Omnipresent and ignored: The ghost of Kurt Cobain

It’s time to understand and recognize that Kurt Cobain was one of the most important and successful artists of the past 25 years,” said filmmaker Brett Morgen in a recent interview with music site NME. Morgen directed this year’s definitive Cobain documentary, Montage of Heck, and is now doing press for its belated soundtrack, “Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings,” which is set to release today.

This is a curious quote, considering that the media has done nothing but play up the Nirvana frontman’s importance (with a capital “I”) since the day it broke the news of his apparent suicide in 1994. Long past the vigils and tributes of that year, there have been countless Kurt Cobain biographies, Nirvana box sets, remastered albums, deluxe reissues, concert DVDs and documentaries released. The latest of these, Morgen’s Montage of Heck, brings Cobain back to life through his home videos, journal entries, doodles and home recordings culled from his estate, now held by daughter Frances Cobain. “Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings” is a collection of recordings made by Cobain prior to Nirvana’s debut album “Bleach.” It is less a musical release than an archival curio — in between rough recordings of Nirvana demos and unreleased songs are spoken word meanderings and mundane snippets of Cobain’s pre-fame life (including a random phone call). Barring another discovery of “lost” material, the bottom of Cobain’s barrel has likely been scraped.

I suppose Morgen’s quote isn’t that ironic considering Cobain’s current cultural standing. Despite the steady diet of Nirvana retrospectives and the overkill done to keep his memory alive, Cobain isn’t as culturally relevant today as, say, Hall and Oates. Millennials are probably more likely to reference ‘80s synth-pop one-hit-wonders than Smells Like Teen Spirit. Unlike Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, he’s not an iconic T-shirt. Unlike John Lennon, he’s not an Insta-quote or a framed picture at an artisanal restaurant. He’s an encylopedia entry, a chapter in rock history, a cold fact. All in all, that’s all he is.

Ignominious circumstances of death

It is tempting to say that the ignominious circumstances of his death have made him a less romantic figure. He died a junkie, much like Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, and left this world a loser after selling millions of albums and becoming a bona fide star. But I’m not sure this fact makes a difference. Unlike Sid Vicious, Cobain was billed as a poet, the voice of his generation, The Great Paradigm-Shifter of the ‘90s. He, together with his band Nirvana, forever transformed pop culture in 1991 by thrusting underground music into the mainstream. His place in history is only rivaled by that of The Beatles or Bob Dylan.

Perhaps the real reason behind his relative unimportance has little to do with him. The timeless mystique of the 1960s will forever enshrine Bob Dylan and The Beatles in the cultural canon. I don’t think the 1990s have aged that well in comparison. I think Cobain fails to resonate with young people because the ‘90s simply don’t resonate with them.

“The ‘90s” is actually two things: “the early ‘90s,” which was the explosion of Alternative (with a capital “A”) music, and “the late ‘90s,” which was mainstream pop’s Great Revenge. It’s the former that’s been seemingly lost in the collective consciousness. This current decade sees a lot more in common with the ‘80s for reasons that continue to mystify me. Grunge music is not remembered fondly, or even at all; you won’t see loose flannel shirts come back in style any time soon. As a consequence, the genre’s central ideological figure has likewise been neglected, left in the bargain bins of culture, like a VHS tape of Benny and Joon.

Cobain mythology machine

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the Kurt Cobain mythology machine, a sole creation of my generation, those who came of age in the early ‘90s, who witnessed first-hand the 180-degree transformation of the world, from synth sounds to distortion, from Flock of Seagulls to unwashed hair, from the celebration of artifice to the glorification of reality, from the vague happiness of childhood to the vague anxiety of adolescence. Its latest product is the shameless publication of a dead man’s private thoughts, long considered public by a generation in desperate need of validation, of immortality.

Even before its release, “Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings” was criticized as an exploitative enterprise. It may have had the consent of the daughter, but not of the man who might never have wished any of it to go public. In one of the most memorable quotes from the Montage of Heck documentary, bandmate Kris Novoselic relates: “Kurt hated being humiliated. He hated it.” We will never know if any of “The Home Recordings” would’ve embarrassed Cobain. The spoken word track Aberdeen contains embarrassing stories from his high school years: the time he became a school pariah for trying to sleep with a mentally-challenged teenaged girl and the time he tried to commit suicide on the railway only to see the train pass along the opposite tracks. The Melvins frontman and Cobain’s friend Buzz Osborne has already repudiated this story as “total bullshit” and Morgen concedes that it’s probably fictional, while insisting on its emotional veracity. Could Cobain have, in the dark intimacy of his private life, imagined his own mythology?

He didn’t have to. The Kurt Cobain mythology has been, almost out of necessity, a willing cult of despair. As his entire discography and journals suggest, Cobain’s genius is inseparable from his pain. “The Home Recordings” is essentially a very rough draft of a career that spanned three studio albums and countless other treasures later to be found in posthumous releases, and it is a picture of a lonesome artist. Not that most great artists aren’t alienated to some degree, but his particular alienation inevitably led to his demise. This knowledge informs everything we know about him.

Our generation still rehashes the same old story — in different forms, involving different details, but with the same ending — as the new one ignores it, oblivious to the reasons why we do so: we need to keep doing it to convince ourselves that he didn’t die in vain. We need reassurance that the things he stood for and that we embraced meant something, that there was some truth behind our adolescent thrashing, that the seriousness and earnestness wasn’t all embarrassing, that there is still realness despite a world that has revealed itself to be hopelessly inauthentic. We do not want to give up his ghost because we cannot let go of the promise of youth.

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