Grohl
By Bill Reese
I never thought I'd ever say this, but Dave Grohl has become a better songwriter than Kurt Cobain. He wasn't always this way, but the song son the new disc are probably the most personal he's ever put together,and the most endearing thing about each Foo Fighters record is that it is always an evolution from the previous effort. With every disc, Grohl adds new layers, subtracts the excess fat and somehow finds away to continually hone his craft.Cobain never really did that. He started to show signs of evolution,arguably with "All Apologies" and "You Know You're Right," but you can't use two songs as proof of progress, not when Grohl has spent the last twelve years experimenting and evolving. Cobain's songs are timeless classics, they dammed the river and forced the music to flowin a new direction. Grohl can't do that, and he doesn't have to.
Of course, Cobain never had the opportunity to evolve, but that's his fault, not Grohls, and as a result, Kurt's music should be measured against Dave's with no asterisk and without taking into account the"what ifs." Cobain killed himself because, among other things, hewasn't comfortable with being a rock star and what fame would do tohis music. And on Echos, Grohl's songs about trouble at home amids this life as a famous rocker show that he's even a bigger person to take the strife associated with rock stardom, live through it and convert negative energy into positive, really fucking hardcore rock songs. And that knocks Cobain even further because he lived through a childhood of abuse, neglect and hate, didn't crack, only to crack under the weight, (among other things) of rock stardom?
Nobody, maybe Sean Lennon, has had to crawl out of a bigger shadow. And Sean Lennon's got two OK albums and seven or eight good songs. Grohl has six LPs (seven if you could In Your Honour as two discs), and two dozen great songs, as well as three or four bona fide classics. He stopped being the drummer in Nirvana so long ago, it took me four paragraphs to even mention that. The only shadows Cobain had to emerge from were his own past and his idols in Seattle's early scene. And compared to Grohl's, emerging from that darkness was like walking into as undrenched afternoon.Nirvana's music and their meteoric rise was the dream. Foo Fighters,and Grohl's music and success is the dream realized.