No Rock And Roll Fun

MORE ON THE 10th ANNIVERSARY: Thanks to Mark for bringing the Canoe piece to our attention, and to Alan at Popwherry who provides an impressively full listing of a lot of the Cobain eulogising from the day itself. Amongst our favourite items was BBC News Online's story of Kurt in pictures - I don't think Ladybird have yet produced a 'All About Nirvana' book, but this would be pretty much what it would be like. Blogcritics, of course, had its usual mixture of views, including the observation thatKurt made a poor excuse for an icon - an opinion fatally undermined by the suggestion that, erm, Terence Trent D'arby outscored Nirvana on the creativity front. Of course that's just a goad, but we reckon that D'arby and Love might have made a better couple than Kurt and Courtney - both share a love of public nudity (they're the only two artists to have appeared naked on the front of Q magazine) and both haven't made a decent record for several years.

Talking of Courtney - and boy, do we spend a lot of time doing that these days - it's odd reading her eulogy to Kurt with the benefit of ten years of hindsight; what in 1994 came across as grief now seems a lot more like grandstanding. In some ways, it's like the rock and roll equivalent of Earl Spencer's words at Diana's funeral: move on a few years and what you took to be delivered from the heart starts to sound very much like playing up to the gallery.

Two final thoughts: First, amongst all the megabytes added to the digital world about Kurt, probably the most perceptive comment was the observation in passing that "Kurt would have hated all this" - of all the second guessing about what might have been and what might have been said and what might have been felt, that probably feels about the most likely.

Second: also ten years ago this week, this happened. Remember Kurt, but set him against the scale of human suffering in Rwanda:

"Our men were ready to fight, even though they didn't have any weapons, so they died standing. You would not think that they were all going to get killed because they were very many. We did not think they would get killed.
My neighbour Gitera was there. Imagine someone leaving their home, knowing the possible victim's name and their children's names.
They all killed their neighbours' wives and children.
All the people they were cutting fell on me because I was near the door. I had too much hair but it all was washed with blood.
My body had been drenched in blood and it was getting dry on me so killers thought I had been cut all over. They thought I was dead.