you were in Nirvana, man

You talk about emo kids, their look-at-me hair and boundless self-love, clearly crying out to be punched in the face. I hear you. But, my cock-rocking friend, can we talk about the giant, bearded man-poodle that is Dave Grohl?

I’ll be honest with you, I have been prejudiced against the Foo Fighters since their inception. Watching them on a rebroadcast of V-festival has not helped. The ashes of the infinitely talented (if overhyped and cursed with malingering moron fans) Nirvana should have produced either a phoenix or sweet fuck-all, out of pure respect. What they produced was a preening peacock, clearly the least essential of the trio (and yes, I mean less than Krist Whatever Happened To Him Novoselic) becoming pretty much everything from which his former band almost freed us.

It’s not that they’ve never done anything good. All My Life is a work of genius, Everlong is very pretty, Best of You doesn’t suck and there are others. But Dave Grohl is like the average kid with the over-achieving brother called Kurt. Dave is successful, wealthy and almost universally liked. Kurt was a self-destructive drug-addict. But in some families that doesn’t make any difference. Mommy and daddy still love him more. Because while Nirvana’s raw, angry, challenging, catchy, genuinely nihilistic art deserved the adoration, cultural iconography and fame it brought them, Foo Fighters are only as big as they are because Dave Grohl once played drums in a better band.

And that’s the thing. As Nirvana struggled with and railed ineffectually against their adoption by the music industry and induction into the champagne and flashbulb-soaked country club of rock-stardom, Dave has just popped on a pair of Ray-Bans and started waving. While Nirvana made music about nihilism, Foo Fighters make music about nothing.

‘Sell-out’ is a stupid term, used all too often in the glory days of grunge to denote a band that had been successful with an album released after the one you liked, as if being successful was in itself a shame. So I’m not going to use it. It’s just sad (though understandable for a nice guy who’s lost a friend to a suicide motivated by a desire to remain authentic) that this is what he has to settle for. Idiot fans crying when they see you, vacuous interviews and hairstyle-driven makeover consultations. And knowing, despite how talented you are, that it’s all contrived. That none of it is really deserved.

On second thoughts, support him. It’s got to suck to be Dave.

Dave says it best when he says nothing at all: