Where were you?
David Segal, writing for the Washington Post on the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide (excellent article), wrote:
Countless fans of a certain age can tell you where they were when they first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was the sort of time-stopping event that triggers a flashbulb memory, like the news of an assassination or a national disaster. You heard “Teen Spirit” and knew that something had changed, that the future in some small but important way was going to be different than what you’d imagined.
… I was in college, walking down the hall of my dormitory, when this amazing sound floated out of a friend’s room… twelve years ago, I wrote:
Kurt Cobains music reached right into the core of my consciousness and YANKED… it expressed the primal scream that echoes at the edge of my consciousness whenever I deal with the insanity of the world.
and
The music always seemed to teeter on the abyss… there was a quality of suspension to it.
It was that quality of suspension that immediately struck me, finally, there was music that expressed my own anguish and pain… it still resonates. I’m listening to “All Apologies” right now, the unplugged version…