Kurt Cobain meant a lot of things to a lot of different people. It wasn’t just him and Nirvana, but they were part of a cultural shift in music, style and attitude that pockets of hipster college students, stoner-metalhead kids and thrift store-shopping punks all over North America had been a part of since the late 80’s.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind was more than a song lyric; it was a philosophy.

They said it was because our parents were divorced and we were bitter because we had no jobs and too much education. After feeling like everything was so fraudulent for so long, the early 90’s felt real in a way that, finally, the mainstream understood. Or, it could have been that suddenly, apathy and sarcasm as a lifestyle choice had become popular. I know in my early-20’s-naiveté, I thought The World Had Changed and that it was a permanent one.

How can ten years have gone by since Kurt Cobain’s death?
Do you remember where you were when you heard the news?

I was 24 years old and staying in the hospital due to some kidney problems that I was having. I was depressed because I had a nagging suspicion that I would be spending my 24th birthday eating cake off hospital Styrofoam in a pair of borrowed pajamas.

The News came as such a huge shock. It was pathetic, sad and it hurt more than it should have. This was a sudden irrevocable shift and a defining moment for a lot of us. This wasn’t Jim Morison’s bloated overdosed corpse in a Paris hotel room. It definitely wasn’t so many vomit-drowned rock stars we had rolled our smirking eyes over. This was somebody who was as sensitive and fucked up as we were who took a bunch of heroin and then stuck a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Were you riveted to your TV or radio, sharing the same queasy feeling, as Courtney read his note? Did you shiver like I did and did a lump form in your throat when Courtney rasped the question we all wanted to ask, “Why didn’t you just fucking stay?”

As tragic as all of this was, is it possible that a gunshot in a Seattle greenhouse smacked the mockingly smug and eye-rolling looks off our faces and snapped us out of our detached, “too cool” delusions? Did you start looking at the world with a little more gravity like I did? Or, did he just pave the way for the anemic boy bands and pneumonic teen popstresses that dominated the rest of the decade?

Whatever the case may be, I hope he’s sighing eternally in his Leonard Cohen afterworld.

Peace, Love, Empathy.