A couple of days ago, Michael Stipe took the stage to introduce a night of celebrations of the life of Kurt Cobain and the music of his band, which arguably was a 1990s updated upon the Beat Generation, and gave a beautiful speech, dedicated “for the fags; for the fat girls; for the broken toys; the shy nerds; the Goth kids from Tennessee and Kentucky; for the rockers and the awkward; for the fed-up; the too-smart kids and the bullied.”
He went on to say, “We were a community, a generation… in the echo chamber of that collective howl, and Allen Ginsberg would have been very proud.”
Indeed, Ginsberg would’ve been very proud. Nirvana came about, as Stipe said, at a time when people lost within a harsh society were in need of a voice. Where Ginsberg gave his voice to the millions in the fifties and sixties, Nirvana lent theirs to disaffected kids (and adults) in the nineties.
It seems sometimes silly to speculate upon what the dead would think of the living, but in this case it’s hard to imagine a man with a heart like Ginsberg’s not empathizing with today’s downtrodden.
The whole speech is worth listening to, but if you can’t be fucked, skip to 5:26.
In early March, a headline in the Community section of the Japan Times caught my…
In the winter of 1971, I was struggling mightily through a course entitled “Survey of…
In doing research for an upcoming novel, I began re-reading a few stories that tell…
Here we go again... ‘Tis the season for selling stuff at a discount and as…
Over this past year, we have transitioned away from our old self-hosted website and towards…
The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Three Wives of Queer William…
This website uses cookies.
View Comments
Why is Billy Joel (clearly drunk again) introducing, by which I mean rambling on endlessly, about Nirvana?
Shite you could listen to two decent Nirvana tunes in the middle of that twaddle. Which means if you play the Billy Joel clip 8 times, you'd have heard all the good ones.
Someone needs to fire the PD!