One of those people is Eric Fredericksen, who wrote after Kurt survived an overdose that we "dodged a fairly large bullet" (he wrote it in The Stranger, but because Stranger online archives only go back so far, the piece is excerpted in the Times here):
I was thinking that morning about death as a career move, as a way of moving beyond criticism into the realm of myth. About James Dean, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, and Sid Vicious. I was talking about the movie we would all go to see in ten or twenty years time, when our generation had acceded to the thrones of Hollywood and could greenlight the Kurt Cobain biopic. What kind of massive import would have attached itself to his life by then? Would he be the icon our age group was symbolized by? Would we wallow in the same sort of cheap nostalgia our predecessors had? I figured I knew the answer to this last one. Yes. I saw the death of one of our most famous members coagulating our scattershot essence and packaging it, replacing a wealth of possibility and a tendency to resist neat categorization with a simplistic caricature nearly as stupid as the hippie. And if we bought into it (by seeing the movie, telling our children cute stories about meeting our spouses in the mosh pit, by losing critical perspective on ourselves) we would confirm media stereotypes and take our neutered place in the procession of generations.But we brought it on ourselves: Our style, in music, culture and fashion is an era-surfing frenzy of appropriation and recontextualization of previous trends, a semi-knowing irony mixed with a closeted love for the kitschy products of our past. How could we then avoid the reductive analyses these past generations were subject to?
I know this is hateful of me but I was glad (that Cobain was expected to pull through) largely because what I mostly wish for the tortured artist figures of my time is for them to age ungracefully, not burn out but fade away. We would then hear and see their work itself, not endlessly recount myths about boys who felt too much, who left us while young and beautiful and just beginning to reach for the peak of their art—the bullshit—that prevents a realistic appraisal of all our predecessors' dead, the bullshit that would confirm what many of us already fear: We're no different than anything which came before us.
This is the same bullet that Kurt the exhibition dodges, by being unworshipful and even unwarm about Kurt. Or does it? Why do we need to think we're so special and smart and bullet-dodging, anyway?
I hope tonight's talk gets into it. Starting at 7, Fredericksen will be joined by music producer Steve Fisk and artist Gretchen Bennett, the discussion moderated by the intelligent EMP curator Jacob McMurray.
