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Kurt Cobain and The Genesis of Grunge


Kurt Cobain’s Influence began in the early nineties with the breakout album of his band Nirvana. Cobain and Nirvana have spawned an entire generation of Punk and Indie rock bands. Undeniably the most influential rock band of the last twenty years, Nirvana’s “punk” spotlighted a hidden culture and gave that culture an icon to follow. Cobain’s ability to lead the grunge movement made him a major national and international celebrity, an uncomfortable position for a man who once said, "Famous is the last thing I wanted to be,"(Cobain, Kurt Cobain Journals). Cobain and Nirvana brought punk trends into the limelight of mainstream culture including things such as a new type of dancing called skanking and the return of the plaid shirt back into the “cool” thing to wear. With this paper I am going to elaborate on these dominant effects of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, not only in the music industry but as the genesis of a new genre that created fashion trends and remapped a youth cultures entire method of thought. The real issue here however, is not a creation of a culture, but the addition of another facet of counter-culture, in this case punk and grunge culture, to the mainstream. Kurt Cobain and Nirvana started out honest and true to the idea of fighting the mainstream, but with their success they lost their place as a counter-culture icon and became part of the very thing they fought against.
This statement is backed up by famous historical author Theodor Adorno who said, “Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them. In so far as culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated into those petrified relations, human beings are once more debased,”(Adorno, Culture Industry Reconsidered), Adorno is saying that Nirvana’s success along with any other...