I’ve been reading all over the ‘net that today is the tenth anniversary of the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the troubled, heroin-addled lead singer of the seminal grunge band Nirvana. Two of my favorite bloggers, John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, have commented on this event in heartfelt, if somewhat ambivalent, entries. Personally, I feel no ambivalence on this subject.

I don’t care.

I didn’t care about Cobain when he was alive, I didn’t care when I first heard he was dead, and I certainly don’t care that it’s been a decade since his death.

I don’t mean to be churlish by saying that, and I don’t want to offend the man’s fans. I fully understand how hurtful the demise of certain public figures can be to those for whom their work has meaning (I myself was deeply troubled a few years ago by the death of River Pheonix, an actor that I respected and strongly identified with). I also don’t mean to be disrespectful of the dead, especially of someone who died by his own hand. It’s always a shame when a young man who has the world at his fingertips is so screwed up that the only future he can see is coming down the end of a gun barrel. Nevertheless, I have never have understood the fuss that was made over Cobain, Nirvana, or grunge in general. And frankly, I resent the fact that people keep telling me that I should care about particular cultural phenomena simply because I fall within a particular age bracket.

Look, I may be the same age as Scalzi and Wheaton, but I’ve never felt like part of this media invention known as “Generation X.” Very few of the pop-cultural markers that supposedly define my generation mean much to me. When I was growing up, I usually tended to groove on the music, movies, philosophies and causes of someone ten years older than myself (the Star Wars juggernaut notwithstanding — I was a textbook example on that one).

In high school, when most of my friends were listening to New Wave, I was into the classic rock of the 60s and 70s. In college, when my classmates were crusading against Apartheid, I was reading up on Vietnam and Watergate. In my early 20s, when my co-workers were having weekly Saturday Night Live viewing parties and wetting themselves laughing at the antics of Wayne, Garth and Adam Sandler, I was pining for the days of Belushi, Ackroyd and Bill Murray. I didn’t much like The X-Files or Friends when the media was telling me how much I was supposed to love them, and I didn’t see the appeal of The Simpsons until the show had been on the air for years. I also never liked Girbaud jeans, South Park, Beavis and Butthead, first-person shooter games, or Quentin Tarantino. And when it comes to dead rock ‘n’ roll martyrs to lost youth and wasted potential, give me Jim Morrison any day.

Some of the commentators I’ve read today describe Cobain’s death in the same reverent, “do you remember where you were” terms that are usually reserved for presidential assassinations and shocking disasters. In a recent article in the SL Trib, Dan Nailen wrote that Cobain’s fans will remember April 5th the way some people recall the days Elvis and John Lennon died. Maybe his fans will. But I suspect they’re the only ones. Fans, by definition, care about things that don’t necessarily have any impact on the rest of the population. I’m not especially a fan of Elvis or the Beatles, but I can’t deny that they made huge, unimpeachable contributions to popular music. However, I can’t bring myself to believe that Cobain belongs in their pantheon. I couldn’t identify Nirvana’s biggest hit, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” if you threw the CD at my head. Grunge was something I heard people talking about, but it meant nothing to me. I didn’t like the sound, didn’t identify with the hopelessly nihilistic lyrics, and I certainly never thought Kurt and his successors were “cool.” Wheaton mentions in his entry on this subject that without Nirvana, we wouldn’t have had Pearl Jam or Soundgarden. To that, I say, “who are they?” Obviously the quantum reality where Nirvana never landed that recording contract wouldn’t seem all that alien to me.

I can’t remember for sure, but I think I was probably listening to a steady diet of Jimmy Buffett around the time that all this was happening. Does that make me “uncool?” Probably. It’s a definition I don’t like, but given a choice between listening to grunge and being uncool, I think I’m comfortable having folks label me a dork.

Again, I don’t mean to hack on something that means a great deal to a lot of people. My ire about this anniversary really isn’t related to Cobain or Nirvana, but rather to the fact that the media expects me to care about something that never really touched my life. The disconnect between what matters to me and what seems to matter to everyone else started a long time ago, and the gap is only getting wider. Sometimes the gap bothers me — I don’t like thinking that I’m uncool or that I don’t know what’s happening — but most of the time, I feel wonderfully free. Free to like what I like and to hell with whomever or whatever happens to be on the magazine covers. It’s a tough job being a contrarian, but someone’s got to do it…