Recommendations of the Editorial team
For me, Nirvana was a classic record store discovery. Something like that happens less and less. I was in Rocks in your head in New York and asked the woman behind the counter: “What’s new?”
She put on “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I thought: “Wow. Someone managed to combine metallica and rem.” The term “grunge” was strange to me, and I didn’t know that it would be a phenomenon. I only knew that I heard something important. Really great music.
My favorite song on “Nevermind” was “lithium”. Kurt Cobain addressed something in culture that nobody had expressed before him: passionate ambivalence. “I’m so ugly, but that’s okay/ ‘Cause soy you.” He got to the point of what extreme feelings could trigger no feelings.
Nirvana – “Lithium”:
Cobain steered music in a completely new way. People who can watch the axis of music history revolve around them very rarely. Hendrix was decisive, Prince was decisive, Cobain too.
You can’t pull out his game through the big muff verror
On top of that, he was an excellent guitarist. I once said that to a Joe Satriani fan, and that made it really angry. But you can’t think of Cobain for a large songwriter and one average guitarist – because he would not have written these songs without the guitar. You can’t pull out his game through the big muff verror, that was essential for his music, and his changed tunings were incredibly influential.
I think of Nirvana, then I also think of the Bad Brains, the sex pistols. All of these bands were radical and idiosyncratic and offset, but their songs are incredibly melodic.
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When it comes to emerald or a diamond, you can talk about purity. But in humans – that doesn’t hit
There is a piece on “Mistak Identity”, my first solo album after the dissolution of Living Color, that is, “Saint Cobain”. I will never forget the day I learned about his suicide. Such an immense success that Nirvana experienced looks traumatic.
And something else happened to him what was a shame in my eyes: Because of the success of Nirvana, he always had to defend himself against the accusation that he would have sold and restore this appearance of flawless purity. When it comes to emerald or a diamond, you can talk about purity. But in humans – that doesn’t matter. That is dangerous.
Think: artistic purity. Racial purity. Although I think Cobain was actually perfect in a certain way: it was perfectly faulty.