The first thing I clicked on this morning, as I scanned through the bowels of Facebook, was an article a friend shared from Rolling Stone about Kurt Cobain from the band Nirvana. He would be 50 years old today. My lungs fluttered when I read those words.  Coming to grips with Kurt’s potential age in correlation with mine was not a good omen for early morning thoughts during my President’s Day celebration of sitting naked in my desk chair, drinking Bulletproof coffee and working on a business plan. Starring my youth and general insignificance in the face isn’t the way I should be spending my morning. I should be gleeful, out in the Colorado sunshine, creeping on the girls in yoga pants. That seems obvious and more productive. But that’s not me, not today, at least right now.

After watching the clip from Rolling Stone and reading the article I decided it best to dive into the catalog of Nirvana’s music as I rumbled forward into my day, naked.  And of course the first song I listened to on Spotify was the ever-present, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and goddamn I miss that song and those days. I remember the electrical current of emotion that rattled my bones I had when I first heard that open chord blast through the speakers. I threw all of my possessions around my room like a tornado in a then-justified, pre-pubescent rage.  I may have been late to the party and a little young, but in that moment, I was plugged into an entire generation that did the same thing – some older than me, some younger – but the collective scream was there and primal and present.

I discovered this music, like so many others, with the absence of my parent’s approval. They wanted me to listen to DC Talk or Jars of Clay. I wanted to destroy things with all my “angst” and ease the burden of pimples and random boners. I went to friends’ houses to indulge in grunge music. And I recorded Alice In Chains, Soundgarden and Nirvana off the radio, onto tapes. At the time, that’s how I thought the world would always work. Now we have Spotify and everything at our fingertips.

This morning, with my 31-year-old nakedness on display, I became enamored by Nirvana again. I listened to four or five songs – and even though I no longer thrashed around my room or hid the music from anyone – I glistened with that unbridled sense of purpose or the perfunctory notion that I belong to something. It was magic.

But, I quickly realized that I was eating up the illusionary tale of my youth. As I perused through Spotify’s catalog for Nirvana I began to see it is borderline ridiculous. There are four versions of the albums “In Utero” and  “Nevermind” on Spotify. Corporations have milked the big anti-establishment band of an entire generation for over SEVENTEEN records that include: compilations, Greatest Hits, singles, B-Sides, Live Albums, deluxe and super deluxe versions of the originals and limited editions with commentary for each song. When I first noticed this I thought to myself, “Well, that seems a bit excessive.” And after writing this far into a post I essentially think the same thing with one caveat: I understand.

Nirvana only had three full-length studio albums before Kurt put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That’s not a large body of work compared to many of the other bands that wandered forward from the 90’s. But those were three formidable and delicious musical diatribes. Perhaps this abundance of Nirvana reveals their musical impact, or maybe more so, it’s a telling sign of our inability to let go of the past and the corporate music industries strangle hold on that time in history.

A Nirvana listening binge feels like a reverse therapy session – it’s impractical implications to my 31-year-oldself are boundless. Humans love nostalgia more than puppies or free Starbucks. I love to reminisce and forget the world in front of me.

And suddenly, Nirvana and their time ended – just like the excessive and primitive emotions I had as a young kid and the nakedness that ensued this morning at the beginning of writing this post. The idealized version of life can only get one so far, right? We are bound by our “excessive wants and needs” and our desire to know we are part of something – even if we look to the past.

I am a novice music listener and I don’t know how to play an instrument, but to the best of my knowledge, I can see it’s hard to argue against the general consensus that Nirvana is the most sonically well put together band of the grunge era. They were really fucking good – like harass your sisters and kill ants with a magnifying glass kind of good. And they seemed unstoppable. But are they seventeen albums good?

I wonder if Kurt would be OK with the exploitation of Nirvana. My guess is, no, he wouldn’t. And that’s why he killed himself. With the writing on the wall, he ended it before it took him over. Really, that’s the only way Nirvana could have ended from an outsiders perspective. In a metaphorical sense, I see that as our way out of this downward spiral of cultural over exposure – we have to acknowledge the cultural and government teat we are sucking on and end it, without a shotgun, of course – maybe we could try to embrace of our autonomy and learn to love more thoroughly.

I think that is as good of a place to end. Positive thoughts. The hair on my ass is sticking to the chair and I think I should get out into the sunshine. Because that’s what I think Kurt would have wanted on his 50th birthday and maybe he would want to do some heroin too. Either way, he would want me to be fancy-free and aware but not for his sake, for mine alone.