Infinitive Splitter

Via Deadspin (of all places), I learned that Kurt Cobain would have been 40 years old today.

I was never really that into Nirvana; my favorite song of theirs is “The Man Who Sold the World,” which is, as Cobain acknowledged after they played it during their acoustic set on MTV, “a David Bowie song.” Unplugged in New York is the only Nirvana album I ever bother to listen to.

More relevant to me are the discoveries that Noel Gallagher will be 40 in May, Beck Hansen and Rivers Cuomo will be 37 this summer, and Cake’s John McCrea is already 41 or 42 (as of this writing, even Wikipedia isn’t sure).

I started listening to some of those guys when I was 11 or 12 years old, and by the time I was in junior high school I had at least one album by all of them (but not Nirvana — in 2003, a girlfriend gave me a used copy of Nevermind after I admitted to being the only American child of the 80s and 90s who didn’t own it). For some reason, I always thought of them as being the same age as I was. As Nick Hornby might point out, it’s probably because the stuff they were singing about was the same stuff that had recently begun to roll around in my own head.

A 39-year-old Noel Gallagher seems a lot further from a 24-year-old me than a 27-year-old Noel seemed when I was 12. But I suppose that happens when rock stars move directly from late adolescence (where many of them seem to spend more time than most people) straight past young-adulthood and into gray-haired middle age.

Small wonder that none of my favorite songs are about moving from entry-level jobs to truly rewarding careers, or the importance of keeping up with friends from high school and college, or how to decide where to live, or whether to go to graduate school.