Danny Goldberg knew Kurt Cobain for only the final few years of Cobain’s short life, but as Nirvana’s manager—and something of a father figure—Goldberg had a rare vantage point from which to experience Cobain’s rapid ascent and tragically blunt end. So, by necessity, Goldberg’s Serving The Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain blurs the line between biography and memoir. In Serving The Servant, Goldberg manages to both give Cobain the credit he deserves for a seismic pop culture shift and to portray him as a regular human being. He admits as much when he claims not to have been as aware of Cobain’s drug use as others in their inner circle were, focusing instead on the intricacies of recording and promotion. Goldberg doesn’t let Cobain off the hook completely. At one point, he refers to Cobain as exuding “an odious junkie smugness.” In March of 1994, Cobain overdosed and went into a coma; Goldberg foolishly hoped it might be a wake-up call. By early April, Cobain was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Serving The Servant arrives 25 years later, almost to the day. Goldberg spoke at Cobain’s funeral, and was mocked by naysayers for treating him too reverently—apparently pouring your heart out isn’t punk. Goldberg clearly loved Cobain, and he humanizes him with the kind of small stories that wouldn’t necessarily make sense for a more sweeping biography, like the fact that Cobain cherished The Chipmunks Sing The Beatles so much that he owned four copies. Goldberg knew Cobain intimately, but admits, too, that “Sometimes I felt as close to him as a brother and other times he seemed a galaxy removed, barely perceptible.” Goldberg conveys that split nicely—and, perhaps more importantly, humanely—in his telling of the Cobain story. Source: avclub.com
Rock history usually accepts that Grunge started in Seattle with the record label Sub Pop, or at least that Sub Pop was a major player in the growth of the scene. Sub Pop was founded in 1988 by Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman. The first Sub Pop releases included Soundgarden, Mudhoney (whose lead singer, Mark Arm, is credited with first applying the term 'grunge' to his band’s music) and Green River (a forerunner of Pearl Jam). In 1988, Subpop released the first Nirvana album, Bleach, before the band signed to a major label. In 1991, Nirvana signed to the David Geffen Company who initially pressed only 40,000 copies of Nevermind and expected it to be a minor indie success. Instead it sold millions of copies and replaced Michael Jackson at number one on the Billboard charts six weeks after its release, an event that has been given symbolic meaning in terms of the replacement of the ‘old guard’ of music and the arrival of grunge in the mainstream. Overwhelmingly, the main themes of the grunge songs are alienation and depression, but with an ironic sneer–‘just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you,’ Cobain sings on ‘Territorial Pissings’.
Tolerance of racial differences and support of women were dominant themes in the politics of grunge. Along with this tolerance of difference came a mistrust of authority, and a deep cynicism towards big corporations. By asking questions about equality and wealth within society, issues of power became central to grunge. While some believe grunge lasted until the demise of Soundgarden in 1997, regardless of the exact timing, grunge is generally considered to have been over by the late 1990s. Cobain displayed what Allan Moore (2002) called ‘third person’ authenticity, having been praised for being able to ‘speak the truth of his own culture’. The way that Cobain has often been referred to as the ‘spokesperson for his generation’ is an indicator of this claim. This can be connected to what Weisethaunet and Lindberg (2010) describe as ‘Folkloric Authenticity.’ Edward Larsen (Selling out: Grunge and Globalization) argues that the contradictions contained in grunge reflect the contradictions being experienced in Western capitalist societies at this time. Pearl Jam (with their supposed feud with Nirvana in 1992) were denigrated for a perceived "lack of authenticity" by NME: "Nirvana’s rise was a beautiful, unpremeditated explosion. Geffen expected Nevermind to shift a few thousand units, and it shifts a few million. But Pearl Jam’s meteoric triumph… What you get is solid AOR, circa 1974 – nothing new."
Seattle was considered the headquarters of the grunge scene. But one revealing article at this time took a critical view of the most successful grunge artists, namely Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam and Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins. Their ‘honesty’, previously praised, had become ‘whining’; their newest albums were ‘diaries’ and therefore were ‘not art’; their authenticity was questioned (Sutherland, 1993). A week after Cobain’s death was reported, a Soundgarden live review said: ‘Before the initial shockwaves from Cobain’s death abated, pundits were debating whether the death also symbolised a funeral wreath for the Seattle scene in general’ (Lewis, 1994). Uncut magazine concluded his suicide wasn't abnormal, that ‘it all pointed to a bad end – his family history, his initial free spirit suppressed by Ritalin, leaving him a profoundly disaffected, morbidly weird, that is, not one of us’ (Stubbs, 2004). He was portrayed as a moody ‘artist’: ‘you could be sitting next to him, but he still seemed a million miles away’ (Lamacq, 2004). Cobain's suicide was portrayed as an image of all that was wrong with ‘Generation X’, and was used by the media to try to explain that generation, which they mostly were not a part of.
It has been argued by some academics that since its inception in the early 1990s the Riot Grrrls movement suffered the same fate of commercial incorporation as grunge. The appropriation of the message of Riot Grrrls by ‘mainstream’ performers such as Alanis Morissette took away the original DIY alternative message of the movement. As Schilt (2003) notes: ‘It was a realistic assumption that girls inspired by Bikini Kill would start their own bands. But how realistic was it for girls to aspire to be the next Alanis Morissette?’ In 2004, Spin’s ‘20 Greatest Grunge Albums of All Time’ places Hole (Live Through This) at number 7, L7 (Bricks are Heavy) at number 11 and Babes In Toyland (Spanking Machine) at number 16. One woman from the grunge movement who has not been forgotten is Courtney Love. Some journalists recognized parallels between her and rock’s other infamous widow, Yoko Ono (or even rock’s other destructive blonde stereotype, Nancy Spungen).
Most references to Hole and Courtney Love in the NME were universally flattering. She was hailed as a groundbreaking musician and her strong personality and forceful opinions praised (see Walsh, 1991). But after Cobain's death, a number of bands released songs reportedly aimed at Love – for example, Nine Inch Nail’s ‘Starfuckers Inc’, or Tori Amos’ ‘Professional Widow’ (including the line ‘Starfucker just like my daddy’). As regards the Nine Inch Nails song, this was apparently the result of a sexual encounter between Courtney Love and Trent Reznor. Love’s comeback to Reznor’s subsequent attacks on her was to suggest that ‘Three Inch Nails’ would be a more appropriate name for his band. Douglas Kellner (1998) describes Generation X as excessively exposed to mass media's influence, where ‘life is rendered simply devoid of value, as impoverished social conditions breed anger, apathy and violence’. Brabazon (2005) believes that the most persistent portrayal of Generation X has been ‘as bored, lethargic, over-educated, underemployed sophisticates.’
For example, in Serving the servants: An analysis of the music of Kurt Cobain (1995), Duane Fish examines the artistry of Cobain’s work through his lyrics, and concludes that Cobain failed in his attempt to create his own form of art by being absorbed into the corporate mainstream, and that this failure led to his suicide. Sherry Ortner also notes in Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World (1998), that members of other ethnic groups did not feel connected to the idea of Generation X. Ortner argues that ‘both the source and the target of the Generation X imagery is the white middle class.’ Ultimately, grunge was colonized and incorporated into the larger field of popular music, but its ‘downfall’ was connected to condemnation from a hypocritical press. The 90s’ (and grunge in particular) were portrayed as a revisiting of 1960s ideals, but in a disillusioned and cynical way that turned the focus onto the self, wary of seeking a societal change. Grunge is not remembered today as something that changed the world because it was never framed by the media in a way that would have allowed this idea to take hold. Its association in the media with an allegedly slack, apathetic Generation X and with the tragic figure of Cobain created a negative context for its ultimate evaluation. —"Grunge: Music and Memory" (2016) by Catherine Strong
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