Summary
Danny Goldberg: Serving the Servant: Cobain, the Living Legend
What is it about Kurt Cobain that still resonates with young people today, even those who weren't even born before Kurt's death?
Danny Goldberg, who as Kurt's manager and close friend was always by Kurt's side, brings a clear and honest insight into the struggles of a talented artist who struggled to balance integrity and ambition. From the front row, he followed the unprecedented success of the album "Nevermind", which made Nirvana the most successful rock band in the world, and raised the words punk and grunge to the level of general culture; Kurt's acquaintance with the brilliant but unpredictable Courtney Love, whom he married, and how that relationship became the on-call culprit for everything for critics; the birth of Frances Bean, their daughter; and finally, Kurt's public battle with addiction, culminating in a tragic death that changed the course of rock history forever.
Leaving aside the usual obsession with restlessness and depression that clearly follows Kurt, "Serving the Servant" deals with his genius when it comes to rock and roll, then his compassion, his ambitions, and his legacy that now outlasts his career by decades. He was an impressionist who knew that the sound of words in a song was as important as their literal meaning in a dictionary, and he used lyrics to convey feelings as much as he used feelings to draw final conclusions. He is one of only a handful of artists in the history of rock and roll who have simultaneously communicated in multiple cultural languages, including the energy of hard rock, the integrity of punk, the infectious recognizability of hits and the inspiring appeal of social consciousness.
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