If you’re flying anywhere this Thanksgiving, you’re already fucked. Least as I can tell from my many hours in terminals yesterday, anyway. The folks on the plane right before mine had their flight up-and-canceled, and every plane coming and going in my connecting city was delayed on an average of an hour. That’s just on pre-THX Monday, man.

Good thing I packed some music mags—“printed blogs,” like Sonic Boom’s mag rack sez, remember ‘em? I picked this month’s Magnet based solely on the fact that it had a review of the People Take Warning! box set (advice: GET), and the issue’s fine; has a kind review of Invitation Songs; has a nice feature on The Mendoza Line’s final album (whose label, Seattle’s Glurp Records, is featured in a piece of mine this week in the printed Line Out). But the issue’s back page column drove me nuts.

It goes on about Glen Hansard from The Frames, making a stink about the sudden publicity his band landed through the movie Once, which he wrote music for. Goes on and on about those who’ve sought fame in rock music versus those who’ve postured grandly about shunning it, about being undernoticed (citing The Mendoza Line) versus making it too big. To make his point, author Phil Sheridan brings out the ol’ shotgun:

The push-and-pull I’m talking about is what destroyed Kurt Cobain. When you look out into the audience and see the people you hate—or more to the point, the people who previously hated you—singing along to your most personal thoughts and feelings, that will seriously fuck up your shit. And poor Kurt’s shit was so fucked up, he could only think of one way out of the trap.

Citing suicide to prove a point is one thing; going so far as to explain why someone committed that suicide is another. I’m not saying Sheridan’s Kurt-pothesis is way off the mark, but isn’t it a rock-writer cliche to reference Cobain as if we’re so close to his plight? Like we’re sitting on the bed with him, handing him shotgun shells and patting him on the back, because we know his every, final thought? Not buying it. Unless Courtney’s sold you the guy’s archived brainwave logs (and, lord knows, she’ll try at some point), it’s ultimately conjecture, and that it merely solidifies a mag’s back-page opinion makes it worse, far as I’m concerned. You have a million other rock burnout examples to pick from that’re better documented. Fat Elvis, maybe?

Cobain’s an easy way out for writers, so I think it’s time to call a music-crit moratorium on referencing him. In fact, I’m tempted to add some strikethroughs to his name throughout this post…because, man, that’s what Kurt would’ve wanted.