HISTORY REPEATING

The name caught my eye immediately. A Nirvana tribute band called Courtney & The Shotguns will be playing the Abart Club in Zurich on April 10 to “celebrate the 15th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death”, as the unfortunately-worded announcement puts it. Quite apart from the fact I find the name tasteless in the light of Cobain’s suicide, the advertisement made me remember how quickly personal experience passes into ancient history without you noticing. It seems only yesterday that Nirvana were playing one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen in Neuchatel, but since that memorable evening in early 1994 the world has changed beyond recognition: The Internet has revolutionised the way we communicate with one another, we are involved in wars raging in parts of the world we could previously ignore, and the first black president has taken residence in the White House. The first inkling of how the planet can change beneath your very feet overtook me when I went to see the film “Enigma” with my father back in 2002. The thriller starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet is set in England in 1943, more accurately in Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking headquarters where my father worked during World War II. Watching the film, I realised how much the planet had changed since he was a young man deciphering Japanese military dispatches – so much so that the world he knew back then has become a thing of fiction only remembered to varying degrees of accuracy by historians, journalists and scriptwriters. And now I’m having similar feelings about my own life. Last Wednesday I attended the launch of the Swiss arm of the Nokia Music Store in Zurich, and although the event under-impressed me with its lack of PR punch, it none the less sent me on a reverie. Nokia’s music platform might only be one of many such sites currently in operation, but it is another step away from a world where browsing dingy record shops like Virgin Records in Coventry was the highest of pleasures for prepubescent males like me. Now that you can access any piece of music you like and transfer it to your favourite piece of tech within seconds, the independently owned record store will at some point become a thing of the past. And with it will go that heady atmosphere of danger and disdain that once added to rock, reggae and rap music’s particular tang: I wonder what Kurt Cobain would have made of such developments.