A year ago, Kurt Cobain put a gun to his head. For all that’s been written about his suicide, the power it holds over our emotions and imaginations remains, for the most part, a mystery. It doesn’t come down to anything quite so simple as great songs, a great band, a great singer, or “the voice of a generation.” The answer doesn’t lie in poring over the details of his life either. There was nothing simple about what drove Kurt Cobain to leave this world; there’s nothing simple about what leads any person to choose death. But if we can never know what combination of biochemistry, family background, drug addiction, neglect, celebrity, and self-hatred caused Kurt Cobain to obliterate himself, it’s still worth pondering what it says about the rock world, stardom, and our own complicity in it–as fans, critics, and partisans within a generation and across the gap. If we can’t figure out what Cobain’s suicide says about him, we should at least try to grasp what it says about us.
At which point in her reading, Courtney Love paused and commented, “Well, Kurt, so fucking what? Then don’t be a star, you asshole.”
Cobain’s commentary on his own demise is a muddle of half-digested contradictions that, in my view anyway, reveal a fundamental quandary that has beset pop stardom since before the advent of punk–since it began to incorporate ideas from the folk music world, really.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The roots of the folk scene’s quest for authenticity are deep, going back to the turn of the century when scholars like Francis Child first scoured Appalachian communities for the remnants of Elizabethan balladry and found a host of songs akin to the version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” that Cobain learned from Leadbelly, who called it “In the Pines.” Child and others found musical treasures and some of the greatest examples of vernacular poetic and narrative writing in the English language, material that still informs the writing of Dylan, Neil Young, and Allen Ginsberg, among others.
The authenticity issue arose in trying to make sense of what happened to these songs when they moved out of the preliterate traditions of the Appalachians (or British village life) and into the stream of urban music making. Folk music scholars insisted for the next century–some, like Alan Lomax, still do–that Tin Pan Alley songwriters who used folk elements created “inauthentic” songs; true folk music arose and was passed along anonymously and orally. There were even supposedly inauthentic instruments on which folk music would not be played–the piano, for example, supposedly existed only in bourgeois households, though a single visit to a juke joint could have blown that idea out of the water.
Punk inherited all this when Malcolm McLaren and his cohorts (notably graphic designer Jamie Reid) expropriated situationist ideas to help build the image of the Sex Pistols, and Clash Svengali Bernie Rhodes followed suit. McLaren, Rhodes, and other punk entrepreneurs essentially took situationist and anarchist ideas into the realm of promotion, marketing, and advertising. The Pistols in particular employed a phalanx of PR men so numerous and so astute they might have made Michael Jackson blush. Managers like McLaren, Rhodes, and even Miles Copeland, the decidedly nonanarchist CIA scion who handled the Police and founded I.R.S. Records, found such rhetoric useful for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that it allowed them to assume superiority over the acts, who were supposedly mere instruments of theory after all. (McLaren seems to remain unaware that the Pistols were a great band, or that they had an existence independent of his enterprise, even after getting his clock cleaned in court by Johnny Rotten.)
Rock’s quest for authenticity reached Kurt Cobain as legend as much as history. Cobain was eight years old when Patti Smith made Horses and the Ramones stormed England; nine when “Anarchy in the U.K.” came out; all of 15 when the Clash broke up. These events took place so far from Aberdeen, the little Washington logging town where he grew up, that they might as well have happened in an entirely different generation.
