A couple of days ago, Michael Stipe took the stage to introduce a night of celebrations of the life of Kurt Cobain and the music of his band, which arguably was a 1990s updated upon the Beat Generation, and gave a beautiful speech, dedicated “for the fags; for the fat girls; for the broken toys; the shy nerds; the Goth kids from Tennessee and Kentucky; for the rockers and the awkward; for the fed-up; the too-smart kids and the bullied.”
He went on to say, “We were a community, a generation… in the echo chamber of that collective howl, and Allen Ginsberg would have been very proud.”
Indeed, Ginsberg would’ve been very proud. Nirvana came about, as Stipe said, at a time when people lost within a harsh society were in need of a voice. Where Ginsberg gave his voice to the millions in the fifties and sixties, Nirvana lent theirs to disaffected kids (and adults) in the nineties.
It seems sometimes silly to speculate upon what the dead would think of the living, but in this case it’s hard to imagine a man with a heart like Ginsberg’s not empathizing with today’s downtrodden.
The whole speech is worth listening to, but if you can’t be fucked, skip to 5:26.
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Why is Billy Joel (clearly drunk again) introducing, by which I mean rambling on endlessly, about Nirvana?
Shite you could listen to two decent Nirvana tunes in the middle of that twaddle. Which means if you play the Billy Joel clip 8 times, you'd have heard all the good ones.
Someone needs to fire the PD!