Kurt Cobain's Overlooked Legacy
Some of the Nirvana Leader's Less Celebrated Attributes
Throughout the course of rock and roll there have been individuals and groups that have created such a legacy for themselves that they have attained on the status of modern gods. Elvis, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan are just a few of the artists whose musical careers have won them enough fervent fans to make them, in certain company, bigger than Jesus. Kurt Cobain has become the most recent rock star to become unanimously deified, and he now stands as one of rock’s untouchable figures.
The trouble with turning men into gods is the revisionism needed to justify the transformation. Events are embellished and are flaws glossed over to make a person larger than life. Whether that person is a political leader, war hero, or rock star history is often filtered to show an individual in the best possible light. This, paradoxically, puts legacy in danger of growing stale. Embracing a person without airbrushing away their flaws it magnifies their great qualities by allowing them to be viewed in respect to their imperfect humanity.
Since his untimely death in 1993 Kurt Cobain has had hyperbole after hyperbole piled on to his name. One of his more popular titles, alluded to by Michael Azerrad in his April 16th, 1992 profile for Rolling Stone, is “the spokesman for Generation X”, a label that he was uncomfortable with and one that is too grand for any one person regardless of their achievements. Cobain’s legacy is filled with appointments like that one, grandiose proclamations that ultimately avoid any real definition of his impact on the world. In order to attempt a summation of his life and music, his legacy must be broken down into pieces before it can be reassembled.
A Very Funny Guy
Kurt is almost universally characterized as a tortured soul, the voice of alienated young people in America and beyond. This is certainly true to an extent, and one listen through In Utero will unequivocally verify this claim, but there is also a lighter side to his songwriting that is often overlooked. People often fail to look past punk’s snarling exterior to its often-humorous core. For every anarchic anthem there is a tongue-in-cheek composition. For every “Rise Above” there’s a “Six Pack”, for every “Anarchy In the U.K.” there’s a “Submission”, for every “White Riot” there’s a “Protex Blue”, and so on.
Cobain, a faithful disciple of punk, understood this well. His pre-In Utero songs often display a pronounced sense of humor. Whether it is phrases, like “We can plant a house/ we can build a tree” from Nevermind’s “Breed”, or entire songs, like the faux-terrifying account of a stay at his grandparents’ house in “Sliver”, Kurt’s songs were just as likely to draw laughter from a listener as anger. This is something that unfortunately is not a prominent portion of his legacy.
A Grateful Student
When it gets down to it, Kurt Cobain’s greatest legacy won’t be his own work, but his support of musicians that came before him. This tendency toward acknowledging other performers’ efforts frequently manifested itself in Nirvana’s original material. Cobain was not a particularly original composer, and their most enduring song is an example of this. “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, regularly regarded as one of the greatest songs of all time, is an admitted attempt at copying the Pixies’ soft verse-loud chorus dynamic with a refrain riff that is essentially the same as that of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”.
Rolling Stone’s November 18th, 1991 review of Nevermind written by Ira Robbins that stated Nirvana “isn’t onto anything altogether new” is as accurate an assessment of the album as any, though revisionism has rendered this claim and any other criticism of the band blasphemous for many. But, without borrowing and outright theft rock never would have evolved from the blues, so harsh judgment of Cobain’s tendency toward parody is downright silly. And hey, at least he admitted when he took something from another musician, which isn’t true for a lot of artists.
Rather than keeping the limelight on himself, Cobain opted to deflect it onto his influences whenever possible. The MTV Unplugged performance is perhaps the greatest testament to this. Nirvana easily could have bashed out acoustic versions of “Teen Spirit” and their other mega hits, but they chose to include more than a few covers. As a result the mainstream was introduced to The Vaselines and The Meat Puppets when they expected to hear the band rehash familiar material.
Kurt Cobain was a fervent musical historian, the many lists he kept in his journals attest to that, and he took it upon himself to ensure his audience knew the material that inspired his own work.
Whenever Kurt Cobain’s name has been mentioned in recent years, it’s a sure bet that the words “genius”, “alienated”, and “tragic” will show up, and probably in very close proximity to one another. While all of these words certainly do describe him, they cast his persona in a dark light. That is not the way to write his story. It does more justice to his memory to acknowledge his multi-dimensional nature, namely his humor and his tireless efforts to bring his musical predecessors onto the same popular plane as Nirvana.
One of his unfortunately few non-sad pictures
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