I have a friend who still believes every ridiculous piece of popular gossip he hears. Example: When I was in university in 2003 he told me that Damon Albarn had AIDS and that he got it from Blur drummer, Dave Rowntree. This of course is untrue and the rumour probably formulated via broken telephone from Oasis' Noel Galligher saying of Blur in around 1995 "I wish they would catch AIDS and die." The point I'm getting at is that my friend is now 30 and he stills introduces these rumours as actual topics of conversation. I'm pretty skeptical of these types of rumours but like most people I believed a lot of this crap when I was a teenager. I believed that Da Brat and Lil Kim had a gallon of semen pumped from there stomachs. I believed Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself, however I never believed that he was Paul from the Wonder Years or the kid from Mr. Belvedere.
My favourite false claim from when I was 15 was that the Nirvana song Sliver was about Kurt getting molested by his grandfather. I don't remember who the girl was who told me this, but she was the kind of girl who was intent on grieving over Kurt Cobain's death for as long as she could. She was also the type of person intent on co-opting other peoples sadness to in turn be depressed herself, and fit in with the popularized, morose generation of the mid 90's. Anyways, she told me that the song Sliver was about Cobain getting molested by his grandfather. At the time I didn't really care about Nirvana, I cared about Weezer, so I was slanted towards debating this claim instead of excepting it as a fan. I asked her why she thought that and her basis for the argument was that in the song Cobain sang over and over "grandma take me home." This seemed pretty weak and I never believed this claim.Nowhere in this song could I find evidence that Kurt was claiming to have been raped by his grandfather. Kurt was most certainly depressed and wrote a lot of dismal poetry but he also wrote a lot of dumb punk rock too. Sliver sounds like, quite literally, the story of a kid having a shitty time at his grandparent's house while his parents were at the movies.
