From the Independent UK:
Read the rest.In the space of two years, Kurt Cobain soared to global stardom then plummeted into a pit of drugs and despair so deep he ended his life in the most violent manner. After a hit of heroin he blasted his brains out with a shotgun.
Yet as what would have been his 40th birthday approaches on Tuesday, his name lives on. More importantly, his legacy generates huge sales. Despite releasing only three proper albums with his band Nirvana in his lifetime, almost 13 years after his death the Kurt industry is stronger than ever.
To hammer home the point, last year he became the first to eclipse Elvis as the biggest earning dead celebrity, generating in excess of £26m according to Forbes magazine. Though most of that money came from his widow Courtney Love's sale of just a quarter stake in his back catalogue, it illustrates the worth of his material: thrashy, wild, angry but lucrative. Even the rights to his diaries, published four years ago, earned a £2m advance.
His musical legacy and social significance are perhaps even more profound. Pundits suggest Cobain, and Nirvana, changed the music business for ever.
"I think he single-handedly changed the way major record labels and TV companies thought about how rock music is sold to a mainstream audience," said Paul Rees, editor of Q magazine. "This was angry punk rock, not something that had been put together by a committee of marketing people. Here was a guy who was so scruffy he wore a cardigan his grandad might have worn, who sang about rage and anger yet sold millions. He changed what was acceptable. His influence is everywhere. Any band who picks up a guitar, from the Arctic Monkeys to My Chemical Romance, is aware of what Kurt Cobain did."
Devotees will mark Tuesday's anniversary by gathering at his unofficial shrine, a graffiti-strewn spot under the Young Street bridge in his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington, where he claimed to have slept rough as a homeless teenager. The town is just 100 miles from Seattle, famous for only two things - Microsoft and being the birthplace of grunge, of which Cobain was king.
Few predicted Nirvana would make it big, certainly on the strength of their first album Bleach - championed by DJ John Peel but loved only by the cognoscenti. The major label Geffen released second album, Nevermind, pressing no more than 50,000 copies. But the slacker generation adopted the single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as its anthem, chanting en masse Cobain's anguished scream: "Here we are now, entertain us." Within a month of its release in late 1991, Nevermind had sold half a million; global sales now stand at 24 million.
The success gave a massive boost to rock music. Every record company wanted its own Nirvana, and every band wanted to sound like them. But success was no comfort to Cobain. A troubled childhood of divorced parents and alienation left him deeply depressed. Crippling, undiagnosed stomach pains led to self-medication with heroin - a drug he despised - and an uneasy marriage to fellow junkie Courtney Love worsened his mental state. After one failed suicide attempt in a Rome hotel room in March 1994, he succeeded a month later. Quitting the Exodus Recovery Center rehab clinic in Los Angeles, he flew back to Seattle and lay low for a week before heading to his Lake Washington home and blasting himself in the head with a shotgun.
Cobain's death hit me hard. I was living in Seattle at the time, and had seen Nirvana perform in small clubs in the city before they became too famous. He was my age, and he sang about things that I felt. He was the voice for a lot of sensitive young people who wore anger as a mask for their pain.
I hope in death he has found the peace he never found in life.
The seminal "Smells Like Teen Spirit":
"Rape Me" live at SNL:
In Bloom (promo, in drag version):
No comments:
Post a Comment