I’m arriving at the tail of a comet to mark the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, but I can’t let this black anniversary pass without lighting a candle too.
I recently listened again Live and Loud, the DVD recording of a Nirvana concert in Seattle in December 1993, four months before the singer’s death. On drums, Dave Grohl, explosive, unleashed, a war machine; on bass, Krist Novoselic leaping as if there were springs in his soles; Pat Smear of The Germs, moving and efficient, hired as reinforcement on rhythm guitar for this tour. At the heart of the stage, planted in front of the anatomical angel-woman, emblem of the album In uteroKurt Cobain, in all his golden blondness, in all his grunge magnificence, in all his discomfort, clenched teeth, bulging neck vein, almost motionless except when grabbing his sky blue and blood red left-handed Fender Mustang, sold at more than $1.5 million last fall by the auction house Julien’s Auctions.
It was apparently his favorite, one of the few that the singer didn’t destroy at the end of a concert. Kurt, therefore, raises his hand to play the first chords of Rape Me. And suddenly a strange and slightly frightening smile radiates into his piercing gaze. His thin lips part to release a roar from the stomach – from the lump in the stomach, I should write. This ball, which Tori Amos called “ bowling ball in my stomach ” in the song Crucify, there was a whole generation of us who carried it within us. Kurt knew how to channel it, spit it out in the face of the world, and no one could turn away.
I saw Nirvana live at the Verdun Auditorium in November 1993, a place I go to today for my daughter’s cheerleading competitions. The iconic video of Smells Like Teen Spirit with his janitor and his cheerleaders. With friends, we had rented a van and rolled with pain and misery from our boring suburbs into the big city, where everything seemed possible. In the frenzy of the moment, and despite the excitement of seeing Nirvana (a word that I had painted with white corrector on my pencil box and engraved with Exacto on the desks), I told myself that Kurt had the seems to be even worse than usual.
To be honest, it hadn’t been a great show, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, not even at the Woodstock bar to attend Radiohead’s first Montreal concert, which took place the same evening. On November 2, 1993, it was the last lap, the final shot of Nirvana’s blood, that had to be chosen.
Why did this group have such an impact on an entire generation? Because we were the disillusioned children not only of the end of a century, but also of the end of a millennium, and that era had crushed us. Our parents had known at our age the golden decade of a new day, flowers in their hair and fire in their bras, years that let in the sun and promised that a new day would dawn. This momentum, this wind of change and this breath of hope had crashed against a wall and there we were, stuck between the depression of X and the numbness of Y.
From a personal point of view, I had spent my adolescence feeling different, maladjusted, and bored at school. Since I didn’t know how to play the electric guitar like Cobain, I rode complicated horses, driven by certain obsessions: to overcome higher and higher obstacles, to gallop faster and faster, to come close to danger, always one step closer. far away, and too bad if I broke my back between two oxers or if I tumbled into a ditch. “ Here we are now, entertain us “, that’s what Kurt said, with all the lucid irony of the 1990s, when he arrived at the parties, summing up the boredom and unhappiness of a generation.
We had to tame this darkness to overcome it. Through a complex alchemy, manage to transform it into a less overwhelming melancholy, learn to let in a little fresh air and light, leave the night behind.
In an interview two weeks ago at the Trois-Rivières Book Fair, the essayist Étienne Beaulieu, who was conducting an interview to which I was invited, asked me a disconcerting question about the appeal of the fall in my stories, dark vortex that swallows and crushes. I remembered this professor who taught us the work of Hubert Aquin, a writer born on the day of the crash of 1929. He said that “all Quebec literature revolves around a coffin”. I think of Anne Hébert, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, Nelly Arcan, but also the living: Safia Nolin, Julien Mineau (Malajube), Michelle Lapierre-Dallaire, the writer Patrick Brisebois, all of whom I miss. grunge icons in my eyes. There is the same cracked ice in their eyes, the same crack in the music of their words.
In his diary, Kurt Cobain wrote beautiful pages about the Beatles and Lennon, whose melodic sense he revered. When we think of Nirvana, Cobain’s harsh riffs and desperate vocals come to mind, but perhaps we haven’t praised enough his sense of luminous melody inherited from the Beatles.
Thirty years later, at a time when hip-hop has almost replaced pop and rock has become more discreet, I miss the roar of guitars that rinse the ear. The roots of my relationship with art and literature extend into the intensity of rock and its tamed heaviness. I can’t help it, I’m a girl from the 1990s, and this darkness is also part of me. Kurt Cobain is my sensitive, intense, fucked-up big brother, gone too quickly, and that’s why I’m erecting this little tomb of words for him today.