Winds of Change has the best neologism I have seen for a while: "neo-Cobainism".
Towards a self directed hate – the hermeneutics of neo-Cobainism (“I hate myself and I want to die – and take you all with me!)”. This month has seen a confluence of voices speaking out against cultural self-hatred.
Touché. There is the musician Kurt Cobain --- a mediocre guitarist who occasionally came up with a truly original track such as "Smells like teen spirit". There is the human being --- a hypersensitive person suffering from bipolar disorder and multiple addictions whose sudden catapulting from obscurity to superstardom may well have driven him to suicide. And then there is the cultural icon --- whose persona expressed a fashionable disregard for anything approaching self-discipline or professionalism, and whose lyrics projected the kind of nihilism and intense self-loathing that viscerally repulse some (such as this writer) but made him an instant mouthpiece for the "generation less-than-nothing". I remember walking through train stations in Europe in the '90s and finding kids dressed up/down into what I used to call "'won't-you-s*ck-my-*ss'-fashion" (after the original uncensored lyrics of a Red Hot Chili Peppers hit at the time), strumming out-of-tune guitars and plaintively whining Cobain songs with such inspiring messages as "rape me...use me...yeah, rape me again... use me.. then waste me..." (Ironically, one of the stations --- Brussels Central --- was a known pick-up spot for "rough trade" ("schandknaapjes") at the time, and even more bitterly ironic, a real raping and murdering monster --- Marc Dutroux, a living and breathing argument for the death penalty --- was doing his grisly work a short bus ride away.)
I also remember reading an article in the "Jewish" periodical Tikkun (yes, I was once a regular reader of charlatan and imposter"rabbi" Michael Lerner's publication) trying to explore the "meaning" of these lyrics (and of Cobain's suicide) in a "liberal Jewish renewal" (read: post-Marxism with bagels) context. And at first grinning at what I thought was a particularly clever piece of satire --- until I realized these guys were serious! (I quickly realized that Tikkun exhibited the same peculiar combination of hyper-earnestness and unintentional humor that anybody familiar with ideologically fundamentalist agitprop literature learns to recognize as the only redeeming feature of such wastes of "tree carcasses".)
Some years later, after we had already move to Israel, the local looney-left newspaper Haaretz had an article by some malignant narcissist whackjob self-appointed "intellectual" who was arguing in favor of replacing the national anthem "Hatikva" ("The hope", with its message of Jewish longing for national self-determination) with something supposedly more "inclusive" of the state's "post-Zionist" nature. I wrote them a letter suggesting Nirvana's "Rape me". Somehow I doubt they got the joke...
One final thought. Romantic love, when spurned, can easily turn into hatred in an immature person. Likewise, malignant narcissism and autodestructive self-loathing are often much closer than their superficially opposite nature would seem to suggest.
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