For me it’s:
“Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back.”
“Umbilical noose” - I could write a novel, at least two nonfiction books, a few academic papers and probably also put together a course about these two words alone.
What’s your favorite?
I've been obsessed with this one lately. I love how it starts low and rhythmic and disintegrates into screams halfway through.
Share your favorites!
Reading Michael Azzerad's The Amplified Come As You Are now and I regret not having read it sooner. It's a fantastic book, better than the original one imho. I love how he handled the annotations with so much care, respect, and self-awareness.
That being said, he dedicates almost an entire chapter to In Utero that I hated tbh. He says because a lot of the songs on it were written before 1992 (the year Kurt claimed he wrote his best songs), the album was a sign of KC's "creative drought."
He then proceeds to denigrate some of my favorite songs, such as Very Ape. He says it's a filler song that doesn't even make sense. To me that's a mind-boggling claim. The lyrics are as straight-forward and as Cobainesque as they can get. He doesn't have a lot of nice things to say about Tourette's either, which is another great song imo.
So apart from ranting about it for a bit, I want to know what you guys think.
Was In Utero really a sign that Kurt's inspiration was running dry?
Not that it would be surprising, I'm just having a hard time believing it since it's my favorite album specifically because of the newer songs.
Yeah no. At least I don't think so.
I have my theory but I'm curious what you guys think.
When he was dubbed 'the voice of Generation X', a lot of what they claimed that generation shared with him and his music could be said of Gen Z as well:
- Disillusionment
- Anti-institutionalism
- Iconoclasm
- Political views/activism - lgbtq rights, feminism
At least on the surface, Cobain and Nirvana have almost as much in common with Gen Z, as they did with their own generation.
To be clear, I'm not asking why an artist and a band from over three decades ago is not popular anymore.
What I'm asking is this:
All things being equal, if Kurt were born in the 00s, would his music resonate with Gen Z at all?
As a writer and someone who works with language for a living, I'm endlessly fascinated with Kurt's writing.
For years, I have collected articles, essays and research papers on this topic.
If you think it really is that deep, here are some from my collection that are freely (and legally) available online:
The Grunge Inferno
How Kurt (not so) secretly wove Dente's Inferno into Nirvana's music and how he used it to describe his own struggles and the darker sides of modern society.
A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Lyrics and Suicide
Looks at the specific language patterns and repeated vocabulary he relied on to express feelings of isolation and anxiety.
Nirvana and Deleuze: Body Dynamics
Essay on the vivid imagery of sickness, medical terms, and physical pain. How he used visceral bodily details as metaphors for love, control, and modern life.
Composition’s Eye / Orpheus’s Gaze / Cobain’s Journals
An essay on Kurt's creative instincts and writing habits based on his journals. How his messy, stream-of-consciousness writing turned into iconic lyrics.
From Anti-hero to Commodity: The Legacy of Kurt Cobain
Examines how Kurt used uncomfortable descriptions of pain, illness and bodily trauma to explore topics such as identity, relationships and alienation.
Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide
How Cobain’s imagery evolved across from Bleach to In Utero, how he flipped pretty ideas on their head, how he twisted traditional romantic imagery into something clinical and unnatural.
Kurt Cobain, Writing Program Administrator
Kurt's use of irony and self-contradiction as means to protect his underground credibility while becoming a global star.
Nirvana: Rape Me - Critique(s) of Violence
How Kurt tackles the topics of rape and violence against women in Rape Me, using sarcastic, mocking surrender against abusers.
Smells Like Teen Spirit: Kurt Cobain, Voice of Generation X and creator of Grunge
How SLTS captured the boredom, mistrust and anxiety of the 90s youth.
Came across this compilation. It's an old one but I thought I'd share.
Featuring: Multiple flying Cobains and countless destroyed instruments.
Trigger warning: Abuse of drummers and bassists and 1 instance of frontman assault
Feels weird to use this adjective for their music but I'm just curious.
I'll go with the obvious one: Drain You is their most romantic, most intimate, almost erotic song.
And this performance is my absolute favorite, just for the screech, if nothing else. He doesn't always do it live, and it's never as animalistic as here.
I don't know if anybody has read Adam Bradley's Poetry of Pop. It's a book that looks into the lyrics of popular songs - syntax, rhetorical figures, figurative language, rhythm and rhyme - in combination with music, voice and delivery. Ignore the GR rating, it's a fantastic book.
The author talks about SLTS at length, and references Nirvana, Kurt's voice, the unplugged performance multiple times. Sadly, it doesn't examine other songs that I think are better lyrically (HSB for one).
What are some of the things new Nirvana/Kurt fans (and maybe some of the older ones) should know?
I’ll start:
NEVER BELIEVE KURT COBAIN
Quoting him as some sort of appeal to authority is not the flex you think it is.
Whatever he said, assume the opposite was true.
Chances are he was either self-mythologizing, self-deprecating, being sarcastic, screwing with everyone, or straight up lying and even he never knew which one it was.
“She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.”
Ray Bradbury, *The Tombling Day*
“She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.”
Ray Bradbury, The Tombling Day