Hey Lively readers, Kathleen here. I want to qualify what I am going to write, because it will be purely my voice. I am our marketing communications manager; it’s my job to help create, curate, and grow the voice of Lively. It is not often that I will use the Lively blog to write from a personal perspective, because we have many voices here, and it’s my aim to represent all of us.
But I started as a music writer, and on occasions such as these I will step out of the obscurity of our social media feeds and be bold enough to speak, in my own words, for this collective of people I sit with every day.
Many of us at Lively did not grow up in Seattle, but many of us did. We range in age from those of us who danced to Young MC at our proms, to the Backstreet Boys, to Earth, Wind, and Fire. We grew up loving all kinds of music, and our divergent, winding paths led us to fall in love with Lively and the work we do here.
If you talk to any of us, though, you’ll find that no matter our age or our place of birth, we were drawn to or rooted in Seattle in part because of the legacy of Nirvana and the movement it was deeply entrenched in.
Almost everything that could be said about Nirvana and how they lifted Seattle’s profile as the city where rebels ruled and their anthems played on the radio, has been said. Biographies have been written (my personal favorite is Heavier than Heaven by Charles Cross), cover songs have been sung (even Horse Feathers did a very pretty rendition of “Drain You” that makes the macabre lyrics even starker), and countless articles penned from every angle imaginable.
I even felt at a loss when deciding what, if anything, a person who was too young and far away in Nirvana’s era should or could say. I didn’t discover the ’90s until 2004, and it was a really sore spot as I blasted Bleach in my car, feeling like I showed up to the party to find empty Solo cups rolling around on the sticky floor – ghostly evidence of a good time.
But what I am realizing today is that Nirvana’s legacy stretches beyond their time, their records, or Cobain’s sensationalized and tragic death. It gave Seattle a history to be a proud part of, no matter when or where you were born. There is no going backwards from Nirvana. The integrity and spirit of the movement that shook the ‘80s and ‘90s in Seattle crackles on today, and it’s up to all of us who are planted here to keep it buzzing. We have to honor the riot grrrls, the slackers, the losers, the kids who came out from under the overpass to wail poetry over distorted guitar. We find new ways to change the status quo, with innovators like Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl as examples. Not to mention Bruce Pavitt, Calvin Johnson, Kathleen Hanna, Josh Rosenfeld, and so many more. We push forward, because we came from somewhere. And we are proud of where we are going.
Last night Nirvana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the performances did a better job of filling a room to the rafters with what Nirvana has meant to music than my words ever could. All I can say is – we will continue to try to live out what was started in our city, as a company full of people who have buried ourselves in the work of giving music the kind of immortality it deserves. Thank you, Nirvana.
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