“So he started it and he ended it with the most horrific full stop in rock history. All American punk these days is, by necessity, Porky’s punk, the comedy crap of Green Day or Blink 182, cartoon moves for the kids to jump about to.
And over in the UK, we’d had enough of the misery. Within a few days, Blur had released Parklife and we were all up at Walthamstow dogs with the band having a rare old knees-up. The soundtrack to our lives consciously changed within weeks and we gladly turned from the twisted internal agonising of In Utero to a bunch of carefree Mancs claiming that we were all gonna ‘Live Forever.’
Amen.”Steve Sutherland, 2004 [1]
You know when your friends do the thing that you really love them for, or when they just do something they are good at really well – the best they’ve ever done it. Then amid all the backslapping and celebration they take you aside to quietly tell you that, honestly, they are sick of it, tired of it, and really wish they could do…
It’s something else entirely that, to you, silently loving them, looks so wrong for them, and unfortunate. They want to switch genres, quit the job, move to another country, and it’s not the sea change so much but the hatred of what they want to change from. It’s tragic to see them like it, but then it’s usually only ever just a cold moment they will have before they carry on being what they were regardless. But it’s still shattering and undermining to have someone you can see so well disavowing what you knew was their most clear, open part.
That’s Kurt Cobain’s whole life in some ways. Certainly it’s those interview snippets where he wants to go solo or join Hole or ditch the whole Nirvana thing. Probably it’s the death, too. Not a neat little narrative of “I’m going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory” (Cobain at 14), “I’m never going to make it to thirty. You know what life is like after thirty—I don’t want that” (at 19/20) [2]. It was not an inevitable suicide, but one of many cold moments that, having taken the plunge during it, got preserved.
His heart was always in the right place, if not his brain. Performing in dresses and bras, Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl kissing with tongues on stage, ‘the finest day that I’ve ever had is when I learned to cry on a man’ (yes, lyric sheet/a capella it’s “on command,” but the final mix and a perfectly-placed snare hit completely bury the hard c sound, even with headphones on). The biggest, coolest fucking band on the planet – right? So we’re going to show you kids that if you’re butch or homophobic then you’re a joke to us. Not even preaching; just making it part of a cool, punk rock image to mock our culture’s frequently unchallenged prejudices. Throwing it all, anti-homophobia, anti-misogyny, into a huge mix of ideas and contradictions. Using your exposure to push through and hold hands with some of the near voiceless people having the toughest lives and experiences out there in the margins of audience land. Most huge bands are cool and that’s enough – they are not homophobic or misogynistic, but they won’t spoil the audience’s party to say that certain jokes aren’t funny, that people shouldn’t hate.
Of course there are the ugly Cobain quotes on all sorts of subjects. There’s a personality formed from his will, his drive. You come up with your own reason for doing something, or your own pedantry angle to describe your actions, and you keep reciting it as a mantra. You never let yourself be humble or sorry about certain things because part of your make up, your success and just your way of living is to always illustrate to everyone your control – your control over or certainty in your opinions and choices.
“I don’t ever talk like that,” he maintained [having left threatening, misogynistic messages on the answerphones of Victoria Clarke and Britt Collins, who were preparing a book/exploitative hatchet job on Nirvana and a particular band member’s wife]. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been so vicious and so sexist and weird. I just wanted to seem as extreme and irrational as possible to scare them. For all I care, they are exactly those things. I don’t feel bad about saying any of that stuff because they are cunts. Men can be cunts, too” [3].
And Cobain always maintained that heroin addiction was a choice – it escalated and got out of control and it was hell and stupid, but he actively chose it as a medicine – and he didn’t regret it (it’s not comical but it is: ‘anybody else who does it will fuck up their lives, I don’t endorse it, but I knew I needed it as a tool’). Whether he regretted it or not doesn’t matter; it’s the need to constantly and always STATE, and state and state, your beliefs and ideas and manifesto about those subjects on which you can never let go. This is why Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic look so laid back in comparison.
“I’m such a nihilistic jerk half the time and other times I’m so vulnerable and sincere. […] That’s pretty much how every song comes out. It’s like a mixture of both of them. That’s how most people my age are. They’re sarcastic one minute and then caring the next. It’s a hard line to follow” [4].
Everything oscillates between love and hate. Cobain’s/Nirvana’s influences are genuine then a joke then genuine. As is the Bleach and pre Bleach material – it’s prototype then true Nirvana then false youthful posturing then good then lousy. Whatever it was, some Nevermind and In Utero material was penned back then. The same dualism greeted those two albums. Thank god, because it makes all the albums so different and so astounding and confounding. I still don’t know if I like them or not. I love them of course. They never get boring or familiar. They are shockingly unfamiliar, un-comforting. Lyrically, every line is the preceding one’s converse, detractor. A single line can battle itself. “The lyrics often loft an idea and then shoot it down with one little burst of cynicism [5].” Musically it’s the same story.
It’s safe to say don’t quote me on that. Lyrically, Cobain’s certainly no dogmatist. “It’s worth pointing out, then, that Bleach opens with the phrase, ‘If you wouldn’t mind…’ Without wishing to spoil the surprise, Cobain’s final song (proper) on a Nirvana studio album also ends in a similarly apologetic manner” [6]. “What else could I write, I don’t have the right.”
You could weep, hearing In Utero. It’s such a happy record – it’s everything Cobain and Nirvana did well, and were happy to do well. Life’s problems and joys dissected with attitude and emotion. They were in control of it, despite all the things that would later be identified with killing Cobain and the band – the heroin; the Courtney [Yoko] hysterics; internal frictions; Cobain’s later, static performances, not enjoying the stage; his dissatisfaction with fame – here they were on top again, after all those things had appeared.
Alongside the downward spiral narrative there is something Cobain is enjoying. 1993. The raucous, joyous side of In Utero is more triumphant than Nevermind. ‘Serve the Servants’ kicks ass (and it’s everybody’s ass) – who knew Cobain wanted to write songs like that? And even the (really) downbeat stuff on the album: despite everything, it’s got to be coming from a position of strength. There’s no way a weak person would write/release ‘All Apologies.’ “I wish I was like you, easily amused.”
Then there’s his clothes. He looks kind of rock star cool here and there in ’93. Previously he’d been dyeing his hair different colours using all manner of things so long as they weren’t actually hair dye, and which matted his hair in revolting clumps, and wearing scuzzy clothes and hospital nightgowns and god knows. 1993 (a NYC photo shoot on 24th July at least) gets shades, jumper, (brilliant) white t-shirt and baggy, rich blue jeans – not the faded cruddy ones that looked don’t-suit-you bad on even him. He looked pretty doozy, on his own terms, at the MTV awards that September, too. And that black military jacket at the Live and Loud gig… he looks fucking cool on the In Utero tour. He’s enjoying something there. A way has been found.
The man who bemoaned publicity while being interviewed on MTV. He had to want it and had to hate it (grin into a giggle – with and at – at Cobain on the cover of the Rolling Stone wearing “corporate magazines still suck” on his t-shirt (16th April 1992)). “Hope I die before I turn into Pete Townshend” – 24-year-old Cobain. The line made his journal, an interview and a gig. It’s coupled with a live cover of Baba O’Riley, Novoselic singing: “Don’t cry, don’t grab your wallet; it’s only major label wasteland” (The Who and/or Nirvana there?).
But maybe it has to come from disappointment. The volunteered mocking is from someone who must have been moved or impressed by young Townshend’s/the Who’s songs and image (Cobain’s beloved Melvins were playing Who covers when he first discovered them [7]), and hated that the violent, fuck you youth was submerged by a later career – carrying on, through their thirties and beyond, adapting and learning to enjoy it with weaker, more resigned/contented music, obliging with gigs and honours and nostalgia, penning songs that offered an image of someone who’d found a way to settle the youthful dilemmas and carry on in later life (or who’d gone soft and just couldn’t see it).
That ‘resolution’ element probably terrified Cobain more than anything else. If he lived long enough, carrying on might prove more tempting and become self-deluding – he would think he still had it, or had grown up wiser than the kid who conjured up the statements of his youth, when really he’d lost the strength and faculty to still feel their potent, insoluble truths.
“I don’t blame the average 17-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout,” Cobain adds. “I understand that. Maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously” [8].
“Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old.” Calming down and carrying on as an old man. Cobain’s dilemma is all there in Townshend’s lyrics, too. From his late twenties onwards Townshend’s a self-proclaimed ironic old fuck, still at it. By 35, the relentless pop anger of: “but cold sex and booze don’t impress my little girls/just wanna be making daily records.” Songs that protest by parodying themselves; it’s furiously happy, musically smothering the doubts and self-taming, praising the graft, the schedules – just keep putting the stuff out, take your mind off it. Townshend’s more ‘I hate myself and want to live.’ He offers a clear image of why Kurt Cobain was never going to make it to 30 – if we really want to be fatalistic – or maybe even how he might have looked if he had.
Cobain was big on his youth. His journals and quotes attest to how much of what made Nirvana big and great came to him years before, arriving almost word-perfect in his teens, childhood. With the unprecedented, rapid rise success of Nirvana he’d proved to himself that his youthful, childish ideas were the winners, the real deal. If old age was to dull or disprove them in his mind then why let himself get there? He never got old enough to start to question his youthful wisdom.
Arriving word-perfect… lines from his suicide note turned up in interviews he’d given earlier. “I can’t fake it. I feel like a fool. The audience doesn’t deserve to be witnessing this when I can’t hear myself because I’m not giving it 100 percent. I can’t stand there and pretend I’m having a good time when I’m not” [9]. There he’s talking about fucking monitors failing on stage, that’s all. The same words justified his death a year or so later: “The fact is, I can't fool you, any one of you. It simply isn't fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it, and pretending as if I'm having 100% fun.”
The deployment of the words seems arbitrary. But then that’s suicide, I guess. Weather changes moods. You preserve the worst possible moment in the worst possible way. An arbitrarily bleak and powerful mood gets to you, and if you act there and then you will immortalize it as the definitive. Then all the arbitrary and contradictory words you aired publicly get rounded down – the negative stuff is what he really meant.
“It might be nice to start playing acoustic guitar and be thought of as a singer and a songwriter, rather than a ‘grunge rocker’, because then I might be able to take advantage of that when I’m older” [10].
Last bit of control: even in his youth, even in his suicide note. Right at the top: “To BoddAH.” Then next to it there’s this tiny “pronounced.” Even then, in that state, he wanted to tell readers how to say his imaginary friend’s name.
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[1] Steve Sutherland, ‘The Death of Kurt Cobain’ in Chris Hunt (Ed.) Uncut Legends: Kurt Cobain, Volume 1, Issue 2, April 2004 p.144
[2] Charles R. Cross, Heavier than Heaven: The Biography of Kurt Cobain, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001) p.33 & 76
[3] Michael Azerrad, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, (London: Virgin Books, 1994) p.290.
[4] Azerrad, p.211.
[5] Azerrad, p.211.
[6] James Hector, The Complete Guide to the Music of Nirvana, (London: Omnibus Press, 1998) p.18.
[7] Azerrad, p.25.
[8] Michael Azerrad, ‘Inside the Heart & Mind of Nirvana,’ in Holly George-Warren (Ed.) Cobain: By the Editors of Rolling Stone, (Rolling Stone Press, 1994) p.34.
[9] Azerrad (Come…), p.300.
Thank you so much for the nice article on Kurt. He is a great guy with great attitude. Kurt Cobain Quotes best collections.
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