Cobain

(click to enlarge)

I've never been a huge Nirvana fan (although I am eternally grateful to my 13-year-old self for falling in love with "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—grateful because that kid went on, thanks to guitar lessons and teenage insecurity, to enter a whole world of musical pretentiousness, bringing great shame upon my family).  They're good, I like a lot of their stuff, I don't disagree when people say they're great—they'd surely make it into my top 100—but I just don't have particularly strong feelings about them.

So feel free to ignore or to dismiss me as underinformed or irrelevant when I ask: how much of Nirvana's continued fame has to do with how fucking cool Kurt Cobain was?  I mean, look at him in this picture, obviously no later than 1994...and this may be circular logic since he's pretty much an icon and has certainly influenced our culture, but I feel like if somebody walked around looking like that today,* nobody would be like, "Aw, man, that's so 1990s."  They'd just be like, "That guy's kind of amazing."

I mean, I guess I'm sort of totally wrong because hipsterworld pretty much hit that look, or something like it, sometime in the last couple of years, so it wouldn't actually look all that fresh today—actually people would say, "Aw, man, that's so L.A.," or "That's so fuckin' Cobra Snake"—but I can't help it, I don't care if I'm wrong: KURT, I LOVE YOUR SUNGLASSES.

There, I said it.

* In some kind of a time-travelly vacuum where no one had ever seen this picture of Kurt Cobain...?