Cobain’s true humiliation was his rapid, inhuman fame — made possible only by the machinery of the record industry. (This isn’t to say that Cobain didn’t want to be a rock star. I think in a way he did, but didn’t know how to handle getting his wish.) It was a big part of what killed him. In his suicide note, he expressed how much he felt detached from rock and roll, from the fans, from the “punk rock 101…independence and the embracement of your community.” The thing had gotten too big, too fast. He quotes Neil Young’s “better to burn out than to fade away” line at the end of his note. I wonder what if the fates had aligned to let him “burn slow” instead. When asked how it felt to be handed a million dollars by her fans, this was Palmer’s response: I have over $1 million of capital to manufacture a record that nobody’s heard. To me, that makes that entire pile of money look like a mountain of faith that my fans have in me, because they’re already on board with my music, my philosophy, my career. They’re on Team Amanda. That’s the kind of thing that a new artist can never do.
— AUSTIN KLEON: “Kurt Cobain wouldn’t have been hawking his Kickstarter campaign.”
