Kurt Cobain has been dead 20 years.
My feelings about this are quite similar to how I felt when I received the news of his passing, which was stunned disbelief, followed by great sadness.
I was 19, and in college. It was a beautiful spring day. That’s what stands out, in my memory: the dew on the bright green grass, the chill in the air despite the warmth of the sun, the silence of a campus just waking up from winter.
People are still hearing Nirvana for the first time every day. But they are not hearing it quite as we did, the actual first time, when everything else on the radio sounded like Mötley Crüe.
Smells Like Teen Spirit is the song that got so popular Nirvana (or at least Kurt Cobain) found it embarrassing; that kind of success was, of course, the exact opposite of what they intended to do.
But if I had to come up with one song that encapsulated the feeling of leaving high school, leaving suburbia, trying to figure out what living in the (bigger) world meant, it’s this one. Even now, even 20 years on, it’s exhilarating listening to him launch into the chorus.
