"Like a funeral," was supposedly the brief Cobain gave producer Alex Coletti for adorning the MTV stage with white lilies, black candles and a lonesome chandelier for the intimate, all-acoustic live show. For the monumental overdrive of 1991's 30-million selling breakout Nevermind – courtesy of producer Butch Vig – and the bare, bone-breaking "Steve Albini sound" of follow-up In Utero, two years later. For the loud-quiet-loud headbanging Smells Like Teen Spirit and head-aching Heart-Shaped Box. For messy feedback, impenetrable rhymes, thrashed power chords and snarled, senseless yelps. In Cobain's lifetime, Nirvana were known for noise. Taped in November 1993 and released as an album a year later, after Cobain's death, this eclectic live performance would serve as a fitting eulogy and revelatory last act. Nirvana were the more truly alternative band, instead taking equal cues from the scratchy DIY aesthetic of 1980s punk rock, extreme metal and dirgy, overlooked underground acts like Melvins, The Smithereens, The Vaselines and Meat Puppets – who Cobain invited onstage, singing three of their songs for a swansong MTV Unplugged in New York. In truth, grunge was a nebulous conceit, coined by journalists lazily clumping together scruffily dressed rockers of different musical allegiances – Seattle also-rans Pearl Jam, Cornell's Soundgarden and Alice in Chains owed more to the big riffs of commercial 1970s rock and heavy metal. What then seemed like a passing trend was arguably rock's last hurrah – a milieu today held up with more misty-eyed affection than any movement in guitar music since. The grunge wave Cobain fronted kicked out 1980s pop and rock, and set the glum tone for modern guitar music forevermore, from Korn, Linkin Park and Nickelback to early Radiohead and beyond. Or making shrill cathartic pleas and intimate confessions an alternative to clich ed rock bravado. Cobain's most lasting influence will always be taking raw, dirty, angsty, DIY music to the masses – and MTV.
Before Nirvana, "alternative music" was just that – edgy, independent releases sold in specialist shops and mail order cliques – an "alternative" to the mainstream. Hyperbole may be a rock critic's best friend, and posterity a dying record industry's favourite tactic, but even the most level-headed historian would struggle to downplay Cobain's cultural impact. It joins a growing stack of literature on Nirvana, and especially Cobain, surely unrivalled in volume by any major artist working since the generation of 1960s pop pioneers to which Bob Dylan and The Beatles belong. The latest tributes come from former manager Danny Goldberg, whose new memoir Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain was rush-released this week to mark the anniversary. It is sadly never possible to separate the artist from the art, but in the case of Cobain, the myth is so overwhelming, the imagery so pervasive – the gloomy music so intertwined with the tortured soul – that any claim of objective perspective feels incredibly fraught. AlamyĬobain's suicide will forever overshadow his work, muddy his legacy and shape any audience's appreciation of his achievements. Nirvana's Dave Grohl, Kurt Cobain and Kris Novoselik, pictured in 1987. And as the recent suicides of Cobain's grunge contemporary Chris Cornell, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington, EDM DJ and musician Avicii and Prodigy frontman Keith Flint illustrate, there has been little progress in addressing addiction and mental health in the music world. It’s known that the rock star’s lifeless body was discovered with a shotgun leaning on the chest on Ap– but no one can be certain when, or perhaps who, pulled the trigger.Įxperts date Cobain's death to three days earlier, but while denial-racked conspiracy theorists continue to doubt the " who?", 25 years after that date, maybe the real mystery is " why?".ĭespite the presence of an eerie Neil Young-quoting suicide note, a quarter-century's perspective hasn't helped the world explain why the lead singer of epoch-changing American rock band Nirvana – then one of the most famous people on the planet – would choose to end his life.
Kurt Cobain’s death fulfils frustratingly few of the neat what / where / when principles journalists live by.
0 kommentar(er)
