Category: Nirvana News

Given the extensive discussion related to the Sound City story in numerous other locations, I’ll admit I haven’t really focused on it too much — I’d hate to be a repetitious presence even for just ten minutes of your day. But…Well, to clear it out of the way…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/9947770/Who-could-replace-Kurt-Cobain-in-Nirvana.html

Even the Daily Telegraph, a respected British broadsheet newspaper of a mildly and moderately right-wing bent, is getting in on the ersatz-Cobain act suggesting Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, Neil Young, Daniel Johnston and Black Francis/Frank Black. Over on LiveNirvana discussion centred on the NME tabloid-styled reporting of PJ Harvey as the key candidate and I admit to accidentally touching sensitive nerves with a suggestion that they may as well tease fans and see what an Eddie Vedder or Axl Rose rendition sounded like — I admit it, that was baiting trouble.

Ultimately, however, I think the core issue is that whoever Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear chose to play with, there’d be challenges; the importance of that trio is centred around the death of a particular individual who has attained Godhead status making any cooperation between them both noteworthy and fraught — the only reason anyone is bothered is because it’s Nirvana and by extension, it’s Kurt Cobain, otherwise who would notice? Similarly, playing the songs, songs the individuals concerned acknowledge were primarily the product of their absent friend’s creativity, has a certain weight. It makes it too easy to provoke howls by employing an individual who somehow doesn’t possess the air of authenticity or achievement that is required when looking for a simulacrum to stand in place of the original.

On the other hand, simply looking for a karaoke performer, someone capable of a functional rendition; that would seem shameful, a reductionist approach not in keeping with the ‘spirit of Nirvana’. But does anyone genuinely want to hear something more than a repeat? Imagine a situation similar to the Peter Hook/Joy Division scenario where the band continually resurrect, revise and repeat the dead past with tweaks and new voices — it can end up unpalatable despite all the avid consideration of who might lend a voice to the project.

The back history slams right into the knowledge everyone has that three friends collaborating shouldn’t be much of a worry, there’s no reason for it to matter beyond the “aw, that’s nice” aspect of talented individuals getting together and playing music again. That uncomfortable collision — “it matters but it doesn’t matter” — is what makes it such a newsworthy subject. In my opinion it ends up tied to the Freud-originated concept of The Uncanny, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny) The performance of Kurt Cobain’s music, by his original band draws attention to his absence meaning the live performance is simultaneously a reminder of death, of disappearance; the greater the similarity of the performer to the original, the more attention is focused on how it isn’t the same, how it might look and sound right but there’s a hole right through it that the human mind can’t avoid circling. Plucking the voice, the image, the words from their original context —irrevocably tied, in popular media imagery, to violent death, debilitating drug addiction and despair; a web firmly woven around Nirvana — can’t help but cause disquiet no matter how well selected the chosen individual who plays mouthpiece and mannequin for the renewed act.

This isn’t a criticism of anyone’s intentions, I feel it’s intrinsic to the topic. In my view, the three individuals at the core of things have been working extremely hard to navigate the waters without causing offence. What I’ve noted is that the band refuse to place the name Nirvana on top of anything they’ve done in relation to Sound City while looking at PJ Harvey as a replacement means they’ve considered people who would meet a range of criteria; Kurt Cobain’s potential approval, indie-stardom and achievement, and arguably taking things in a different enough direction that making a direct comparison is exceedingly difficult. The only issue is that handling the music of Nirvana with such caution and care reinforces the message that this is the equivalent of touching fragmentary remains of the true cross; relics requiring ritual, appropriate priestly interpreters, a coterie of worshippers circling the chosen altar. By being so decent about things it makes it even harder to simply play the songs.

Ultimately, for the next ten years, at least until the survivors of Nirvana are in their sixties and hopefully far too occupied to stage a return, these reunion tales will reoccur over and again. Get used to it; we’re going to be rereading and rehashing the same ol’ “who could take the place of Kurt Cobain” games a good few times to come. Save the articles somewhere and enjoy seeing how egregiously the newspapers rip off their own past coverage to quickly and effortlessly fill column inches. As for the Sound City tribute album…Whatever, it’s a tribute album melding a blur of old school hard rock musicians and modern mainstream rock musicians together; like all hard rock, it’s enjoyable but is it anything I’d want on the shelf? Not really.

http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/03/album-review-various-artists-sound-city-real-to-reel/

And the core item, Grohl, Novoselic, Smear and McCartney’s recording Cut Me Some Slack? You’ll make up your own mind, I’ve no intention of my opinion taking any priority over yours — music is personal. In my opinion it’s echoes of U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me melded to The Beatles’ Helter Skelter — fine references in the hard rock canon but bugger all to do with Nirvana and the corpse of alternative rock. Maybe with critical distance we’ll look back and it’ll be further evidence of the aging of Dave Grohl from hardcore punk (Scream), to alternative rock (Nirvana), to FM-friendly rock (Foo Fighters) to, essentially, M.O.R. smooth sounds of the Seventies. Some heroes get old enough to fade away on a lulling wave of applause and friendly acclaim; the river reducing boulders to soft pebbles.

Having said that…It’s still kinda fun…

Left me in two minds this article — always enjoyable to have to debate something internally before deciding where one stands, far too many kneejerk positions floating around in my head.

http://northhollywood.patch.com/articles/meet-the-newest-real-estate-marketing-strategy-kurt-cobain#comment_6656042

So, a few months back we covered the tale of recording studios and Nirvana (https://nirvana-legacy.com/2012/12/06/studio-life/) — I admit I forgot about Devonshire Sound Studios, another one to vanish into history, still going but not a name deemed worth preserving. Here’s a few photos of it as it stands:

Anyways, the lady in question flagged (and, honestly speaking, overegged) the link to Nirvana and the phantom presence of Kurt Cobain to draw attention to the property being sold. My first reaction was a weary sigh at Kurt being used to sell something but then I paused and revised.

As far as I can see the advertisement is entirely honest in stating the ‘not quite’ nature of the connection, both fair and reasonable in the ‘made you look’ vibe, essentially is doing very little beyond citing the limited history of the property. It’s reasonable that mentioning the fairly recently (and tragically) dead as a talking point gives a ghoulish air to events but I can’t think of a reason why that vague discomfort has a more noble claim over how we should feel.

I’ve walked the streets of London, stood where Guy Fawkes’ co-conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered (as an aside, beautiful procedure; hung until almost dead, cut down, revived, then sliced from throat to crotch with a white-hot knife allowing the executioner to haul your inside out with the crucial point being to hold your heart before your eyes so you saw it before you died. Then, next, hacked into four quarters and despatched to various points in this reserved and charming isle to give others second thoughts about any plans they might be hatching.) I’ve been up to the Tower of London and seen the burial place of Anne Boleyn. I’ve scoured the Internet for a few shots of the house in which Kurt Cobain died…It’s all voyeuristic in some way, a proximity to a thrill of some sort, just coated in a curious legitimacy in some cases.

Then again, potentially I’m just discussing one of my own moral quandaries; am I profiteering from the death of Kurt Cobain? If, by some miracle, Dark Slivers: Seeing Nirvana in the Shards of Incesticide exploded and I sold…4,000 copies, let’s say, that’d mean a profit would occur. Is it my goal or ambition to make a profit? No. Am I content if I make a loss? Yes. Would I like to avoid that if I can? Heck yes. Would I like as many people as I can interest to read the book? Of course. So have I taken advantage of the good name of Nirvana (and Kurt Cobain) for ulterior motives? No, I genuinely feel I’ve written a book that’s worth reading, I truly believe I’ve uncovered a certain quantity of new information and my ambition is to convince someone to change the entry on LiveNirvana:
http://www.livenirvana.com/official/incesticide.html

As for the advertisement…Sheesh, there’s too much defence of orthodoxy, guarding the sacred flame when really lambasting people for things is far less creative or constructive than getting on with building something fresh.

I’m still unsure I’m totally comfortable with what has been done here but I don’t oppose it either — there have been far more egregious frauds perpetrated on the Cobain name, by sources and organizations who could have done far better, far too much rubbish printed or released for me to sweat over one successful house sale. Kudos to taking the time to uncover the history of the area — in one hundred years who’ll know or even remember?

http://pitchfork.com/news/48962-watch-paul-mccartney-front-nirvana-again-on-snl/

It seems the collaboration was a positive experience for all involved – so much so that they did it again for Saturday Night Live, have released the studio audio recording and are featuring the song on Dave Grohl’s upcoming Sound City documentary soundtrack…Gosh. Plenty going on.

There’s a certain poetry to it; a survivor of the first supergroup of the rock n’ roll era working with the survivors of the final supergroup of the rock n’ roll era (before the steamroller of electronic music took full control). Similarly, those who had to suffer through the death of their friend in one of rock music’s first gun-related shocks (Lennon’s assassination) teamed up with those who endured the decline and ultimate annihilation of their friend in rock music’s last great gun-surprise (Cobain’s suicide.)

The nicest thing, however, is that their response to it hasn’t been to let bad things decide who they are. The response of Paul McCartney and the Nirvana’s guys always seems to have been life-affirming and positive – they look happy.

…OK it’s still a shame there isn’t more ‘edge’ to the recording but still…It’s nice.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmZw9e0vciM

Plenty of footage on YouTube – corrections to previous ‘first take’, Pat Smear along too. They played a new song called ‘Cut Me Some Slack’ and seem to have left it at that. Phew!

Looks like an enjoyable enough evening – a poppy enough new song. I’ve always wondered what that move is called where guys on stage play ‘to each other’ (you’ll know it when you see it) and why its visually effective.

Courtney is restrained enough in her comments – nothing particular to worry about…The Lennon preference is a fair one if we’re talking reasonable comparisons to Kurt Cobain:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/12/courtney-love-paul-mccartney-nirvana-not-amused_n_2289015.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/dec/12/paul-mccartney-kurt-cobain-nirvana

Please imagine the first paragraph of this post as a morass of colourful swearing interrupted by attempts to draw breath and come up with something that beats the imagination of the previous elaborate expletive. It was looking ever more likely these past few years that the surviving members of Nirvana (version circa 1990-1993) were ever more likely to get together more formally. A charitable examination would compare it to the period of time it took Johnny Rotten to become comfortable playing Sex Pistols’ songs while on tour with Public Image Ltd, then the ongoing time before the surviving Sex Pistols were able to get back on stage together. Alternatively, perhaps the span of time prior to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant getting together for the No Quarter collaboration and then the, eventually, stage appearances of the remnants of Led Zeppelin. It takes a while before one’s own past feels like a costume one would wish to inhabit again.

On the other hand, a less charitable view would be that gazing into one’s past happens once one’s inspiration, one’s vision of the future, runs dry. Kurt Cobain is a fair example of that (in my view) given the covers he played, the originals he (apparently) was practising in his basement, the calls to family members not seen in a decade, addressing the suicide note to his childhood imaginary friend… Again, Johnny Rotten is a good example — by the time he began singing the odd Sex Pistols’ song he had shed the whole of the first (and best) edition of PiL and was about to start the long decline in PiL’s creative energies that led eventually to the Sex Pistols reprise. In the case of Foo Fighters…With all due respect to a really cool bloke, it’s a long time since Foo Fighters set the world alight musically and a while since they had a new musical idea. It’s understandable, to me, why Dave Grohl might be open to looking back to Nirvana. Krist has barely been involved in music in years yet has recently looked like a man more than happy to acknowledge his part in the most important rock band of the past few decades. Paul McCartney meanwhile is a very pleasant bloke, a surprisingly underrated musical and lyrical talent compared to his former Beatles’ comrade John Lennon, and a willing collaborator with anyone going. But. He’s also a guy with a voice now on its last legs if the Olympics 2012 performance is anything to go by and one who hasn’t had a genuinely fresh musical thought since before Nirvana even existed.

I have a feeling the story is being over-hyped; a one-off charity performance with celebrity friends (see the Living Like a Rock Star post from last week) likely consisting of a couple of the softer-edged Nirvana tracks, a smattering of Foo Fighters songs plus some Beatles classics is a perfectly worthy endeavour but, no, it isn’t a reformation. And in the end, it’s harmless. Given Kurt’s respect for The Beatles, having Paul McCartney sing is songs would probably tickle his ego no end. The fact that it turns Nirvana into a slightly fluffy cabaret act doesn’t bear thinking about…Just focus on the money for a good cause and pray no one gets it into their heads to call it Nirvana, or, worse, to persist with it beyond this one-off display.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83331.html?hp=l13

In their heyday, Nirvana were atypical rock stars. It’s heartening to see that Krist Novoselic, as much as Dave Grohl, has persisted in evading the lame clichés, the tedious spectacle of mainstream rockers behaving like grey-haired apes. I talked the other week about Bruce Pavitt’s continued efforts to support grassroots music (his book Experiencing Nirvana will split profits with The Vera Project http://www.theveraproject.org/) — it’s another case of a denizen of the grunge scene continuing to make a worthwhile contribution to things that are important to them.

In the case of Krist, his long involvement in political causes is well-known particularly from his publication of the exceedingly readable Of Grunge and Government. At the time of Nirvana, Krist arguably formed the band’s heart contributing substantial amounts of its humour and leading the band into several of its political engagements notably against censorship laws and the raising of substantial funds for Serbian rape victims. To see him move on to the FairVote organization (http://www.fairvote.org/) has been heartening.

The generation that had come of age in the time of mass movements wrote the script regarding Generation X; they defined the youth of the late Eighties and early Nineties as some kind of passive, uninspired and morally/socially disinterested mass. This was always a simplification, one that could just as easily be applied to any generation, based on an inability to comprehend a generation that didn’t use massive organisations as their key method of political expression. That reaction was certainly real; it was a move away from bodies that imposed a set persona and character upon their followers. Instead individuals were equally capable and willing to commit time, money, energy to causes — they just didn’t feel that being in favour/against one issue meant they were part of a single congealed mass (left wing, right wing, etc.), nor that it meant they automatically agreed with other related or unrelated causes or issues.

The ‘slacker’ tag overlooked the fact that the scene from which Nirvana emerged, and a substantial amount of work within the alternative music scene, was focused on causes not as easily reduced to mass appeals for cash. A lot of the ‘new politics’ couldn’t be solved that way given they were about attitudes rather than the presence or absence of a political permission, or a physical element. Krist exemplifies Generation X, showing the forebears of modern activism that, despite not lining up alongside the megalomaniacal LiveAID style of action, a generation wanted to seek change and had decided to do so by focusing locally, attending to the lives of those around them rather than to distant abstracts, and were attentive to things that were less photogenic, less interesting to TV news, but were no less worthwhile.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that there weren’t weaknesses in the political nature of the generation. The absence of a specific organisational identity — such as a political party, a cohesive movement with an administrative core, a trade union, a web of think tanks or entities (as existed for the U.S. Conservative Movement) — while laudable in theory (anti-hierarchical! Individualistic! Open to opinions and debate!), made it very difficult for conversations to take place with the wielders of actual power. In a world run via conversations between organisations, where organisations act as the proxy for individual voices, it’s hard for diverse cacophony to have an impact. Again, however, the trajectory of Nirvana — or perhaps Krist specifically — shows a move from individual awareness, to initial actions (marches, protests, concerts, speeches) to committed organisational politics via a defined body.

I take the message of Nirvana to be to engage positively and soulfully with the world. Seeing Krist Novoselic use his middle age, not to turn into another embarrassing wreck, but to fight for something…It’s good to see Nirvana’s heart still beats.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k4Q3zKfBRnI

Obama paying tribute to Led Zeppelin a couple days back. Its the fate of all history to be softened, sugared, reduced to soundbites – it’s intriguing that Nirvana’s career hasn’t really undergone that reduction to family-friendly status given the self-inflicted brutality of its ending. When I mentioned Nirvana or Kurt Cobain to people the responses are fairly uniform; “he’s the one who shot himself?” “Wasn’t he a massive drug addict – did he die of an overdose?” “He was married to that mad woman wasn’t he?” and then, increasingly regularly, “who’s Kurt Cobain?” There’s too much darkness surrounding the collective memory to be eased away and made fit for a Presidential tribute.

I’ve been asking, when people ask to be placed on the pre-order list, how/when people first got into Nirvana – what’s their story? As a personal part of my own, Kurt Cobain was my first experience of death. It seems strange but I was fourteen years old, I’d been at most three years old when my last major relative died, other family deaths were off too far in the extended network for me to really notice. Kurt Cobain was the first time death had penetrated my existence as anything other than a cartoon element in action films, comics, play fighting. Suddenly it was a real presence. I didn’t know the guy, I live thousands of miles from Seattle, but that didn’t stop it being a knife wound. Something I cared about so deeply had been unexpectedly and sharply severed.

This weekend I spent sat with my grandfather. Until as recently as three years ago he was a powerful, immaculately dressed gentleman with a raft of stories always worth a retelling. He’d been a sportsman for most of the first part of his life, then a professional rugby referee, then a coach of professional rugby referees, only retiring from his involvement in his late Seventies. This was a guy who at age 72 bought an x-type Jaguar and had the most gleeful look on his face as he showed me he could kick it to 125mph without even touching the Sports Button. At age 76 a drunk tried to attack him in a newspaper shop – my grandfather decked him with a single punch then stuffed the guy over the top of the shop counter. You’ve never seen a happier ‘bad boy’, he was so chuffed with himself, a permanent suppressed grin for the next week.

Quadruple heart bypass in between the death of his wife and one of his two daughters , my grandmother and aunt respectively and truly one of the worst years I’ve ever heard of. He came back from that, began living again and its a joy to see someone restored, realising how they hadn’t been themselves in so long. He had the cartilege kicked out of his kneecaps during his playing career leading to a knee replacement operation he never really recovered from. Then cancer shut down one of his kidneys, all dormant but requiring regular observation – untreatable, inoperable, just sits inside there. Meanwhile his hips had been compensating for his knees so hip pain resulted, then his back began to go. The drugs that keep his blood thin mean he can’t be treated for the cancer, nor for the frozen shoulder that is causing him immense pain. The diabetes killed the circulation to his feet while the back problem made him walk less and less. Gangrene set in this year and ended with a toe being amputated and weeks of treatment to drain the feet. There’s a hole where the bone had to come out of. This weekend was the first time I’ve ever, in my entire life, seen him unshaven. I lived with him a year and there was never a day when he didn’t spend his morning preening himself ready to face the world. This weekend it was, as always, a pleasure and an honour to spend time in his company. He sat dozing with his head resting on his chest for most of the two days, he won’t wear the hearing aid so conversations are shouted over a TV with the volume dial up on fifty. The heating is up so high I get headaches but he’s still cold.

And there’s nothing to be done for it. He’s enduring a bad death. A drawn out three years of mounting problems making this great man a prisoner in his home. All we can do is make him comfortable, show him he’s cared for, find ways to reduce the burdens on him and keep him happy – bare witness.

So I didn’t post yesterday. I love Nirvana, Kurt Cobain is a hero, but real life and those I love will always be more important. It makes me wonder how hard 1992 was for Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl; forcing smiles to avoid media intrusion while being able to visibly see their friend reduced to a skeleton. What do you do? Most of the time all you can do is witness. It saddens me he couldn’t find a way back to life, I can’t even begin to understand what its like to carry so much physical and mental pain around though so I don’t give much credit to those who suggest he just needed to pull himself together, get over it. I’m watching a man die and I can see he hurts, but I can’t share in that pain, only acknowledge it. Pain is private, it can’t be passed from one body to another, ultimately Kurt Cobain endured alone.

Oh. And the bloody draft book still hasn’t shown up – delay is driving me nutty. It’ll be here today/tomorrow and then, with my say so, the full print run will be returned to me at the end of the week.

 

 

http://www.craveonline.com/music/articles/199967-kurt-cobain-biopic-courtney-love-chooses-brett-morgen-to-direct

It seems a Kurt Cobain biopic is genuinely in the works and we’ll see something at some point in the next couple years; I’ll take a wild stab in the dark and bet on April 2014…Any takers?

The book Cobain Unseen by Charles Cross was perhaps the first work to try and integrate Kurt’s work outside of music. While leaving aside, for the moment, commentary on the quality or otherwise of Kurt’s art works (whether videos, sound collages, paintings, installations, animation, etc.) what seems significant is the scale of ambition and the willingness to experiment in other arenas. I would argue that what distinguishes a true artist is that the priority is simply to create and to express the internal vision for its own sake regardless of audience or commercial gain.

The concept mentioned for the film in which Kurt Cobain’s own works will be incorporated to try and relay his story actually seems an intriguing one. The market has been flooded with semi-interesting interview discs, the artful but slow Last Days by Gus Van Sant, plenty of live footage but there genuinely is a gap for a comprehensive look at the life of Kurt Cobain. The choice of Brett Morgen as director doesn’t set off any alarm bells; he’s an experienced and serious documentary producer with some well-respected work in the back catalogue and if his willingness to experiment with the medium allows Kurt’s own dalliances with visual work to gain greater acknowledgement then that’s all to the good.

What intrigues me is that Kurt’s central ambition in life seems to have been not just music, but to make art, as a wider concept, an integral part of his way of living. It’s meaningful, in my view, that the only commercial or career vision he ever expressed in his songs was that of a folk artist making pictures from recovered debris as featured in Mrs. Butterworth and echoed in Swap Meet. He seems to have surrounded himself, as soon as he was renting a home, with his own creations, turning his living space into something akin to Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau; a declaration that he wished to live cocooned by external manifestations of his internal creative drive.

The unity of his vision is also visible; observe the four paintings that were released for auction in April 2012 alongside the works shown in Cobain Unseen for a sense of Kurt’s ‘cosmology’ of images and elements. In March 1990 Kurt chooses to lead Nirvana into a TV studio to try and create their first video, an entirely self-motivated decision. That was followed by the Sub Pop In Bloom video that same year. Lack of funds and resource were irrelevant to the desire to incorporate other mediums around the music.

The way, after fame struck, that he seems to have retreated even more into other forms of art is noteable. While barely bothering to express himself in the form that gave him fame, music, his urge to articulate whatever was within him meant a continued sea of other works, only a fraction of which has so far been shared publically. In amidst what was a very turbulent life from 1992, he took time to personally involve himself in the art work related to a majority of Nirvana’s releases, despite the fact he could easily have left that role to others. He didn’t; he wanted to do it. So, while he can barely be persuaded to turn up to record with his band, he takes the time to prepare the Incesticide art-work, to conceptualize and prepare an installation/collage for In Utero, is fully engaged with the Heart Shaped Box video, plots the single art for that song and for All Apologies/Rape Me. It’s only the Pennyroyal Tea single where he relinquishes  that control; a disturbing sign simply because the art was the only element of Nirvana he seems to have clung to during his final years.

A film that can shed more life on Kurt’s life not just as songwriter and performer, but as a quintessential artist with an omnivorous desire to toy with any means of creation, can only be welcomed.  It’s awe-inspiring how total Kurt’s need to create was.

A year ago Brick Lane, London hosted a really neatly done exhibition consisting of relics from the sainted Kurt Cobain, photographs, a showing of the (then) not-quite-released Live at the Paramount film and even an anorak/hoody that used to belong to the man.

I made a special trip across town to catch it (and foolishly ended up sinking cash in the record shop across the street too) and strolled a while. It was a moderate sized gallery space with an upper mezzanine floor. Very classy, typical Brick Lane combination of trash/flash.

http://www.nirvanaexhibition.com/?page_id=62

My major problem was knowing how to react to it all. Standing in front of Kurt Cobain’s hoody I wondered if I was meant to feel a proximity to the man himself, or to appreciate his ordinariness, or take it as a clear statement that he was gone and these remnants were in some way feeble. A shard from a guitar made me think of medieval pilgrims travelling miles to touch alleged chunks of Christ’s cross. The organizers had done a great job, the back room was packed with people watching the concert on a big screen, people meandered studying the photos…

…And I left. The problem was me. I admired the photography, it was nice to see the posters and other pieces…I still felt like I often do at art exhibitions, slightly blank. I seem to need a story line presented, a context given underneath/alongside an image or sculpted item before I can connect.

Kurt Cobain and Nirvana used their fame to fight sexism, racism and homophobia. They berated audience members who would grope girls in concert; they kissed live on one of America’s biggest TV shows; they gave performances in support of these causes; he gave an exclusive interview to The Advocate magazine and was delighted by Pansy Division’s affectionate cover Smells Like Queer Spirit. This was a band determined to tell people that no one has the right to invade another’s right to privacy or to use fear and intimidation to impose one’s will upon them.

Which is why the news of a break-in at the home of Frances Bean Cobain is so disturbing:

http://audioinkradio.com/2012/10/frances-bean-cobain-rabid-nirvana-fan-broke-home-had-murder-objective/

It’s a horrendous incident; the invasion of one’s home, of one’s place of safety is deeply traumatic for anyone. The added elements, the potential murder plot plus the link to a father one last seen when not even aged two, makes it worse.

Yet one thing that is clear, no one who had absorbed the music of Nirvana and had any respect for the band’s social/political opinions would believe they had the right to commit such an act. This man was sick, psychologically disturbed, dangerous…But not a Nirvana fan. The definition of a fan is (variously) “a devotee”, “a supporter”, “an admirer” — for someone to claim an identification with Kurt Cobain or Nirvana and then to act so much against the spirit of the individuals concerned refuses him entry to the community of fans.

As a wider question, there’s always an unsettling relationship between bands and their audiences. The (excellent) Nirvana Live Guide website records numerous incidents during the 1993 In Utero tour of Nirvana stopping shows to prevent male audience members groping unwilling girls in the crowd. Nirvana were certainly sensitive to this issue, look at the liner notes from Incesticide in which Kurt Cobain demands that anyone homophobic, sexist or racist “leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

But a band doesn’t get to dictate who likes its music. An audience does get to declare a band’s behavior beyond the pale via its power to give or withhold support. It’s also good that fans don’t slavishly follow the often dim-witted and thoughtless behavior of artists. Maybe the answer is to separate being a fan of a band or an individual from being a fan of their music? Declaring oneself a fan of Nirvana’s music means one likes the music. Declaring oneself a fan of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana means one shares many of their views and identifies with their positions. If one wants to be a true fan of Nirvana, not just a consumer of their catchy tunes, then there must be actions to back it up. Words are not enough.

As a final comment on the incident at Frances Bean Cobain’s home I’ll turn to an old Calvin n’ Hobbes cartoon: “a man’s home is his castle, it shouldn’t have to be a fortress.” The same goes for the home of any woman.