In the eighties I was reading silver-age comics and sixties detective fiction. Escapist for sure and my potential stress about getting old and dying was supplanted by the possibility that my dad would kill us or get us killed. It wasn’t a real issue but it wouldn’t be toxic masculinity without the rhetoric of fear and violence. Like telling people they haven’t been practical about their mortality and hoping to get paid to do so.
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A new dumb thing:
This is a very limited vaccination policy, and it’s in the middle of an area with an active measles outbreak.
It only keeps unvaccinated kids out of school if the vaccination rate is below 95% (herd immunity level), and only for the duration of the outbreak.
At this point, they’re basically suing for the opportunity to give their kids (and the other kids at the school) their best opportunity to catch measles.
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Anti-vaxxers are murderers and attempted murderers.
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I remember the night the news broke. Only a few of my circle of friends would admit to liking any of their albums except Bleach. We were the alternakids on the Iowa State campus from 90-95. We ran the best slots on the student radio station, we formed a student organization in order to bring national acts to campus (we ran every aspect of these operations from set up, ticket sales, break down and post gig entertainment/food for the bands), we were the kids Boomers wrote exasperated generational divide articles about. And the reaction to Cobain was…“meh, we knew this would happen sooner than later.”
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Aw, man, I bet Ames was a weird place in the '90s.
I love Ames so, so much. I’m actually planning a trip there right now.
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I was mostly ‘doesn’t he have young daughter? that sucks.’
Being on the leading edge of GenX I never got the Nirvana thing. When I first properly heard them my reaction was ‘okay a metal version of REM whatevers’ so I didn’t have a lot of interest in them and was really diving into jazz at the time as well.
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I remember where I was when I learned Kirk had killed himself.
I was on a Greyhound Bus to Mississippi to pick up a truck from my brother. I liked most of Nirvana’s stuff so I was a bit bummed by the news, but that was the extent of it.
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What really died was the idea that art was cathartic, that writing (or listening to) songs about drugs and self-harm could be an effective method of dealing with drug problems and self-harm problems.
Not like Cobain was the first artist to ever illustrate this, but he was particularly pointed about it. His lifelong body of work was practically one long suicide note.
SEE ALSO: layne staley, elliott smith
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SEE ALSO: Chester Bennington
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I was in middle school. I was in a new school district starting that year, I’d really been miserable at the previous school because I’d been bullied terribly and I had family problems, so I wasn’t paying much attention to current events. I didn’t really listen to rock music much but I’d seen Kurt Cobain on TV. Years later I actually have more of an appreciation for the band than I did then but at the time I just remember that a lot of kids wore their Nirvana shirts that week. I was pretty depressed so honestly I think I thought something like “even at the top, eh?” It must have been relevant because I actually remember though…
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Oh yeah- That hits me dead on. I was born in one of those years that they can never decide about designating it as GenX or Millennial, so I end up relating to either, both, or none of the stereotypes. Almost as if there aren’t clear cut generations, and there’s actually a continuum between all of these things,
I remember one time I was able to compile a playlist of “Upbeat 1980s songs about nuclear war”. It’s quite well populated for a ridiculously specific genre.
And they’re generalising their childhood out to an entire age cohort.I wonder if it’ll ever hit them that that their individual memories aren’t a set of unchangeable universal truths.
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That was mostly my reaction.
I was sad for him, but mostly because he was dead, not because I personally cared for his music.
I liked their music, but only in the sense that it was music that I heard everywhere but didn’t mind listening to. I was always more of a jazz fan, but couldn’t really explain that to my classmates without sounding pretentious as fuck.
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Ahh see I was in my mid 20s so going fanboy over any band was not my thing. Brave Combo being a minor exception but that was only after seeing them live.
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I wasn’t going fanboy over them, just that saying “I like Nirvana” was more socially acceptable than “I like Nirvana but prefer Charlie Parker”.
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as is proper.
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Aww… 
My experience was completely the opposite, especially in my early and mid 20s. Most of my friends were really into music, and the other kids we hung out with were either similarly enthusiastic or musicians themselves. We were always pretty shameless fans of something, although not necessarily the same bands at the same time or even for very long.
We didn’t really have the “fanboy” concept, with it’s negative connotations, though. I mean, we definitely had strong opinions about good music and bad music, but I can’t recall ever knocking someone for being too much of a fan of their favorite band. That would have just been weird. (although I suppose, technically, there was the occasional grumbling about “if I have to listen to one more Phish tape I’ll scream”, but nobody ever payed attention to those sorts of comments. 
)
And since we were into blues rock and jam bands (among other stuff), it was a short leap to the fundamentally improvisational nature of jazz. I played saxophone in my high school jazz band, so maybe that helped, but I never felt pretentious about liking jazz. I didn’t know a ton about it, to be honest, but when the mood was right it was easy to slip some Parker or Coltrane into the mix and say “listen to these guys jam!”.
However, I will admit that Brave Combo would have been a tough sell at the time. 
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I heard them on the local commuity radio station and picked up a used tape… An acquaintance at work/school noticed the tape and said hey they are in town this week wanna go. That band live was another level of fun, especially for club shows where they liked to expand their playing styles and have fun with the songs.
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Haven’t really kept up as to what that means. But Mirriam-Webster says:
fanboy
Definition of fanboy
:a boy or man who is an extremely or overly enthusiastic fan of someone or something
First Known Use of fanboy
1919, in the meaning defined above
1919!?!
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hmmm, maybe I’m thinking of fanboi, instead? There’s definitely a pejorative connotation to the way I’ve seen it used these days, e.g. as a way to dismiss someone’s opinion or argument because they’re “just an Apple fanboy/fanboi” (or Android fan*, if you prefer).
Or maybe we were all just homers, back in the day. It could be that.
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I’ve just been playing a bit of their stuff from youtube. They look like they’d be a fun show, especially in the right venue with the right crowd. A good concert experience can totally augment or even change my opinion of a band and make their recordings more fun to listen to.
I’ve never particularly been into polka music (aside from Weird Al), but I did have a very brief period of seeking out klezmer music, and to this day I quite enjoy Zydeco when I hear it (I’m not necessarily well-versed in the genre). What I’m saying is: I can respect the accordion.
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