Wit & Attitude Quote by Krist Novoselic

There is a quiet grief baked into Novoselic's shrug here, the kind that only lands if you remember what Seattle used to signify. In the early 90s, the city wasn't just a place on a map; it was a pressure cooker that exported mood. "Crazy" is doing a lot of work: it points to the scrappy weirdness of cheap rent, DIY venues, subcultural cross-pollination, and the sense that you could fail loudly without immediately being priced out. It also nods to the messier, darker edges of that era the mainstream later romanticized as "grunge."

Calling Seattle "a big dot-com city" isn't just an observation about industry. It's a cultural reclassification: from scene to sector, from accident to plan. The phrase compresses an entire civic identity shift into a single corporate label, the way a neighborhood becomes a "corridor" once investors arrive. Novoselic's intent reads less like nostalgia for flannel and more like frustration with how creative ecosystems get flattened by economic success. Dot-com is shorthand for moneyed rationality: campuses, IPOs, and a workforce that imports stability along with capital.

The subtext is that cities don't simply grow up; they get optimized. When the cost of living rises and risk becomes expensive, "crazy" doesn't disappear because people matured. It disappears because the conditions that reward eccentricity get regulated out of existence. Coming from a Nirvana co-founder, it's also a sly self-indictment: the movement that made Seattle magnetic helped make it marketable, and marketability invites the very forces that neutralize the magnet.