Cobain

I was a mere 15 when Kurt Cobain died. Arguably younger than most of Nirvana's target audience. His music spoke to me in a way that no other music ever had. Perhaps it was the media, my age, or some strange cosmic conversion of everything at once but it was an awakening. Remove the lyrics. Take away the MTV spotlight, left with just the instrumentals and I remain as moved now as I was then. Kurt's lyrics were so raw and piercing they produced a bite that burned the roof of my soul.

Which is why, when I first heard of the Kurt Cobain exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, I was giddy to attend. I wanted to see first hand what Kurt's city would produce in his memory. It has been more than 16 years since his death rocked our city--the world. The changes in my life during those 16 years are monumental--too many to even attempt to list. I am now four years older than Kurt was when he died--at a mere 27 years old. I have lived into my thirties--married, two kids, college degrees in hand. But his music lives on as I continue to grow into an old age that Kurt will never see.

What I forgot to consider upon entering the exhibit is where it was being held, THE SEATTLE ART MUSEUM. Art, is by definition, someone else's interpretation of life. This fact eclipsed me upon entering this morning. I had such high expectations for what the museum would display, or rather, what they could display, I allowed my expectations to catapult. What I found was an exhibition of posers stifling Kurt's legacy. The only song left playing over and over again, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", arguably, one of Nirvana's most mainstream over played and mass marketed commercial songs. As I walked through the exhibit I couldn't help but wonder, what would Kurt think of all this?

The mainstays of the exhibit were not artifacts of Kurt's actual life, or even his music, but rather, how other artists interpreted him. How they exploited his life, his music, his fame for their own liking. What I was expecting was a glimpse into his life--not an artist's rendition there of. I left bemused at best, and severely let down by my own, overly ambitious expectations of SAM.

Depression began to set in as I walked toward the last portion of the exhibit--a darkened room with a video of Kurt playing, "Negative Creep". My senses were peaked but alas, left to fall again. In this room, where they could have played a series of Nirvana music videos, a variety of Kurt's music, which could have stood on their own to represent him in death, as he was in life, instead played a looped version of "Negative Creep," over and over and over and over and over again. Perhaps it was the museum's way of insinuating what they really thought of Kurt--a Creep. The music, the man, none of it was displayed in ways that allowed Kurt to speak for himself--to us. It was all about how others viewed him--and I just wasn't interested in an artist's rendition of the Man or his music.