I can't believe this was 20 years ago, it feels like yesterday when this album and this band and this musical movement changed my life. This wasn't necessarily my favorite album from those days...I've listened to Pearl Jam's 10 many more times...but this album meant everything. Back then, the Baby Boomers ruled the world, and we were coming into adulthood far outnumbered by them. The economy was dismal and we didn't know what our future was. This album showed us we had a place in that world. That our peers were feeling the same anger and frustration that we were feeling. That we wanted things to be different. That we had a voice.
And now it's 20 years later, and we're middle-aged. Even those of us who thought we were unconventional are living our middle-aged lives, with houses and kids and non-slacker jobs. But we have made a difference. We didn't have a grand plan to make it happen, but we wanted to reject phoniness and conventionality and shallowness, and in our non-showy, non-Boomeresque way, we have done that. By just being different and saying that's OK.
Hearing those opening chords of Smells Like Teen Spirit will always take me back to the feeling that maybe there was hope for me, for my generation, for the world. And at the same time, it hurts because it's always a reminder that Kurt gave us what we needed, but we couldn't return the favor. Ironically, Kurt was the one who showed us that the music couldn't fix it all. Did he plan to be the voice of a generation? I doubt it. He never tried to say anything profound. He just wanted to be fucking real, and he was...that's all he needed to be.