Here We Are Now, Entertain Us!

Kurt Cobain is larger than life and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians, said Frances Bean Cobain to Rolling Stone in an interview upon the release of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Frances Cobain was an intern in the Rolling Stone magazine when she was 15, providing research assistance for articles about Jonas Brothers and the like, in a cubicle working desk across a giant poster of her dad. She said he is inescapable, and it is true. Even so, if you’re an ordinary citizen who happens to be a music fan, you would not attempt to escape him. You would look for him. I remember the time when I was 14 and making a Friendster profile page. My profile picture was the 7-year-old Frances Cobain, holding a broken guitar neck. I remember wondering that in another part of the world was a girl around my age being the daughter of Kurt Cobain. How would her life be? 

Nirvana was a staple for my earliest serious exposure to music. With serious I mean I distinct the way I consume this music with the way I am exposed to my dad’s karaoke VCDs or my Mom’s The Beatles collection that me and my brother have no choice other than to listen to during breakfast before school. When I was 10 and my brother 14, we listened to Nevermind and MTV Unplugged for the first time. We would watch the pirated 1991: The Year Punk Broke without subtitles and without knowing what it was actually about. “About a Girl” is one of the first songs we play with a guitar.  Some kids have Metallica, some kids have Guns ‘n Roses, but we have Nirvana. The greatness of Nirvana’s music and Kurt Cobain’s tragic life is overarching for my and my brother’s musical tendency, and that does not make us special. There are millions of other kids out there that do covers of “Breed” in their very first bands, play In Utero during their first sex, and indifferently play MTV Unplugged as a comfort-music at the end of a very long, tiring day.

For 21 years after his death people like me are still interested about the Kurt Cobain universe. Kurt Cobain nerds are not necessarily grunge kids; I don’t feel obliged to dive into the 90s Seattle scene and listen to Mudhoney. Kids like me are the target market to the commercialization of the life of our very own idol. We are the reason why Kurt Cobain’s life have been cultivated and exploited in any possible way. An uncountable number of books and films have been written about his life. In 2006 Kurt Cobain replaced Elvis Presley as the top earning deceased celebrity. We will still consume Kurt Cobain’s works that are released posthumously for our love for him, and Courtney Love still can afford another Botox injection.

I own a copy of Heavier than Heaven (2001) by Charles Cross and loved it. The book confirmed my imagination of the tragic hero, the mythological representation of the rock star who determined what musical world should be for me: loud, noir, destructive, full of either angst or ecstasy and written by junkies. I was annoyed when I learned the fact that Heavier than Heaven is presumably Courtney Love’s version of Kurt Cobain’s life. Courtney Love; the villainous female, the demon counterpart, the opportunist widow, was the catalyst to his lethal, explosive formula. She owns the rights to Kurt Cobain’s archive of drawings, recordings, writings, and diaries. She provided the ingredients to a beautiful collage of anecdotes and myths to build the story plot of the life of the idol for millions. The book put the myths and facts in one plane and brought him into a higher pedestal in the altar of rock ‘n roll icons.

Having experienced with Heavier than Heaven, I was more prepared when I watched Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). The doco was directed by Brett Morgen and involved Frances Bean Cobain as the executive producer. Now a 22 year-old visual artist with celestial genes of her rock star parents, the movie is her debut to public. And the film is beautiful. It is beautiful.

This film proves that the wisest perspective to watch it is with the attitude of “enjoy it, don’t believe it”. Although Buzz Osbourne refers to the movie as a romanticized crazy-talk for glassy-eyed, stoned teenagers and pathetic, middle-aged rock ‘n roll morons, I still think it is a cool work of art. It is a super-Hollywood 120 minutes collage of Kurt Cobain’s artworks in any form that totally show how great he is as a musician, poet, visual artist, and just artist in general. I love the animation made through his drawings and the animation made to match his recorded speech. I love the scoring. Nirvana songs are great soundtrack to riots and destruction, and they are put together well with the footage. I also love it when they put the scenes of Over the Edge (1979) with Nirvana’s “School”. Kurt’s screaming “NO RECESS!” is just so in tune with the destruction made by the students in the movie. I also love how they get rid of the music at the end part of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” so that it highlights Kurt’s singing “A DENIAL!” to the top of his lungs. In heartwarming scenes they put slow cover versions of Nirvana songs or Kurt’s acoustic humming. I love those scenes; especially the home video footage of the little Kurt. There is this scene of the toddler Kurt smiles to the camera and offers crackers to the camera person; and a scene when the same toddler says proudly to the camera “I am Kurt Cobain!” without knowing what the name would mean to the world years later.

However, like Heavier than Heaven, the film depicts Kurt Cobain as a character with a suicidal fate haunting his whole life. It is a Greek tragedy: the audience already know that the hero will die at the end of the story. It is a movie about a man destined to live the roller coaster of rock ‘n roll that ends in a tragic death. The movie starts with an angelic lovely child whose world seemed to collapse after the divorce of his parents. Afterwards, the movie mainly talks about the sadness, anger, destructive behavior, stomach problems, and disappointments he faced for years that then led him to take his own life.  It is a story that tells what happens if all kinds of teenage angst condensed in 27 years lived by a single character. This character exposes bizarre sexuality instead of only exploring it. He is a full-on junkie who goes beyond substance experimentation. He is drown in a pool of depression instead of episodes of bad moods. He really kills himself as a series of clumsy suicide attempts fail to rehabilitate him. Kurt Cobain is a round character, like a main protagonist in fictions. He is as dramatic as Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker.

Besides, his lyrics and music are harsh yet popular, as it sings the same tune as teenage heartstrings. With the combination of the beyond interesting character and the soundtrack-of-your-life music, he fits the title as the spokesman of the disaffected generation. Not only for the Generation X from which he came from, but also the Millennials like me who was born around the time of his death, who experience 90s music scene only through bootlegs and cassettes (yet that what makes it very exotic to us). I remember I was in middle school and loving “You Know You’re Right” that was released over a decade after Kurt’s death. Despite the fact that the song was written in the 90s, the sound was still relevant to the year 2000s and made good reviews in the corporate magazines Kurt hated.

Messiah Cobain. He endured the torture of the greatness and fame so we, fans, can feel the cathartic pleasure of consuming rock ‘n roll and praise him. If Montage of Heck is a true depiction of who he is, I believe he would hate it. They say he hated fame, he hated being praised and being ridiculed. He did not want to be a rock star, he just wanted Nirvana to be successful. I believe he preferred people (((strangers))) to watch his band's rehearsal tapes rather than his hideous home videos starring half-naked Courtney Love. I believe he would rest in more peace if we stick to the fact of how dedicated he was to his art and how talented he was as an artist. Because unlike Sid Vicious, he really made good music. But fans want juicy, intimate stories of real life tragic heroes. So like the crowd in the music video of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, we stand together and sing, “HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US!”

The movie rapes his head-blown corpse, exploits the most intimate bits of his life to feed his fans with beautified, grotesque image of him. His story has been one of the most classic rock ‘n roll story, and we love it. We rape him together and we love it