It's funny how the little things can set you off. For example, I was reading the sports blog Deadspin today, and there was a link to this story about new Kurt Cobain Converses. Now, the fact that Courtney Love would license her dead husband's name and writing for a pair of shoes doesn't surprise me at all. I'm more or less prepared for the day when Nirvana songs are used to sell everything from cars to life insurance. In fact, about the only thing that Courtney could do now to surprise me would be to put out a new, good Hole album. And while I'm bothered by the existence of these shoes, given how much Kurt would have hated it as well as my own knee-jerk reaction to the use of art to sell shit, that's not what I really began thinking about. Instead, I began thinking about how genuinely strange it all is- the mere fact that a rock star who has been dead for fourteen years is being used to market shoes, of all things, and how interesting the cult of Kurt really is.
Since his death, Kurt Cobain has become something of a profane saint, a symbol of all that was good about the music scene of the late 80s and early 90s and a symbol of how the music industry and marketing eat their young. He has become a martyr, a pure artist who had stardom pushed upon him, James Dean and Rimbaud and Elvis and Holden Caufield all rolled up into one person. And most of this is as full of shit as the endless conspiracy theorists who refuse to believe that a depressed heroin addict would ever kill himself. I don't find Kurt's life and death to be full of any particular meaning, nor do I see it as some sort of post-modern grunge Passion Play. Chris Bell and D. Boon both died at the age of 27, in a pair of car crashes, and I don't see Kurt's death as being especially different from either of those, except for the fact that Kurt's death wasn't an accident. Okay, so Kurt didn't like the nature of stardom or the way that music industry works. I can name a dozen other people this is true of, and none of them killed themselves. In fact, I don't believe that Kurt's distrust of fame and his suicide are connected. I think that Kurt shot himself for essentially the same reasons that Richard Manuel hung himself in a hotel bathroom- a cocktail of personal demons and addiction and depression. I could probably construct some elaborate theories about Manuel's death- Robbie Robertson killed him because Robbie can be as unlikable as Love, or he was upset about the way that Woodstock generation that Manuel was associated with had turned from peace and love to greed and materialism, and it would be just as hollow as the idea that Cobain's suicide is deeply significant on any level other than the literal level- a great musician killing himself.
In his excellent book Love Is A Mixtape, Rob Sheffield (who used to write for Spin, but I think I read he gave up and took a gig with Blender) writes about the now legendary Nirvana unplugged show, which has retrospectively become Kurt's real suicide note, superseding the Neil Young quoting doggerel that Courtney Love famously read aloud to that huge crowd of mourners (and people who just saw the gathering as the place to be) after Kurt's death. Sheffield doesn't buy this interpretation, and neither do I. (On a purely literal level, if the show was a suicide note, why didn't the band play some bizarre acoustic version of "I Hate Myself and I Want To Die"?) Sheffield writes:
"The Unplugged music bothered me a lot. Contrary to what people said at the time, he didn't sound dead, or about to die, or anything like that. As far as I could tell, his voice was not just alive but raging to stay that way. And he sounded married. Married and buried, just like he says. People liked to claim his songs were all about the pressures of fame, but I guess they just weren't used to hearing rock stars sing love songs anymore, not even love songs as blatant as "All Apologies" or "Heart-Shaped Box." And he sings, all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can't leave until you die."
When I listen to the album, I'm more interested in the little moments where Cobain seems to be having fun. "This is off our first record, most people don't know it" is a great way for a suddenly famous band to introduce their act. Or the story Kurt tells about trying to get David Geffen to buy Leadbelly's guitar for him. Or the way, before "Pennyroyal Tea" when Kurt asks "Am I going to do this by myself?" I'm not trying to say that the album isn't moving, or that it doesn't churn your emotions, especially looking back at what happened after the album was recorded. I'm just saying that I don't see the album as being any more packed with meaning than the Who Are You album cover, which features Keith Moon sitting in a chair with "Not To Be Taken Away" clearly written on it, and this being the last Who album before Moon died.
I worry about things that are somewhat silly. It's kind of my deal. But I do worry that the gospel according to Kurt has completely overshadowed just how great the albums, especially Nevermind and In Utero, really are. I feel like when people hear "Come As You Are" now, the only line that really connects is the weak irony of "I swear I don't have a gun". While Jim Morrison's death has somehow conferred a level of seriousness onto the essentially silly lyrics of Door's albums (which is not to say that silly songs like "The End" or "Riders on the Storm" or "Break On Through" are wholly without merit), Kurt's suicide bestowed a level of meaning onto the Nirvana albums that obscures just how legitimately good they really are. Most people can listen to the Sex Pistols rail about nihilism and "No Future" without connecting it to Sid Vicious murdering Nancy and then killing himself with a needle, but can't hear "All Apologies" as anything other than a parting epistle from the only pure soul in all of the music industry. People claim that Cobain never wanted to be famous. I call bullshit. Of course he wanted to be a rock star. He might have discovered, upon achieving stardom, that it wasn't what he wanted, but that makes him just like every other rock star who took their music seriously (except for, maybe, Paul McCartney. Just a feeling I have). I feel like the worst of the Cobain mythology has passed us by- the last time I saw a huge display of posters for sale in the Brickyard, Tony Montana outnumbered Kurt by at least four-to-one, which is a rant for another day- but every time something like this Converse deal comes to pass, there will be a little flare-up. Yes, you should be irritated about this. But you should be irritated in the same way that you're irritated when Jaguar uses "London Calling" to sell cars, or when "Fortunate Son" shows up in a commercial for jeans, or when, inevitably, the Velvet Underground is used to sell Roth IRAs. I'm saying that Kurt Cobain was a fantastic artist, and might even have been something of an unofficial spokesman for a generation, but he wasn't a saint to be canonized or the last angry man standing up against the corporate takeover of rock and roll.
Besides, everyone knows that's Neil Young's job.
The picture is a Kurt Cobain action figure. When I did a Google Image search, it came up, and it was too ridiculous not to include.
No comments:
Post a Comment