#Nirvana full discography how to#

When I graduated, I threw my poster Kurt away. I’d finally arrived at the future I’d been living for.

But I was freer than I’d been in Brooklyn. I still strained to earn A’s even as I lost days to my depression. All things Nirvana- In Utero, Unplugged, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah-were my most sacred artifacts.Īt Yale, I hung a poster of Kurt in every room I had, even after I found other bands, friends. My depression was as definitive to me as my race, gender, name, and religion. When I sang along with Kurt, I felt less alone (“I’m not the only one”), but I also affirmed my misery as a fixed, integral, if unseen, part of who I was. We planned to live there one day.Įven as a teenager, I knew my worship of Nirvana was both balm and fuel for my depression. It was The Land of Kurt-a place where we could be ourselves. The city, its mountains and gray, symbolized escape to us. For anniversaries and birthdays, we bought each other Nirvana paraphernalia: postcards, biographies, Kurt’s journals. My boyfriend at the time was a painter, a Puerto Rican kid who wore eyeliner and fishnet stockings for sleeves. Kurt and I had the whole world in common.įew understood my infatuation. In 1991, I was five years old.īut when I listened to Nevermind, the gaps didn’t matter. I was a daughter and a sister Kurt had started a family of his own. His hair was blond (except when it was pink or blue) his mother didn’t speak to him in Spanish. I was aware of the ironies: I was a Brooklyn girl Kurt grew up in Aberdeen. In my diary, I wrote, “Kurt Cobain = me.” But I easily saw the kinship between my insides and his outsides. He expressed a whole range of life, while I was stuck to a single setting: good. I admired his rule breaking, how sad, irreverent, and ferocious he could be.

Mostly, I found photographs: Kurt swinging from a chandelier, Kurt in a floral dress, Kurt in bug-eye sunglasses, glamorous, and frail. I searched for everything I could find about Nirvana. The music was a boon to me, but eventually I wanted more. I sang my determination, “I like it, I’m not gonna crack.” I just had to hold on until college, when I could get away. Maybe this was just what it was to be alive, to be here one day, then another, and the next. Sometimes, it didn’t seem so bad, my nights in the bathroom, my loneliness. I was fine, aside from the little scrapes and nicks, the incisions I used to prove my unhappiness wasn’t all in my head. “The water is so yellow, I’m a healthy student”-I could write English papers in an hour, memorize flashcards on the train uptown. No matter how bad things were at home, I remained a star at school. I didn’t want to believe they were right, that I was ugly, fat, sensitive, as entitled as any rich white girl from school, but sometimes I wondered, “And just maybe I’m to blame for all I’ve heard.” I couldn’t handle my parents’ advice, their truth talk. Kurt understood: “I’m worst at what I do best.” I tried, and, in the meantime, I wore my yellow rain jacket everywhere-during class, at my grandmother’s-so that no one would see my body and know what an embarrassment I’d become to the parents I wanted so desperately to please. I wasn’t as thin as my mother wanted me to be, or as pretty, and if I didn’t lose weight, she was certain I’d end up alone.

I knew myself to be a grave disappointment, unworthy of all their sacrifices, their hopes. And yet, I didn’t feel like a prized child.

#Nirvana full discography how to#

My father worked second jobs and tutored me in math my mother penny-pinched and had taught me how to read, even as she was learning English herself. I was a scholarship kid at a posh girls’s school on the Upper East Side, a Brooklyn girl with a bright future. The album played, and I felt that someone had reached down into my throat, grabbed hold of some vital, neglected organ, and squeezed, as if to say, “I know what’s there.” Even when Kurt wasn’t singing, I could hear his voice. It was by turns dark and pretty, raucous and simple. I let the first track-their most famous-rip through me. I was working my way through ’90s staples, and Nirvana had beat out Jagged Little Pill that afternoon at HMV. The first time I listened to Nevermind, I sat on the bathroom floor with the liner notes and jewel case open on my lap. I know Naima.’”Įvery day when I got home from school, I’d shed my good-girl persona by locking myself in the bathroom and listening to rock and roll. When I told her I was fine, she looked relieved and said, “When I first heard, I thought to myself, ‘Now wait a minute. She’d heard rumors that I was having a hard time and maybe even hurting myself. I was called only once into the guidance counselor’s office. I wore my uniform skirt to my knees, raised my hand in English, refused to sneak cigarettes before class. By the time I was fifteen, I’d mastered the art of being a good girl.