60 Songs That Explain the '90s

by Rob Harvilla

He was never real to me. Not really. I thought too much of him to believe he was real: a “real person,” a mere mortal, a vulnerable flawed melodramatic human, a scrawny kid with an aching stomach. Yes, he’s a kid to me now: I’m, like, 17 years older now than he ever got. He’s a myth to me, a deified abstraction, a creator and destroyer of worlds: He destroyed the ’80s of my childhood and created the ’90s of my adolescence. I am never, if you want the truth, a true Nirvana superfan, but I mourn him all the same, and worship him all the same, because my understanding is that everyone worships him, here in the ’90s he created, here in the computer chair in the bedroom I’ll never leave. Never take me home. That’s not the line. That’s not what he says. I misheard so much of what he said and misinterpreted most of the rest. But I’ll never truly believe that, and you can’t make me, and I can’t make myself.