Brandon Coale Notes

This week is the 30^th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s tragic passing back in 1994.   I like many of Nirvana’s songs, and I like watching old footage of Kurt in interviews.  There are also a couple of unauthorized documentaries from Chrome Dreams Media featuring interviews with people that knew him in the few years before the major success and fame that are very interesting to watch.  Watching old interviews with Kurt, he was interesting and seemed like an intelligent man.  I think this is why so many people found him and Nirvana appealing; it wasn’t just their musical talents, but also their front man’s charisma, intelligence, out of the box thinking, and real life rags to riches story.

I confess that I didn’t own a copy of the Nevermind album when Cobain was still alive, I finally bought it in sometime in 1994 or 1995.  Up until the mid 1990s, I was mainly into music from the 1970s and 1980s (and still am for that matter, some of the best bands of all time came out of the 70s and 80s!).  My brother was ahead of me in discovering the newer bands at the time; he owned his copy of Nevermind before I bought mine, and for example I remember he owned Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream long before I did.  While I would listen primarily to the local 70s/80s radio stations, I would tune to other stations playing newer music, and I remember in the spring of 1992 hearing “Come as You Are” played on the radio a lot.  I also remember in September 1993 being at my guitar player friend Bill F.’s house and seeing the video on MTV for “Heart-Shaped Box” for the first time, and Bill was very impressed with the song and the video that Nirvana had made.  I’m sure many Nirvana fans would disagree with me, but I also enjoy listening to Tori Amos’ 1992 piano cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and I have wondered what Kurt thought of her cover. 

One of the most memorable magazine covers of all time is the cover of Rolling Stone with Kurt wearing the T shirt “Corporate Magazines Still Suck”.  I bet that raised some of the magazine’s executives eyebrows when they first saw the photo, but fortunately due to the existing sales success of Nevermind and the first single “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, they let Kurt get away with wearing the shirt (and didn’t photoshop that writing out).  This is one of the things I admire about Kurt is that he wasn’t afraid to say and do things like that to challenge authority.  I’m sure Kurt was influenced by one of the most famous and intelligent comedians at the time, George Carlin, who all of his life was consistently a great advocate for the freedom of speech, and had a natural distrust of the news media and politicians.  Kurt probably was also influenced by other famous and talented people who had a distrust of the news media and authority, possibly including Frank Zappa with his great song “I’m the Slime”, the excellent 1976 satire movie “Network” (written by Paddy Chayefsky), writer Mark Twain, and Bob Dylan:

“It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people–who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations–do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies.”… “That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.”

-Mark Twain

“It’s a class of people that take the magazine seriously.  I mean, sure I could read it, and I read it, I read it on the airplanes, but I don’t take it seriously.  If I want to find out anything, I’m not going to read Time magazine.  I’m not going to read Newsweek, I’m not going to read any of these magazines because they’ve just got too much to lose by printing the truth.”

-Bob Dylan

I didn’t check this, but evidently Rolling Stone magazine itself changed their enthusiasm for Nirvana, as Slim Moon observed:  “There’s this danger of revisionist talk where people claim that they always knew.  But if you go back to the Rolling Stone review, when Rolling Stone reviewed Nevermind the first time they called it basically a mediocre record.  You read Rolling Stone now and they basically pretend that they always knew that Nirvana was the most brilliant thing on the planet.” (Slim Moon, documentary “Nirvana: The Untold Stories”)

Every Nirvana fan should own the DVD for their 1993 MTV Unplugged in New York concert.  During the concert in the intro to “About a Girl”, Kurt says “This is off our first record. Most people don’t own it”.  If Kurt were to suddenly be resurrected back to earth today in 2024, he would likely be shocked that most people don’t own physical music media anymore, they stream it from the internet.  30 years later, the idea of purchasing and owning music that Cobain alluded to, in my opinion still remains relevant, and I would still encourage people to purchase and own CDs and MP3s.  The problem with streaming music is that you are at the complete mercy of your internet provider/cellular data plan and music streaming service, meaning that both of them can raise their rates on you at any time.  This may be quite a problem in the coming years in America; sadly due to many years of reckless and irresponsible spending along with many very bad foreign policy decisions made by many members of congress and presidents, some smart economists such as Robert Murphy are predicting that within only a few years, the United States dollar will no longer be the global reserve currency.  Robert Murphy discusses this on this podcast at https://mises.org/podcasts/human-action-podcast/murphy-gives-post-game-analysis-zerohedge-dollar-debate , and he invited another smart economist Brent Johnson to discuss further on the podcast at https://mises.org/podcasts/human-action-podcast/feds-milkshake-brings-all-foreigners-yard

One thing that didn’t help all the reckless spending was that in 2002 congress allowed a rule called “pay as you go” to expire that was in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990.  This rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut.  One very smart and responsible person in congress who raised many concerns about the spending during his time in office and during his two presidential runs was Ron Paul (R -Texas), and he said the root of the irresponsible spending is central banking policies.  He wrote books about this such as “End the Fed”, which was recommended by musician Arlo Guthrie.

If the United States dollar is no longer the global reserve currency, everything may be more expensive at that point, our taxes may be higher, and things like streaming music, movies, tv shows, and online gaming unfortunately may only be affordable to the upper class.  Home internet providers may unfortunately end up charging by data used like cellular providers do now.  So as long as people have food and electricity and have kept their CD collections, CD players, PCs/Macs, iPods, MP3 players, old smart phones, DVDs/Blu Ray discs and players, they can still enjoy these offline forms of music, TV shows, documentaries, and movies.  I believe most smart phones unfortunately require working batteries in order to boot up, so if iPods and MP3 players can run on electricity alone, they should be hung onto.  People who collect vinyl records now are already there, but obviously vinyl isn’t a portable format, and you obviously can’t make a nice playlist that combines music from multiple albums and artists.  Some people may now say “Why keep all this old stuff that takes up space?  I’ll just work and buy new stuff if that time comes”, but as Robert Murphy has written, these goods made in other countries will have higher prices than they do now:

“Americans will still benefit from the global division of labor, but it will be on more honest terms. The transition will be painful; the U.S. dollar’s value will fall against other currencies, meaning that “cheap imports” will no longer be so cheap. When there is a recession or other crisis, the U.S. government won’t be able to so casually throw a trillion dollars at the problem, because it will be Americans themselves funding the new debt through higher taxes and/or domestic prices.”

This also brings up another point that the American government should be enacting reasonable policies for businesses to develop energy sources in America that could work as serious long term alternatives to relying on foreign oil.  The 2022 documentary “Nuclear Now” directed by Oliver Stone makes the case for nuclear power plants.  Alex Epstein has many interesting articles on energy at https://alexepstein.substack.com   Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle wrote that in addition to things like nuclear power plants, space solar power satellites could potentially be an option as well. 

Back to music.  No band should be above any criticism, and sometimes the Nirvana guys would destroy their instruments at concerts, and I wish they wouldn’t have done that.  John Hiatt released his “Perfectly Good Guitar” album two years after Nevermind in September 1993, and John is right on when he sings that song’s chorus:

Oh, it breaks my heart to see those stars

Smashing a perfectly good guitar

I don’t know who they think they are

Smashing a perfectly good guitar

In the documentary “Don’t Blame Me: The Tales of Ozzy Osbourne”, which was released several years after the death of Randy Rhoads, Ozzy said about Randy: “I don’t for one minute think he would be still playing with me.  On that last bus journey from Knoxville Tennessee to Orlando Florida, he turned round to me and said he wanted to quit rock and roll, and he wanted to go to UCLA, and get a degree in classical guitar”…“He wasn’t a guy who was into being a mega-rock star.  He was a musician”.  I’ve wondered a similar what if about Kurt Cobain, if Kurt would have done something similar to what Randy Rhoads wanted to do to get out of the public eye, as well as get help for his health and addictions.  I’ve also wondered about Kurt and Dave Grohl; instead of remaining in the same band, maybe they each would have eventually had their own friendly, competing bands that would have pushed each other to keep producing more and more interesting music.

“Nirvana: Nevermind (Classic Albums)” is currently available for streaming on Amazon and on YouTube (in lower quality video).  I’ve made my case in the above paragraphs some reasons why big Nirvana fans should also own the DVD, at the time of this writing it is a currently a reasonable $7.00 on Amazon and at similar prices on eBay.

This is one of my favorite things that Kurt said about music, so this post will be closed with this quote from him:

“I just think there’s a breed of people who really honestly like music, and there aren’t very many of them, really, and those are the people who usually become musicians.” -Kurt Cobain