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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Kurt Cobain

  • A Requiem for Kurt: 15 Years Later

    Is it sacrilegious to compare Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur?

    Before you start screaming, believe me. I know you can’t compare their output from an artistic standpoint. Cobain was clearly an A-list songwriter and an effective vocalist who made two (three, if you count “Unplugged in New York” classic albums, while Pac’s output was decidedly mediocre. His legend is based more on charisma and image than music.

    But take a closer look. The two died at relatively the same age (Kurt was 27, Pac was 25), both died by gunshot, and while their musical paths were widely divergent, they both were the spokespeople for a segment of their generation. I’m lucky enough (or culturally and musically eclectic enough) to be able to claim both as representations of the era in which I came up.

    There’s no denying what Kurt did to popular music, even if (shock! horror!) his influence is ever-so-slightly overstated. A lot was made of his symbolic toppling of Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” from the top of the Billboard charts, but a closer look into 1992 reveals #1 albums like “The Bodyguard” Soundtrack and Michael Bolton’s “Timeless…the Classics”, chart-toppers post-“Nevermind”. With that said, though, Kurt’s kicking down a door that R.E.M. had pried ajar is extremely significant. Whereas in the fall of ’91, I asked my friend Dee to make me a “rock” mixtape and returned with a Warrant and Poison-heavy piece of work, I was checking out much harder, less glammed-up sounds barely a year later. A whole generation of kids did the same.

    After all these years, the music still holds up. A lot of folks forget (or don’t realize) how poppy Nirvana’s music was. While the musical structure was off-center, the melodies were straight from The Beatles. Think about that next time you find yourself singing along with a Nirvana song. “Teen Spirit”, “Lithium”, “Pennyroyal Tea” and “Rape Me” still sound fresh on the radio after nearly two decades, and Cobain’s shadow still looms large over the rock scene today. Next time you hear Chester Bennington shrieking on the radio, think about whether that sound would have existed in contemporary pop music without Cobain and Nirvana. Whether you want to praise or curse him for the existence of bands like Linkin Park is another story entirely.

    kurtIt’s interesting to imagine what Kurt would be doing with his music if he were still alive. After all, his contemporaries Pearl Jam still make commercially relevant music, as do partners-in-rage-if-not-sound Nine Inch Nails. Hell, anyone who’s heard “Pablo Honey” knows that Radiohead pretty much started out as a Nirvana tribute band, and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell was still pretty relevant until his recent ill-fated collaboration with Timbaland. Would Nirvana still be on the cutting edge? Would Kurt have said “fuck it” and retired? Would he be a kook like Axl Rose is these days? Shit, would the Foo Fighters (an absolutely underrated singles band) even exist? That’s to say nothing of Courtney Love. If Kurt really did write much of “Live Through This”, I’d say there was a helluva career in store for her, had they stayed together.

    At any rate, Kurt deserves credit for bringing an anti-establishment attitude straight into the mainstream and not doing a goddamn thing to temper or change it. And when you break it down, isn’t that what rock ‘n roll is all about?

  • Worth A Second Listen: Hole’s “Live Through This”

    It’s a reasonably well-documented fact that most if not all artistic people are a few sandwiches short of the old picnic basket, and before Amy Winehouse took over as music’s #1 female nutjob, there was Courtney Love. Over the past two decades, Courtney’s been labeled as just about anything you could think of: opportunist, poseur…you name it, Courtney’s been called it. However, the fact that she led the music industry in Hot Messitude during the Nineties (and she’s still up there these days) should not take away from the fact that she and her band Hole made some good music: most of which appears on 1994’s grunge-era classic Live Through This.

    Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This"
    The cover of Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This"

    In retrospect, it’s pretty likely that her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain expedited the band’s signing to major label DGC (which just happened to be Nirvana’s label), but Courtney and Hole (which also featured Eric Erlandson on guitar, Kristen Pfaff on bass and Patty Schemel on drums) had paid their dues by slagging through the underground for years. Courtney had been a fixture on the L.A. rock scene since the early Eighties, enjoying vague associations with everyone from Faith No More to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, before founding Hole. They garnered some attention with an indie release called “Pretty On the Inside” before Love met Cobain. The association gave Courtney some additional notoriety (especially when she said she used heroin while pregnant with Kurt’s baby), but her association started a trend of her music almost becoming secondary to her celebrity. Which is a shame, because Live Through This is a damn good album.

    A lot of the signifiers that associate music with the grunge era are here. The loud/soft dynamic is in full effect, as Courtney usually slurs the verses and shrieks the choruses. The lyrics are on the obtuse side-at least to my ears, but they certainly sound tortured enough. However, one thing that set this album apart from most records of that era was Courtney’s insistence on the music being as melodic as it was aggressive. Her sense of melody wouldn’t fully develop until her significantly more sanitized album “Celebrity Skin”, and most folks assume she had help in the songwriting process (in all likelihood from Kurt himself), but it’s a rarity in that it’s an aggressive rock album that you can actually sing along with.

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