“Is Rock and Roll a Strand Which is Slowly Killing off White People?”

This post can’t really be about MUSIC, per se, when… I’m not even sure what it’s about at all. I in fact feel like I’m focusing on thin air — like I’m waving my computer up into a cesspool of mossy nodes, fishing for an answer when there isn’t one.
After all, Chris Cornell was the ONE invincible person on the planet, or so I thought — his music was my rock. But let’s be honest, the rock he represented was one that he, way more so than anyone else, truly needed.
It would be logical, here, since I’m discussing a manifestation of EFFECT, to say that rock music does something to the listener, that it truly catalyzes change. But what is “nirvana,” exactly — I’m talking about the actual cosmological phenomenon, although I am obviously also in tandem talking about the band as well. Maybe it’s really nothing.
That’s why it’s so hard to realize, like The Verve’s Richard Ashcroft keeps saying in “Catching the Butterfly” — “I’m gonna keep catching that butterfly / In this dream of mine”. It’s all a dream.
We can’t blame it on file sharing, since Kurt Cobain’s suicide preceded even the invention of the Internet. There’s no question, though, that drug use is a huge informing factor on failure, which in this case, is of course tied closely to success — music so gripping, so undeniably efficacious, that it precipitates mounds and mounds of commercial transfer.
And once that singer’s music is out there, they have nowhere else to hide. Kurt Cobain would never be able to deny it — there’s nothing CULTURAL about Nirvana. Nirvana COMMENTED on culture in all its hopeless vapidity (“Here we are now / Entertain us”)… Nirvana contributed to culture in a way they’d end up resenting, spawning the entire craze of flannel shirts and, maybe, general listlessness, laziness and cafe denizenship, although that part is obviously debatable.
Anyway, just think about it: everybody, in the wake of this music’s propagation, in a sense KNOWS these singers, and maybe it’s not so much the reality of everybody ACTING like they know them, in public places, in bathrooms, restaurants…. it’s that they ACTUALLY DO. Of course, I have no idea how it really feels, rather I’m just hypothesizing.
In closing, I’d just like to say that as a resident of the Hoosier state, I am thankful every day for the camaraderie I have with black people. This sense of community is invaluable — it manifests itself in forms of points of pride for myself, in terms of the collection of new slang terms, as well as just in simple comfort of (often, I realize I’m generalizing) being around non-judgmental people. Chuck Berry made roughly the same impact on music as Chris Cornell and Kurt Cobain, yet he not only didn’t die of suicide but, as far as I know, had incurred precious little legal misfortune whatsoever throughout his life, leading up to his recent passing, of natural causes. I worry, then, about the white people who choose to transcend whiteness. I worry about the value of stasis and I worry that ignorance of one’s possession of it might be preferable to the gnawing will to virtually suspend life’s functional ennui.