I am a big Nirvana fan.
The bug caught me when I was in the second year. Right when I was getting into things beyond the usual Indipop/Spice Girls/Now 4-stuff. That was the year I became aware of how different bands sound different. Know what I mean? The year the Matrix hit us. Bought the soundtrack. Got initiated into Marilyn Manson, The Prodigy, Rob Zombie, Rammstein, and Rage Against The Machine all at the same time. Somebody brought a cd which had the Matrix OST mp3s ( mp3s were pretty rare in those pre-Napster-500Rs-per-mp3-cd days), and by some freak chance, the songs from Nirvana‘s Nevermind.

That wasn’t the first time I had heard Nirvana. The was a girl named Pankhi I studied with, way back in junior college, who was a Kurt devotee. She tried getting me to try out Nirvana, but since I teased her too much about – you know – things like “you’re actually listening to the ravings of a loony who committed suicide??” – she gave up. Then my roomie in the first year would play “On a Plain” over and over again – Ajay “Hozzy” Hazarika would get high at night and his sole peace-keeper happened to be, you guessed it, Kurt. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was about a monotonous-sounding voice and a jangling guitar that soothed him so much. Although, I have to admit, there were times when I would be walking down the REC campus alone at night, and suddenly would find myself humming “I’m on a plain, I can’t complain.” Nothing else, just those words over and over again. It was irritating, and not only to myself.

But Nevermind didn’t sound monotonous or jangly at all. I found the opening guitars of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” awesome. Gave the songs – all of them – a couple of listens. And the buggers just refused to get out of my mind. The tunes were catchy as hell! And they kept buzzing around in my head at odd times, just parts of them. No words, I couldn’t figure out most of the lyrics, but I kept humming the bits and pieces that stick. Someone got me the lyrics, and I tried figuring out what they mean. And thus, slowly, i entered Kurt Cobain’s troubled world….

It was the first time I was paying attention to lyrics. Also the lyrics he had written were words that could actually mean so many different things, depending on how you interpret them. Polly, the whole of which is based on three chords, is a paean to girl’s innocence lost. Kurt once said it also alludes to Courtney Love ( his wife). Something In The Way. Just four NOTES in the song, forgoshsakes!! Four notes and a cello, that’s it. And those words about his homeless meanderings – hence “Underneath the Bridge, the tarp has sprung a leak…”. In Bloom was about me. “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don’t know what it means.” About guys who mouth songs without knowing what they actually mean. (Not anymore, though!) The frenzied Breed, the sonic-assault of Territorial Pissings, it took me time, but I fell in love with ALL the songs.

The MTV Unplugged: Live in New York album was the next one I heard, and it was a revelation, too. It was also an anticlimax of sorts, because I found out that I couldn’t listen to the plugged version of the songs on In Utero (when I heard it later), the unplugged ones stayed on. Needless to say, I listened to On a Plain with a much, much, more open mind. Lake of Fire and Where did you Sleep Last Night showed how Kurt could use his voice to astounding effect. A girl I met on a train to Bangalore suggested I listen to All Apologies properly. I did, and promptly fell in love. (with the song, not the girl.) The catchiness bug caught up again, with the “I think I’m Dumb” line from Dumb. Somewhere down the line I fell in love ( with a girl this time) and also…well, you know what happened next. Spent nights crying and singing along with with Kurt’s voice. Love makes us appreciate music better, I guess. In the Final year at college, we would try doing a three-piece unplugged medley of Nirvana’s songs onstage – “Polly”, “Come As You Are” and “Jesus Don’t Want Me (For a Sunbeam)”. And somehow I gathered the courage to sing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in my last college concert. I guess the craziest thing I attempted to do with a Nirvana song would be trying out a 140-bpm trance remix of Something In The Way, dropped the idea after certain close friends threatened dire consequences.

Kurt Cobain died in 1994. There are six Nirvana albums ( seven if you count the latest one, which is a compilation) Somewhere down the line, I decided I had listened to enough of Nirvana. It was time to move on. And let’s face it, The Unplugged album has become a lot overplayed. I started getting a headache everytime the DJ in the pub played “The Man Who Sold The World”. And he did that every other time somebody wanted chillout tracks. (Chillout tracks, indeed!!! )Winced everytime I heard a guitarist strum the opening bars of “About A Girl”. Yeah, it was that bad.
So I made this conscious decision to STOP listening to Kurt for sometime.

Until yesterday. An office colleague asked me if I had the mp3 of “Oh Me” in my system. For a couple of seconds, there was a blank. And then it struck me, “Oh Gosh, that’s a Nirvana song.” And THEN it struck me, “Oh Gosh, I can’t recollect anything about the song.”. Nothing at all. Not the tune, not the chords, not even what the chorus was. Shame on me! This is what comes of “control”, eh? I am sorry, Kurt. I shouldn’t have done this to you.

Only Nirvana for the next week.