurt Cobain, but I think the whole thing was colossally overblown,” he continues. “Not his killing himself, there’s no words to summon how awful that is on so many levels. He was my friend. But the mythology that’s built up around him–it’s repulsive. And I think no one would be more repulsed than him. The idea of him as ‘the man who reshaped rock music for the ’90s,’ it’s like, he didn’t do that. It was this collaboration between radio, management, MTV, you know. . . . Admittedly the records are great, and because of the nature in which he departed from this world it lends itself to a mythic interpretation, but that was so much of what he wasn’t about.”
“There’s so much scar tissue with that stuff,” Jasper says quietly. “It’s 10 years later and I still have no perspective on it, it still just feels strange and weird and sad, and I don’t know that that will ever change. There was so much intensity, it was so intense. It was as good as it can get and as hard and terrible as it can get. And I definitely think about it a lot, it’s such a big part of what makes this label this label.
” The icon of Kurt became so intense that when he did die it was hard to understand what you were mourning,” she continues. “The challenge has been to remember the individual beneath all the layers of the mythology. And certainly, from a business standpoint we don’t want to milk the Nirvana stuff at all. To put out rereleases and make money off of them now when Sub Pop has already made a lot of money off of Nirvana just seems not right on a whole moral level.”
“In all due respect to everyone involved in that era, time moves forward and there’s always new bands and new music to get excited about,” Poneman concludes. “I would much rather it be that way than just keep toiling year in and year out with the same sorrowful cast of characters.”
