Cobain, Britpop and Craft Beer.

I purposefully refrained from posting yesterday, the actual anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, deciding to let it pass another few hours. However, it's fully deserving of a marker here.

I first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" while in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) during my teaching gig in 1991, courtesy of a radio station called ROCK-FM. The advent of Nirvana roused me from musical slumber; I'd been so engulfed and preoccupied chasing my travel dreams the previous seven years that I hadn't kept up with a changing world.

By then, I may have been a bit older than the target demographic, but Kurt Cobain spoke directly to me; 'nuff said. Suddenly there was all this new music, and I was like a little kid in the doughnut shop those first few public house years.

It is somewhat odd that while much of what followed in Nirvana's wake failed to make an enduring impression on me, my eyes and ears were opened sufficiently to fall in love with the subsequent Britpop: Oasis, Blur, Suede and others. In terms of pop music, I've always been more English than American, and have long since made my peace with it.

In the Guardian, these two disparate elements are intriguingly tied together. One passage in particular has me thinking about Cobain, the Britpop "mass" progression, and my own field of craft beer.

Besides, you might reasonably argue, a death like Cobain's is a far trickier thing to construct a celebration around than the arrival of Britpop. Cobain presented his suicide as an act not just of personal despair but artistic defeat. His suicide note began by discussing his inability to square Nirvana's vast commercial success with what he called "the ethics involved with independence". "All the warnings from the punk rock 101 courses … [have] proven to be true", he wrote: it was impossible for an "alternative" rock band to become as successful as Nirvana had without losing something important in the process.

Artistic defeat. That's the thing, isn't it?

Can the formerly alternative "craft" beer movement avoid losing its soul with growing success and mass-market recognition? Are we losing something important in the process? The answers are "no" and "yes," but ultimately, as with music itself, the implications can't become clear until we're much further down the road. Until then, the market will do as it will. That's just the way it is.

Britpop and Kurt Cobain 20 years on - don't look back in anger

As the music world marks two anniversaries, Alexis Petridis looks at the impact the death of the Nirvana star and birth of a musical phenomenon had on pop culture

April 2014 brings with it two musical anniversaries. This Saturday it is 20 years since the death of Kurt Cobain. The 25 April, meanwhile, marks 20 years since the release of Blur's third album Parklife, the vast commercial success of which – it went straight to No 1, stayed in the charts for 90 weeks and went platinum four times over in Britain alone – seems as good a marker as any for the beginning of Britpop as a mainstream phenomenon ...