Grace

It's gotten to the point where my father will ask me the same question about five or six times in a span of about one hour. If I laugh because of how forgetful and genuinely funny it is he'll get mad at me, and if i get mad at his forgetfullness he gets mad at me and will come back with some guilt ridden line like "Well I'm sorry I can't be perfect." My point is that I hate not being able to react to something because of my aversion to being a robot. I hate being a robot sometimes. Lemme tell ya, when it rains in Pittsburgh and I'm walking around, guh, i'm just an oil change waiting to happen.

So i'm going to post something I've been thinking about and talking about to a few people lately. I really think Kurt Cobain killing himself was the smartest marketing move of all time and definitely the best thing he could have possibly done for his career. Before you say "That's horrible! A man died!" or something close to that please realize that I am removing all human emotion from that statement, of course I think it's horrible that someone who was once a living being decided to kill themself, but right now that has no bearing on my argument. POINT ONE!

Nirvana's most well known and most popular music came out four years before Kurt Cobain decided he couldn't handle being famous. His career had reached an obvious peak and whether or not he would have experienced a rebirth (provided he didn't kill himself) after his inevitable further downward spiral into drugs and depression is up for debate but, what is not up for debate is the fact that his career had nowhere to go but down. His music had become increasingly weirder and more "avante garde" in a way (listen to "Tourettes" off of In Utero if you don't believe me) and, most importantly for the preservation of the title of being a "Rock Legend" his weird stuff was definitely less commercial. Very few artists can become "weird" after being a commercial dynamo and continue to be successful. The only band I can think of that got "weird" and maintain or increased in celebrity is The Beatles and that was more due to the fact that their "weird" period beget a new genre of music. Radiohead gets very special mention here as they managed to alienate all the fans they got from the mid nineties (due to "Ok Computer" and "The Bends") with the release of "Kid A" and they ended up being more popular then they were before. Go figure.

FACT TWO!

The release of "In Utero" was met with the following phrase:

"The follow up album to Nevermind"

Not, "Nirvana's crowning achievement" as some call it today but just "A follow up to Nevermind". After Cobain's suicide the album was referred to in a new light "The last piece of official Nirvana material". Suddenly a good album because a timeless classic. Everyone is a saint after they die and everything they do immediately becomes more substantial.

The statement that Nirvana could have brought back rock and roll is crap. They didn't even create "Grunge". They popularized a genre that otherwise was frowned upon before they released Nevermind. People forget that Pearl Jam's Ten was released several months before Nevermind and was every much a commercial equal to Nirvana's "masterpiece". People also forget that the groundwork was already layed down for grunge to be popular it just took a hit or a catchy riff to bring it through the limelight. No one band has been responsible for anything in music since Bach took vocal music and created the Baroque period. And even he need other peoples work to do what he did.

http://www.myspace.com/kaiserwilhelmsorchestra

Right now we are "Kaiser Wilhelm's 'Happy Birthday Tony Danza' Orchestra"

Also Kojak was quite the bitch in the fifteen minutes i saw of last nights episode. Stay tuned for weekly Kojak updates such as this.