Remembering Kurt Cobain: The Reluctant Hero Podcast Wayne Cheong

Our next episode will focus on Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, and feature additional guest speakers like Stuart Swezey , Anehta Regglef and Neville J. McKenzie, recorded during March 2021's “PodFest Asia - Live On Clubhouse” event - thanks to our collaboration with the wonderful Desolation Center Don’t miss out as Steve and 4 other guests join the episode and chat with me to answer the questions, “What’s his favourite song from Bleach”, "The first time he saw Dave Grohl with Nirvana”, “Would Sonic Youth’s 1996 Singapore Show With Foo Fighters See The Light Of Day”, “Does he miss Sonic Youth” and more! 
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In a world filled with pretenders and opportunists, Cobain was the real thing, a unique and invaluable voice that stayed in the heads of lonely people everywhere. Friends or loved ones come and go, but he is THAT friend that stayed who screams in my head and also tells me “I am not alone”.

Kurt Cobain died 27 years ago at the age of 27. (A friend of mine, Dr Philip Merry told me to find synchronicity in the numbers: I was born on 17 July 1977). His death on April 5 1994 was one of the most influential and groundbreaking events of the 90s. It took place during a time when grunge rock music was at its prime. Their music videos were super-intense (Heart-Shaped Box still scares me and fascinates me) and MTV brought the world together when the Smells Like Teen Spirit video premiered. My mom and dad, my two sis, and my next door neighbours absolutely hated it when I turned up the volume during Dive, Breed, Scoff, School, Endless Nameless, Scentless Apprentice, Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter, and even the hits like Lithium, Come As You Are and Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Our generation loved Kurt Cobain and his music because it was so different and wasn’t staged - it was authenticity and comes from a place of pain. We have started to feel the effects of anxiety and angst and understood what they were - so to have Kurt Cobain literally screaming into a mic about how f*cked up his head is made people feel good - it was validation for Gen X-ers which our parents didn’t understand. The generations after us ie. Millennials and Gen Z experienced hand-me down stuff (and we’ll feature each generation covering Kurt Cobain songs during the #NirvanaTributeVirtualFestival) but this podcast episode recorded two weeks prior to the batch-taping event on our PodFest Asia - Live In Clubhouse session serving as a precursor, proved that Kurt Cobain was so ahead of his time and spoke to not just my generation but also all the generations that came after. It features spontaneous conversations with fellow podcasters, educators, new bandmates, spanning across generations and geographies and cathartic moments when audiences raised their hands to come on stage to provide their own impromptu rendition of “Come As You Are” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”.

Decades in the making, April's Nirvana Tribute Virtual Festival literally took me a lifetime’s journey to learn how to do podcasting, curate an online festival, masking taping gear tech and apps, develop communicative and interviewing skills, establish network and build community in order to be able to make a serious stab at this and do my heroes Nirvana and friend Kurt Cobain justice. The Festival is more than simply remembering him and his music, it opens up the conversation on how his suicide made each generation feel.

Like many in the pre-internet days, I found out about his suicide from the newsstands after basketball practice in school and kept the newspaper clippings thinking even back then, his suicide was as important and game changing as Nirvana’s Nevermind was in resetting music entirely. I still remember on that fateful day thinking that it sucks, even though it wasn’t a breakdown for me personally cos I was still a pre-teen and it was the first time in my life I heard of suicide and for days after, I was bummed out and confused about why would anyone kill himself? My only experience of death at that time was only my grandparents. That gun shot blew up his brains but opened up the conversation about suicide and mental health. His work is art. All his lyrics are existential, about pain, but like poetry, which is what you will mostly find on social media and some of my favourite podcast shows in 2021 today.

Three decades in, after working through the ups and downs of life, career dissatisfactions, rough relationships that didn’t end well, more deaths in the family, tragedies piling up, feeling lost, pressures of finding myself, the struggles and journey to discover m