It’s been tough, this month. Lots going on. Nothing going on. It’s not spring yet. Oh sure, it sprung, but then it ran away and hid again. It’s hard sometimes to get one’s groove on when These Economic Times™ are bringing everyone down, when the networks are cancelling all my favorite teevee shows, when my grandmother can only wait for the cancer to overtake her, when a new virulent epidemic is on the sweep, when people are actually criticizing our fair president for all the myriad things it just wasn’t possible to do in The First One Hundred Days instead of lauding him for the admirable first leaps in the great climb out of the hole that’s been dug for him, when we’ve lost Bea Arthur, when finding a part-time day job is actually the height of my joy.

Oh, and another thing from this month: The 15 year anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death.

Truly, I’m ambivalent about this, as I was fifteen years ago. Then, I remember my dad saying, “It’s not like he’s John Lennon or Jimi Hendrix or something, what’s the big deal?” At the time, I had already been in and done my stint as a college radio deejay, and was one when ‘Nevermind’ hit the big time. So, y’know, I was already over him by the time Frances Bean was born. But it did feel like a big deal, and I didn’t know why.

I still sometimes see the young kids with the t-shirt with the Cobain head on it, and wonder why they wear it. Because he was cool, and then he died, and so he’ll always be cool, like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean — or Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon, for that matter, so that makes them cool by way of identification? Is that why we wear t-shirts of cool bands? I guess it is.

Fifteen years ago, I wasn’t really surprised by the suicide, because man, who could win in his situation? His wife was a nasty mess and he’d just become a father. His band was about as big as it could get, so the rest had to be downhill. He’d been upheld as the voice of a generation, and that’s a damn lot of pressure. He’d become a role model for kids everywhere and then one of his own and he kept singing songs that said “fuck you.”

Maybe those kids wearing his face on their chest are really just walking around saying what Cobain no longer can, representing him from beyond, and what those t-shirts really say, without saying it, is “fuck you.”

Now, I’m no music critic, and I’m also not a particularly big fan of Nirvana (with a capital N). But I like them, especially ‘Nevermind.’ (Because I’m a sucker for a good hook, and every last song on there had an awesome one.)(And also because it seemed like the most polished but least selfconscious record they had.)(Which is a great combination.) So I don’t have any deep or researched thoughts on the matter, and I don’t claim to totally know what I’m talking about here, and it’s probably true that Kurt Cobain wasn’t Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon. But they both had their distinctive ways of being creative and political and saying “fuck you,” didn’t they? I mean, Hendrix psychedelicized the freaking National Anthem. Lennon dared to compare his band’s popularity with that of Jesus. He & Yoko held a “bed-in” for peace, for chrissakes.

I don’t know about you, but if I was just a greasy grunger with some hard-edged melodic ways to say “fuck you” and then I was held up as the voice of a generation — an entitled, ignorant, despondent, celebrity-culture kind of generation, I might want out of that situation, too. I might offer an ironic “fuck you” to the ones who held me up and co-opted my voice, and bail.

And leaving that generation with a role model for “fuck you”… well, that is loaded a kind of politics all its own.

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