Scott Brinton

Kurt Cobain was never Generation X

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“What else should I be/ All apologies/ What else could I say/ Everyone is gay/ What else could I write/ I don’t have the right/ What else should I be/ All apologies.”
—“All Apologies,” by Nirvana, 1993

I was driving north on the Meadowbrook Parkway, headed to the Herald recently, and that song –– that hauntingly beautiful song –– came on the radio. Instantly, I was transported back to 1993, when Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was 26, and so was I.

“All Apologies,” which revealed Nirvana’s vulnerable side, was all you heard on the radio back then. To me, it summed up the subconscious guilt felt by so many in Generation X –– the generation born between the early 1960s and 1980, yours truly included.

We were named Gen X because, in those days at least, we were supposed to stand for nothing. We were a generation without a cause or movement. We had not known the crushing poverty of the Great Depression. We had not saved the world from totalitarianism in World War II or Korea. We had not banded together to fight racism during the civil rights movement or protest the Vietnam War.

According to the folklore of the time, we existed off the largess of the generations that came before us. We were self-centered, ungrateful coffeehouse slackers.

To me, “All Apologies” was one Gen Xer’s mea culpa, a plaintive appeal for forgiveness for having come of age during a period of relative normalcy in our country’s history, when the nation was apparently at peace. The Iron Curtain had been asunder in 1989, and the former Soviet Union was in tatters, bankrupted by an unrelenting arms race that left East and West with a litany of psychoses. The U.S. and the USSR had spent five decades playing chicken with nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating life on earth. Suddenly we were friends. How strange it was. Couple all of this with a deep recession that left hundreds of thousands of young people jobless, and it was a confusing, at times scary era.

Nirvana emerged from the flannel-clad Seattle grunge scene in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a hyper-kinetic, rageful trio known for its incisive lyrics and transcendent melodies. Cobain’s suicide in his Seattle mansion in April 1994 shocked the rock world.

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