I’ve been seeing this a lot:
A toddler, or little kid, wearing a t-shirt with the iconic Nirvana smiley face.
It’s bewildering on a few fronts to me, the first one of which is merely temporal. For, assuming that the parents of young kids (younger than, say, five) are not much older than 40, then they were a mere 11 years old when Cobain committed suicide.
Probably not committed Nirvana fans at that point?
Though that doesn’t preclude them from becoming big fans after Cobain’s death, nor does it suggest that Nirvana was not a major musical force for the next several decades. (They were!)
But the other front is a different matter, removed from the temporal questions of fandom and when it happened and how old the parents were.
The other front:
Why do some parents treat their kids as billboards for their tastes, musical and otherwise?
I saw this, if it’s not obvious, as a parent who, um, doesn’t do this.
Part of this has to do with the act that kids’ clothing is already expensive. Why would I want to spend extra money on artist merch that the wearer will quickly outgrow?
But the greater part is the discomfort of saddling my child with a smiley face that they cannot possibly understand the unbearable cultural weight of.
Taylor Coe 