Kurt Cobain has been dead a while.

Today is the 20th anniversary of when musician Kurt Cobain shot himself. Of course the press jumps all over anniversaries like this, even when it’s a busy news day, ’cause nostalgia will steer web traffic just as effectively as actual news.

So, why are all the 30- and 40-somethings making such a fuss about him? Well, he was the first musician who died that we actually liked. We were too young to appreciate John Lennon or Marvin Gaye’s deaths, or feel any great loss at their passing. Cobain was different. We liked his music. True, we were young and dumb and had no taste, but that makes no difference. We liked him, and suddenly lost him.

In the ’80s, top-40 radio had gone from rock ’n roll to hip-hop in a big way, and rock fans were feeling left out. Enter, in the early ’90s, “alternative rock"—really rock ’n roll, with the "alternative” being that it wasn’t top-40. Among the musicians at the forefront were Cobain and his band, Nirvana. They wrote some really catchy pop-punk tunes, and because they cranked up the distortion (and personally looked a bit under-washed), we were led to believe this was a whole new rock genre, “grunge.” We assumed the semi-coherent, mumbled lyrics were profundity. We liked what we heard, and demanded more.

And Cobain couldn’t handle the pressures put upon him by the work schedule, health problems, marriage and fatherhood, fans and fame, and so forth. Heroin didn’t help. So he shot himself. (Unless you believe the conspiracy theorists. I don’t.)

I haven’t deliberately listened to a Nirvana song in years. I pirated a copy of Nevermind back in 1991 when I was at KEDG, Sac State’s student radio station. On the air, I did what I called a “bootleg set” (a term I stole from San Francisco’s KRQR, which did this all the time) and played the entire side of an album. That’s right, kids; back then albums had “sides"—sides of a vinyl record, sides of a cassette tape. While the side played, I recorded it onto cassette. Then, next time I was on air, I did a "bootleg set” of the other side. I managed to get maybe 20 albums out of this process before the program director told me to cut it out.

Ten years later, when I finally bought CDs to have legal replacements for all my pirated cassettes, Nevermind didn’t make the cut. I never listened to it, nor the follow-up album, In Vitro. Still don’t.

Probably the last time I deliberately listened to a Nirvana song was the second episode of my short-lived AudioRants podcast. That episode was entitled “The ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ Show,” and I posted it on 20 July 2005. But that show was far more about all the goofy “Smells Like Teen Spirit” covers I’d found, and why that particular song captured our imagination for no good reason. And other rants on music styles, selling out… and a critique of emergent Christians.

Wanna hear it? Here ya go.

AR-2, The “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Show.

Oh yeah, it’s got some Weird Al Yankovic too.