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New Complaint: The Fame and Death of Kurt Cobain By Cole Louison Maybe it's that I've lately found myself arguing that Limp Bizkit is not such a bad band because they, unlike so many of the groups and singers in the MTV spotlights, are an organic band and not, a creation existing basically to make money off today's adolecents. Or maybe it's because someone like Lenny Kravitz can still stay popular just because he's really stylish (have you ever actually listed to the words of any of his songs?). Whatever the reason, now seems as good a time as any for a reflection on Kurt Cobain, his stardom, its destruction, and the sad absence of a character like him in today's world of rock stars. Like most people my age, I found Nirvana and Kurt on MTV. It was on MTV where I first saw the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, and it was on MTV where the official word came to confirm the terrible rumor: Kurt had blown off his head with a shotgun. I was a sophomore in high school then, and had actually started listening to Nirvana less than in the past two years. But let's start there. I was in eigth grade when "Teen Spirt" was on MTV literally every 20 minutes. Though Nirvana and especially Kurt were all over the TV and magazines, at the time I didn't know and didn't care about this new band and young man from Seattle who was suddenly a spokesperson for my generation, writing powerful and passionate songs that identified with anyone who had ever been picked on or beaten up. I had heard and read a little of these ideas, and none of it mattered. What was important to me at the time was the sound Nirvana brought to chartown. When Nevermind became the top-selling album in the country, it shared the charts with Garth Brooks, Guns 'N Roses and Michael Jackson. The sound, Kurt called it punk, the TV called it alternative, was one a lot of people, especially suburban-bred middle schoolers, had never heard before. The lyrics, and certainly not the message, were not nearly as important and attractive as the sound Nirvana made that wound kids up so much the DJ could only get through about half of "Teen Spirit" at dances because kids would start to pile on each other and hang from the rafters of the cafeteria ceiling. Something in that sound created by the menial base, drums and guitar lines drove kids into a frenzy, and at the center of the whole thing was bright-eyed, blonde-haired (sometimes), 23-year-old Kurt Cobain, who came back from a European tour to find out he was the biggest rock star American youth had found since Michael Jackson, a status he butted heads with until he lost that rainy April day in Seattle. The strange thing was, Kurt never seemed to enjoy his fame and attention, but through the rest of his life, he never hid from it either. As vocal as he was about his annoyance with being recognized in public and his hate of rock-star culture, he was vocal about it on MTV and in Spin interviews. He never seemed to hate his stardom enough to pull on Axl Rose or Eddy Vedder and just disappear. So was Kurt a sellout? Nirvana had signed with a giant record company, consistently did photo shoots and interviews, and kept making videos: All the things that seem to turn good bands into bad creations. The sweet thing was, as Nirvana went on through the stardom machine, its music got weirder, heavier, and more graphic. The David Geffen Company first refused to release In Utero, stating: "These new songs are not for wimps." Kurt's performance illustrated a mixture of weakness, strength, anger and power totally unmatched by the popular musicians of the time. The set-up usually went like this in concert: Dave would thrash away on the drums, Krist would bounce around the stage with this bass, and Kurt would stand there stiffly, hunched over the microphone in multiple layers of clothing, sweating like a demon. But that was the beautiful thing about Kurt on stage: As small and uncomfortable as he looked, his screaming voice and guitar brought out a force unheard at the top of the charts. Also attractive to so many people who related to the pain in his music was Kurt's copyablestyle. It was easy to wear wasted jeans and lots of t-shirts and not wash your hair. Still, I think kids' deeper attraction to Kurt existed because there was something vaguely Christ-like and masochistic about him. Images from the 'Lithium' video show something miserable but admirable about a turtlenecked, sweatered Kurt Cobain playing his ancient guitar and screaming his so often pained lyrics in front of a shirtless crowd with his face boiling and his hair matted over his eyes. Kurt either had an attraction to what was uncomfortable, or simply found what most people feel uncomfortable to be pleasant. The only picture I ever saw of Kurt sleeping featured him laying on the tile floor of a swimming pool next to his guitar. During the Nevermind recording sessions, Kurt apparently took care of his strained vocal cords and pained stomach with codeine cough syrup and Jack Daniel's. Whether pain was attractive to Kurt, or Kurt was attractive to pain, elements of sickness showed up in a lot of his lyrics, especially on In Utero, Nirvana's final album. Constant references of infection, waste, healing, burning, decomposition, deformity, birth, the body, and especially medicine, tonics and the idea of taking something to get rid of something else, suggest a fascination with the forces that make and break life. While Kurt's songs, especially the later ones, obsess over decay and sickness, the forces that take away from life, there's also a huge interest in growth, healing and especially pregnancy. From the reoccurring images of pregnant women and fetuses on the back, front and inside, to lyrics like "Sit and drink Pennyroyal Tea/Distill the life that's inside of me," to the title, the album calls attention to birth, life and beginnings as it does death and decay. This concern with the balance and cycles of rotting and fertilization, of killing to live, and the way death and life sprout from each other is a major theme of the album that surfaces if not dominates most of the tracks on In Utero. "Scentless Apprentice" offers: "I lie in the soil and fertilize mushrooms/leaking out gas fumes are made into perfume." In an MTV interview, Kurt said "Rape Me" was about a rapist sent to prison, where he himself is raped. For the chorus on "Very Ape," Kurt screams: "Out of the ground/Into the sky/Out of the sky/Into the dirt." The lyrics to "Pennyroyal Tea" tell the story of a pregnant woman who seems to have gone to deadly measures to have an abortion, while "Milk It" describes a sick, but successful, parasitic relationship: "Her milk is my shit, My shit is her milk." All this being said, the final stance the album takes is not a balanced one when it comes to life and death and growth and decay. Here, life seems to lose and death and decay seem to win. While Kurt makes an effort to show the interrelations of life and death, details of the lyrics call special attention to the sickness, evil and terror that confronts, defeats and deforms life so early on. The opening track on the album talks of the pain in growing, being bored and old, and having nothing left to say. "Scentless Apprentice" finds growth in death (see above quotation), but the growth is fungal, and pitted up against lyrics like "every wet nurse refused to feed him" and "there are countless formulas for pressing flowers." Very early on, says this song, life is ignored, crushed or survives in the form of fungus. The over-before-it-starts outlook on life drives "Rape Me" and "Pennyroyal Tea." If life doesn't come from the dirt like in "Scentless Apprentice" or "Very Ape," it comes from one person forcing themselves on another, leaving scars that, cycle or no cycle just can't heal: "You'll always stink and burn," says the last line of "Rape Me." And if life is conceived, suggests "Pennyroyal Tea," we don't want it anyway. Another dark argument the album makes questions the idea of birth as a new beginning. Life will continue in whatever grotesque forms it will take on, and again life comes from death, but Kurt's lyrics seem to question if birth really starts us anew and how much of the sickness and decay in death carry over into life. "Heart-Shaped Box" states: "Cut myself on angel hair and baby's breath" and "Milk It" ends in a pounding guitar and the single-breathed: "Obituary birthday/Your scent is still here in my place of recovery." Kurt was often credited with being able to pull beauty out of misery in a way that appealed to a huge numbers of young adults and especially teenagers. By the end of In Utero however, it seems like Kurt's given up. You can bring out the beauty in what is sick and painful and unfair, but the bad stuff still remains, so what's the point? A lyric a lot of people have heard or hummed but less people know comes in repetition at the end of "All Apologies," the album's final track: "all in all is all we all are." Like most Nirvana lyrics, I never thought about the message of the line until Kurt was long dead, Dave Grohl became leadman for the childproof band Foo Fighters, and Nirvana's CDs were moved to the 'popular music' aisle of Sam Goody, right next to 98 Degrees. I think the line might mean: "What we are in the end is what we are and nothing else matters." If that's true, then Kurt's lyrics on his last album offer more of an explanation of his suicide. In Utero's lyrics see us as poisoned, tired, old and sick and towards the end of his life, I think Kurt was beginning to match that description. He was plagued by stomach pains to the point of using heroin, and though it was said Kurt had been clean for sometime before he died, he had fled a rehab clinic before going to the house where he took his own life and an autopsy revealed narcotics in his bloodstream. I never thought Kurt looked old until Nirvana did "Unplugged" in 1994. As uncomfortable as he looked in concert, the intensity of his voice and guitar gave him a strength that just wasn't there in that small studio full of flowers, candles, and acoustic instruments. This isn't to say the performance wasn't powerful in it's way; the songs were great and at times, Kurt's voice was strong as ever. His final breath at the finish of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" is as chilling as the scene from the "Lithium" video when he sprints into the stacked amplifiers. Still, Kurt seemed weak sitting in that armless secretary's chair reading the lyrics from a music stand in front of him. Pat Smear had also been added to the band to help with the already basic guitar chords Kurt was having trouble with and lately a cello had been backing the band up on slower songs. Kurt seemed to need more help than before. Rolling Stone, who has botched facts about Nirvana since the beginning, reported Kurt requesting the set for Unplugged to be "exactly like a funeral." If Unplugged was Kurt's funeral, MTV certainly made sure everyone was there, broadcasting the performance constantly after there was nothing left to report about the suicide. I wonder how Kurt would feel about that. How his one acoustic and most user-friendly performance was shown again and again in his memory, rather than one of the many intense plugged-in performances MTV had in its archives, like the 1993-94 New Years show when Kurt spit on the camera, threw his guitar into the rafters, broke the head off one of the In Utero dummies, tried to get the crowd to rush the stage, imitated mindlessly clapping fans, and walked off stage with his broken guitar still plugged in, leaving the amps screeching until a large man in black walked out from backstage to unplug the guitar. Credits. Cole Lousion is a senior print journalism major at Ithaca College. |
