While Kurt Cobain openly disdained certain elements of his audience, he liked the idea of bending their minds to his left-leaning convictions.
“I wanted to fool people at first” he said in an interview. “I wanted people to think that we were no different than Guns n’ Roses. Because that way they would listen to the music first, accept us, and then maybe start listening to a few things that we had to say.” When he began letting loose with carefully aimed condemnations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, he was pleased to discover that high schools had become divided between Nirvana kids and Guns n’ Roses kids.
This according to “Generation exit” by Alex Ross (The New Yorker 25 April 1994, pp. 102–06).
Today would have been Cobain’s 50th birthday! Above, Julie Kramer’s 1991 photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; below, Cobain with Nirvana in 1992.
