I learned a good lesson from Kurt Cobain. It wasn’t something that he did directly or indirectly that led to the lesson, more that my reaction to the life (and ultimately, death) of Kurt Cobain brought on what I would later discover as one of the most important lessons in my life.

From early on as a teenager I decided, for one reason or another, that I was going to be a judgmental, intolerant jackass. My mom initially identified it as snobbery, and I think in the beginning it was to some extent, later I think it was just a pattern of thinking I made for myself. At the time, I thought that conviction of your beliefs meant that one must shun all things that don’t mesh with them. Along with that, I was convinced that I was open-minded, cultured and educated. Looking back, I know now that I was purely sophomoric in a good many of my opinions, ignorant to the history that ultimately leads to popularity in not just popular music, but a good amount of culture that I thought I knew about. I was, as are most self-important youth, angry, opinionated and ignorant.

When it came to Kurt Cobain, I wasn’t particularly quiet about my distaste for him. Although I do clearly remember being much more angry about the mystery of his popularity and why everyone considered him to be such a genius than picking on the man himself, but as an educated musician myself—and by educated, I mean there was a time I could read music; now it’s just a bunch of dots, so take from that what you will—I took offense to mainstream garage rock and unleashed my undeserved vitriol on poor unsuspecting Kurt. It was wrong to do, and to this day I feel bad about it. Mostly because later I discovered that Kurt was pretty much the embodiment of angry, troubled youth and finding that out made me see him as a person—not just a musician whose work I wasn’t all that fond of.

The lesson learned from shedding my hypocritical (did I mention that I owned ‘Nevermind’ all while crapping all over it?) former self is that, yes people like different things, a lot of art out there is crap, (thank you Patton Oswalt) like what you like and drive on.

I have actually developed a decent collection of Nirvana that I do listen to from time to time and I serves as a reminder to make sure that I’m really looking at things before I decide that I don’t like them, and if indeed I do decide that I don’t like something to just simply leave it alone and save my energy for something more productive than hate.