Kurt Cobain is dead?

Alan Partridge : So, who's your favourite singer, then?

Ben : Oh, uh, anything really, you know... Frank Sinatra. Kurt Cobain.

Alan Partridge : Who's he?

Ben : Nirvana. Blew his head off with a gun.

Alan Partridge : Why?

Ben : He was depressed.

Alan Partridge : Why, were they not very good?

Ben : No, they were great.

Alan Partridge : Someone should have told him

Aviici is dead too.... It happens more then one would think and you would wonder.... They had it all fame, money and whatever they wanted.... Won't say friends because they seem to come out of the woodwork when one has money.

Cos his gf killed him and framed it like a suicide...

I think it’s partly because he was such an anti-hero at a time when ‘rock stars’ of the late 80s and early 90s thought they were gods, because they were treated like that. All big production with a slick, polished image and a kind of mystique like they weren’t like normal people. Kurt was like that odd kid in school who listened to 70s Norwegian punk and didn’t make a big deal about going out of their way to be a misfit.

It was also a time when pop music culture was dominated by hip-hop and rave. Nirvana were like a direct kick in the balls on behalf of everyone that hated that scene. Nirvana gave those people a cultural scene to call their own. Then there’s the tragic ‘romantic poet’ thing with this quiet and intense guy who never felt comfortable with all the fame and then died young.

He captured angst and turmoil in his music that teenagers just identified with. The music was just something totally different. Nirvana were massive, everyone everywhere knew their music, and they were at the pinnacle of their career when out of the blue he killed himself. It’s one of those moments in your life, that if you were around for you’ll never forget. I remember people in school being absolutely devastated by his death. But to this day, to my generation at least, you turn on that music and you are back to those teenage years again. He had so much talent and so much promise, and just like that it was gone but the music lives on and it’s as good today as it was almost 30 years ago.

splashuum wrote: »

He once gigged in a small pub in Cork

Sir Henry's

Played there as a support act to Sonic Youth. Oh, if I had a time machine that would surely be one of the gigs I'd like to go back to and visit.

Sam Quentin wrote: »

Right ok fair enough...but why the fascination?

Why the fascination with anything?

Probably difficult to understand it now, looking back on an event that happened 26 years ago, but I remember the day after he died, there were crowds of Nirvana fans gathered at the plaza around the Central Bank on Dame St. I certainly wasn’t one of them, but there aren’t many cultural figures that can invoke that kind of spontaneous reaction.

Sam Quentin wrote: »

Well I suppose that explains it. But rave and pop and even Ska/Mod were a million times better than that stuff in the 80s early 90s.. so basically it was kinda crap
emmmm not popular or not as popular!?

Says you, there’s a helluva lot of people who’d disagree. To each their own, Kurt was an icon in his day to a lot of people.

Difficult to sum this up, are you talking about fans of his music or people who might be talking about it when referencing something in popular culture, some context might help.
Nirvana were already massive before he killed himself but his fame and their music went into a different stratosphere after he committed suicide. His music resonated with a generation of music fans. Nirvana were the epitome of the 90s he was the voice of a disaffected youth people related to Nirvanas music on a deep level, suicide is shocking, a gun to the head when you had the world at your feet even moreso. It affected me at the time as a huge fan of the band and as a teenager of that era who had a relatively difficult upbringing. Cobain for many was a representation of the struggles that life could throw at you at that time, people really loved the music, without it life would have been alot duller, Cobain was a huge loss.