Archived Edition of Chromatic Musings

Simon on Kurt Cobain

Writing in The Age, Helen Razer struggles to cope with the Cobain myth. Rather clunkily, she kicks off "In the first quarter of the past decade, any kid with their antennae trained to pop culture knew and understood an object called Kurt." An object? And surely, erm, part of the problem was that while everyone thought they knew Kurt he kind of pointedly revealed that nobody ever quite understood him. But nice to reduce the man to an object as his memorial. It gets worse: "To gauge Cobain's popularity is simple: he claimed enough airtime, ink and eyeballs to be a bona fide celeb." He may also have made a record or two, we hear.