Kurt Cobain, 30 years ago his death. Because those who experienced punk loved it

Thirty years without Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana of grunge

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And looks that, rather than scruffy, we can define as “tattered”. Deliberately and provocatively. The first protagonists of this chaotic revolution performed in a New York club called Cbgb. There’s no point in remembering their name: those who appreciate them know them, others wouldn’t understand. Cobain, however, understood, and was one of his first musical inspirations.

Table Tennis Usa-Uk

The genre bounced, as had often happened before in the world of rock, from one side of the ocean to the other, and transformed from an almost isolated phenomenon to what in retrospect is defined as “punk 77”. Ugly, dirty, bad; according to some, with zero musical ability (goodness for you, you know what Art is) and, often, busy. The period was favorable: the wave of ’68 had died down and groups who “really knew how to play” were in fashion all over the world. It’s the golden age of funky and jazz-rock, but there was room for those who used a guitar or bass to vent their adolescence and the troubles of young adults. That’s how it was there.

Young Kurt’s culture broth

Cobain was only 10 years old in 1977, but it is precisely from that period that one’s tastes are fixed in the mind and soul.

Punk 77 didn’t last long, leaving room for new wave and those more refined (or, dare we say, “licked”?) musical genres that were popular in the 1980s. Long hair came back into fashion, but this time “clean”, as if it were treated with high-end cosmetic products. The protagonists of the rock music scene, on both sides of the ocean, were trendsetting but perhaps had lost, at least externally, that spirit of disruption that seemed to be grafted, up until that moment, into the roots of this musical genre. From ugly, dirty and bad to beautiful, clean and good: only with a few winks at the “reasonable concerns” of young people, but without exaggerating.

Yet, young people around the world did not always recognize themselves in these models. Cobain was one of them. The influence of the nihilism of the original punk (“Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it”, sang the Sex Pistols) carried him throughout his life. Even when Nirvana, almost unexpectedly, became perhaps the most famous group of the grunge wave, with Nevermind, the album that took them on the crest of the wave worldwide for a short but intense period. He didn’t know how, he didn’t want to adapt to success. And his flame burned too quickly, until that fateful April 5, 1994. «Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on stage», he writes in his farewell letter.