The user who created the video tagged it with "spinning grave" and "courtney love is fucking bitch." I think that watching the virtual Kurt aping Flavor Flav at the beginning of the video is the most jarring, but the creator of the video seems to focus mostly on Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name." That's understandable, not only because it's a sort of clever fingering of Courtney Love, who controls the right's to Cobain's likeness and is almost certainly the responsible party for him being a playable character in this game, but also because Bon Jovi essentially epitomizes the 80's stadium rock aesthetic that Nirvana is so often portrayed as being the antithesis of. I have a feeling that the real insult to the Cobain legacy contained herein is having "him" front "Comedown" by Bush, a shameless, talentless grunge also-ran that ranks among the more inexplicable bands to achieve popularity in the early to mid-90s.
When I first started to become a music fan as a kid, Nirvana was one of the first bands I gravitated towards. I was too young to be aware of Nevermind when it blew up and conquered the world, but I flipped for "Heart Shaped Box" when it came out on the radio. I talked my parents into getting me a copy of In Utero on cassette for an Easter present by claiming that "Rape Me" was an instrumental track. Kurt Cobain committed suicide around a month later. So my visceral reaction to this Guitar Hero video was to cringe in disbelief at this affront to his legacy. If you clicked on the video above, you probably did the same.
But that's a dangerous reaction. And it's one that, if we knew what was good for us, we probably shouldn't be having.
Generation X, the cohort of 1990s teenagers and young adults for whom Kurt Cobain will perpetually be identified as a patron saint, was never more united in anything than it was in rejection of baby boom generation in general and their romanticization of 1960s culture in particular. Gen X saw the baby boomers as a stifling hegemony of deluded narcissists bent on enshrining their salad days as the perpetual sine qua non of American culture. They pointed out the baby boomers were still blithely celebrating 1960s social rebellion even after they'd all gotten corporate jobs and elected Ronald Reagan twice. Generation X's message to the baby boomers was that their values were bullshit, and their heads were too far up their asses to even realize it.
And they were right, and they're still right. But the march of time is a motherfucker, and in 2009, we stand in serious danger of history repeating itself. There's been a push toward establishing 1990s "classic rock" as a radio format. There's been a barrage of reunions and tours over the past five years, from the Pixies to Rage Against the Machine to Smashing Pumpkins (kind of). Lollapalooza came back in 2003, albeit as a festival rather than a tour, and Lilith Fair is returning next year. Looming in the foreground is Weezer's 2001 reunion and subsequent recorded output, which stands as a case study in "be careful what you wish for, because you might get it."
I don't begrudge any of this; Perry Farrell's heroin isn't going to buy itself, and I'm sure Sarah McLaughlin can't cover her mortgage by licensing music to the SPCA. Clearly, there's a demand for 90s nostalgia, and there will be supply to meet it. That's OK.
What isn't OK is taking a moralistic and self-righteous stance about the values of the 1990s, "selling out," and all the rest of it. That ship has already sailed. We've already seen Liz Phair reinvent herself as an aging-hooker version of Avril Lavigne and Billy Corgan putting "Today" in a Visa commercial. Even Kurt Cobain's been worked over: we can buy a collection of his personal journals (which I'm ashamed to say that I own, having been given them as a gift - I've flipped through it but never read it cover to cover) and he's even showed up as an angel in heaven to sell us Doc Martens:
But you know what? None of that changes the fact that In Utero is an amazing album (I prefer it to Nevermind by a considerable margin, and am in fact listening to it as I write) and none of it dishonors or invalidates anything about the 1990s. The past is always with us, but it's the past for a reason, and we don't have to let a romanticized version of it dictate how we see the present. It's easy and seductive to believe that Kurt Cobain would never have let himself be put into Guitar Hero 5 to sing Bon Jovi and Bush. Maybe he wouldn't have. Then again, maybe he would. We won't ever know for sure, because Kurt Cobain perforated his head with a shotgun on April 5, 1994.
I was 11 years old when that happened. Now I'm 27, and two weeks older than Kurt Cobain ever lived to be. I'll be widening that gap, day by day, as I live my life. And it's got me thinking that perhaps idol worship and nostalgia aren't all they're cracked up to be.
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