The Real Godfather of Grunge: Bob Mould's Modulate

KURT COBAIN WAS a wonderful musician, but the combination of a best-selling record, a tabloid marriage and a lurid suicide inflated his reputation all out of proportion. For if you scrape away all the celebrity distractions that Cobain hated and you compare him on purely musical terms to Bob Mould, for example, Mould is the more important artist. Everything that Cobain did musically, Mould did earlier, better and longer. And Mould is still out there doing it, with a new album, Modulate, and tour this spring.