For example, a band like Joy Division. Two masterpiece albums in the form of Unknown Pleasures and Closer, and the untimely death of Ian Curtis cut it all short. They were even heading into the direction that New Order eventually went in, and it would have been interesting to see what Ian Curtis would have done if they fully made the leap into electronic music while he was still alive.
Nirvana.
I dunno man. I love Nirvana and they broke through just as I became a teenager.
But I think they would have become lame eventually. The greatest thing about Nirvana was their resistance to the mainstream, they youthful energy and great melodies. I don’t think it would’ve been pretty when Kurt turned 40.
It’s depressing how difficult it is to imagine an alternative universe where Kurt could have made it to 40 and still been Kurt.
Maybe somewhere out there was a 90s with better solutions to mental health problems then “just do heroin until you can’t stand it any more then kill yourself” and we’d have a few thousand more artists running around.
But would it have been enough? I feel like he’d hate the world we built.
Corporations psychopathically wrung every penny they could from his life, art and obvious misery. They didn’t show the slightest remorse for their part in his tragic, lonely death, instead just revealing in the feed frenzy it caused and the millions it put into their bank accounts.
But even after watching them feed artists into the woodchipper over and over again, we still didn’t burn it down. We didn’t even get angry. We just let the neoliberalism wash over us, settling into it like a lukewarm bath.
He couldnt stand racism, homophobia, fundamentalism and toxic masculinity. He was angry, hurt and disillusioned so he wrote poetry and music and put it into the world.
Now the angry, hurt, dissilussioned kids just make far-right memes because a social media exec decided letting them get groomed was worth it for 14c worth of ad impressions.
I just don’t see how he could have made it here, watching everything he hated packaged up in plastic and sold to the world, unable to even hide away with his little family because for a few years he was the hot new product.
But would it have been enough? I feel like he’d hate the world we built.
He definitely would have. He had a very strong distaste for the system and for him to see the world become this manufactured when he tried being a part of the tide that worked against it. I think he’d honestly be finding a new reason to kill himself over.
I still enjoy Foo Fighters and feel that Dave Grohl has grown up and is still relevant. People change as they get older and some even improve.
But remember, one third of Nirvana in their final incarnation was Dave Grohl. With his talent, image what might have been…