Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain

by Danny Goldberg

While her husband was overseeing the dismantling of many programs that helped the poor, Mrs. Reagan spent $200,000 on new china for the White House. Reagan was elected by huge majorities. Embattled punks in the eighties, having no mass culture of “resistance” against the administration to plug into, created one themselves. DOA released a song called “Fucked Up Ronnie.” The Minutemen wrote “If Reagan Played Disco,” and there was a hardcore band called Reagan Youth. In 1983, Biafra’s group, the Dead Kennedys, organized a Rock Against Reagan tour. Two years later Thurston characterized Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising album as “a rejection of the smiley face façade of Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ re-election campaign.” In 1991, after Nevermind was released, Kurt said, “The Reagan years have definitely set us back to where the average teenager feels kind of lost and there isn’t much hope.” Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush, presided over the Gulf War, which seemed to many in the punk culture like a conflict that was launched primarily to protect the interests of oil companies. Kurt and Krist felt isolated when the war had a 90 percent approval rating and spawned ubiquitous yellow ribbons, ostensibly to symbolize support for the troops, but often expropriated by hawks as signifying support of the war itself.