Kurt Cobain and a dream about pop
In an age of corporate consolidation, Kurt Cobain turned an industry upside down. And in an age of media prying, he died right in front of our eyes.
By Bill Wyman
Sept. 24, 2001 | In the early years of the last decade, we watched the concussive career of the rock band Nirvana -- from early word about an explosive new group from Seattle, to the release of the group's epochal "Nevermind" in September 1991, to the wrenching suicide of its leader, Kurt Cobain, on a sad April day two and a half years later. There are a pair of interesting disconnects between what we lived through then and the story offered by a new biography of Cobain, the group's songwriter and singer. The charismatic, talented and troubled Cobain led the group into a furious and extraordinary career that sold millions of records of caustic and uncompromising rock at a time when radio hated it and it seemed like there was no mass market for it. The new biography is "Heavier Than Heaven," by Charles R. Cross; it's a detailed, comprehensive and dispassionate major look at Cobain's life.
By disconnects, I mean that the story Cross tells us reorients us to what was important about Cobain's life and his death. In a couple of ways it's different from what we thought -- or were, in effect, led to think -- at the time.
Cross charts, painfully and for the first time, how Cobain's heroin addiction informed and then dominated the band's day-to-day activities during the period in which most of us cared about them. This is in contrast to the band's first serious chronicler, Michael Azerrad, whose 1993 book, "Come As You Are," was written with the cooperation of the group; despite that access, Cobain's friends apparently covered up the star's problems. Cross has the benefit of the passage of time and the apparent desire of many around the band to finally set the record straight.
It was known that Cobain used heroin; one or two major magazine articles and Azerrad's book during Cobain's lifetime talked about it. Still, it seemed like most of the press -- and MTV -- and even we fans just didn't want to know. It's a little sobering, in fact, now, to watch again MTV's coverage of Cobain's death, and see the channel's agreeable news anchor, Kurt Loder, tell viewers that Cobain had only "experimented" with heroin. You can see various Rolling Stone types bending over backward to assure us that Cobain had said he'd cleaned up. (There's a certain breed of journalist that is always rushing to tell us that celebrities have stopped doing something they, the journalists, had never told us about in the first place.) In the year before his death, Cobain barely toured; the band canceled a lot of shows; controversy swirled around virtually every public appearance the group managed to make. There was a report of an "accidental overdose" in Italy. It all seems plain in retrospect.
The second disconnect had to do with the band's status in -- and Cobain's function as the de facto avatar of -- a world of self-consciously indie rock that had sprung up in America in the 1980s. ("Indie" refers to bands who recorded for independent record labels, those companies unaffiliated with the handful of multinational record distributors. At the time, this type of music and these bands were also identified as "college rock.") In this, purity counted for a lot, and the epithet "major label" was a routine slur.
The indie critique dominated much critical discussion in the late 1980s and early 1990s and in some ways continues to whimper along today; Nirvana wasn't the first of the celebrated indie bands to go to a major, but that didn't make it any easier. Nirvana was criticized for signing with Geffen records, part of, at the time, the huge MCA conglomerate; for remixing -- sweetening the production -- on "Nevermind" in general and specifically the sound of what would become the band's first hit single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; and finally, doing similar sonic manipulation of two radio-friendly songs on its last Geffen studio album, "In Utero."
All three of these controversies are covered in Cross' book, but not breathlessly. The casual reader won't miss them because it is plain, in retrospect, that history has passed these concerns by.
But together the two points are something of a cautionary tale, a reminder that in pop culture things really aren't all they seem. The tempest in a teapot of the day dissipates; the jut-jawed statement of principle by the talking head of the moment will soon be forgotten. Does anyone really care, at this point, that "Smells Like Teen Sprit" -- now routinely cited as one of the great singles of rock history -- was made to sound good on the radio? And what's wrong with sounding good on the radio, anyway?
In the unappetizing story of Kurt Cobain, we can see something that puts all that into perspective -- we now know that the self-destruction that we saw was exactly what it looked like, and it eventually came back to haunt us. Cobain's friends and loved ones didn't exactly sit back and watch -- they held confrontations and interventions. Yet, still, his coterie, over and over again, protected him -- and the press, for the most part, went along.
Our age is supposed to be a media-saturated one. Privacy is gone, people claim; cameras and nosy reporters are edging into everyone's lives. So how did Kurt Cobain die right before our eyes?
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By the early '80s, punk had come and gone. Then what came to be called post-punk -- new onslaughts of still rough-edged but more complex bands, like X, from Los Angeles, or Gang of Four, from England -- came and went as well. Besides a fluke or two like the Clash, with "Combat Rock," none of these bands sold any records.
Punk was going to change everything. When it didn't, corporate radio, corporate labels and the corporate press settled into complacency. Besides a few super-duper stars like Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, there was a large group of second-rank multiplatinum artists to keep folks occupied: Call it the Live Aid era, with Sting, Phil Collins, Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, from England, joining a bunch of rootsier but presentable Americans like Tom Petty and John Mellencamp to function together as rock's reigning royalty. There were exceptions, like Prince, but that was the status quo of the time.
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