KURT CRITICISM

Rip It Up, Issue 202, 1 June 1994, Page 8

KURT CRITICISM

As expected, your May issue cover story features the death of Kurt Cobain. I looked forward to picking up a copy to get some sort of qualified thought on his suicide. Aside from Donna Yuzwalk’s interesting obituary, I was pissed off to see in its full glory a final days timeline that read like a Days of Our Lives plot. That’s shit RIUI The very kind of commercially viable trivia that Cobain despised, the typical media thrill that shits on an individual’s sanity and as in this case, natures their demise. Few people in NZ, including myself, knew the guy so we've hardly got grounds for personal grievance, but Cobain’s death is a real fucker. It would be harsh, at the very least, to call a dead person a loser — however as “a role model to the world’s losers” his style has been severly cramped. There’s no more in store for all those grunge heads that simply loved the music. Your article fails to tackle the real dilemma or at least mention it. That dilemma being: as much as “corporate rock still sucks” so does death by suicide ... it really sucks. Alastair Hopwood QUEENSTOWN Editor replies: The question on most people's minds was “what happened?” We tried to answer that question with a simple chronology of events allowing readers to add their own moral twist. Any similarity to Days of Our Lives is entirely coincidental.