Uh-huh Kobain Iconocaustic: Media and Manipulation

All icons are formed by a process of identification, idolisation and marketing. In opening a new vein on the world of popular music, and here the word popular must be understood in the sense that a niche is found to have a groove in the mainstream, Kurt Cobain and band Nirvana achieved momentary post-modern heaven by promoting the subversive-nihilistic trade in "grunge" theatre. Heavy sounds are accompanied by gloomy, moody lyrics and wry humour, evidently intended to appeal to a minority but ultimately appealing to the zeitgeist of the western hemisphere. With Cobain's well-informed death 'flavour-of-the-month' becomes the stuff legends are made of - particularly rock and roll ones.

Of an interest, and weirdly enchanting, is the sweater Cobain fashioned for the video shoot of Nirvana's seminal "Smells like Teen Spirit" single. To the fan the sight of Cobain earthy strut and leer in a video that appears to break down into musical chaos the singular outstanding feature is the green striped sweater which holds the image of iconic Cobain in a place between rock absurdity and roll banality. The director Samuel Bayer claims Nirvana expected a sub-standard promo but he turned out a highly polished sense of the nature of modern rock. Veering between concert and high-school camp the dark shades help to evoke the passion of the practically inaudible lyrics. But it is the sweater we are concerned with. Now if the band wanted to escape the clutches of corporate domination then making a video like the one viewed was a tactical blunder the weight of Olympus.




















The world is fickle and the eye is attached to that which it sees and desires. Cool Cobain, renting out angst in buckets, is formed entirely from guitar and green striped t-shirt, and all worshippers seek to find where they can imitate their 'idol' and search high and low for comfort in identification. The "business" is eager to help, and entombed the sweater in various locations to please the morbid glee of the pilgrimage of those underlings of the lower floors. The media pretends innocence in these matters and so we follow the idea with growing cynicism. Cobain's death could have only been bettered if he had only worn that sweater. Still it is a cool sweater.

The Vault of Horror

It's Only Rock N Roll

Her mind is tiffany-twisted, she's got the mercedes benz - She's got a lot of pretty pretty boys that she calls friends

You raise the blade, you make the change - You rearrange me till I'm sane











Rulers make bad lovers - You better put your kingdom up for sale

It's a town full of losers - And I'm pulling out of here to win


As you lie there naked - Like a body in a tomb - Suspended animation - As I slip into your room



My brain hurt like a warehouse - It had no room to spare - I had to cram so many things to store - Everything in there


For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself - For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself




You put your hands into your head - And your smiles cover your heart



To find a queen without a king - They say she plays guitar and cries and sings - La la la la




I've been waiting here for so long - And all the time that passed me by - It doesn't seem to matter now




The nights are hot and black as ink - I can't sleep and I lay and I think - Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain

Oh Well : Self-fulfilling prophetic Cobain

Kurt Cobain was born on 20 February 1967. There is nothing really remarkable in the formative years of his life and no doubt the kind of life he experienced was no different to many others. Around the age of seven his parents decided to seek a divorce, and though this experience too is shared by many young children, with Cobain it seems to have created a schismatic void from which he drew enormous artistic endeavor and creativity but this went hand in hand with a "death wish" that only increased the depths of the artistic expression till the ideal had to be consumed by the submission of the artist to the inevitability of his vision.

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From around the time of his parent's break up he begun to indulge in forceful fantasies where he enabled himself to predict the outcome of his existence. This was fostered on a world view that indicated that creativity with its genius also had a penchant for madness. The self defeating talent of Cobain is testimony to this truth. His desire to "make it" is always kept in time with a desire to destroy the ego. His first notable self-fulfilling prediction is when he reckoned he would become a big rock star and kill himself so that his fame could only increase with his sudden demise. This foresight, obviously engendered by an internal mechanism that blamed himself for his parent's marriage failure, is such a deep seated rut that as time wore on, and Cobain wandered from one disaster to another, in a subconscious attempt to not fulfill the prophecy, it became more entrenched in the inescapable of the fact.

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Any reading of Cobain would need an understanding of the nature of human contradictions. The rush to be famous and the constant hate of that fame is registered clearly in his poetry and lyrics. His creativity is shadowed by dark images that he intends to shock and appal the observers in a desperate attempt to be loathed by the world, and to be condemned for his crimes. This self-contained hate could often coalesce into a mighty outrage, not unlike the mass shootings at Columbine and other places, as the wishes and misunderstood motives of the assailant decides it is payback time. Cobain was incapable of this. His creativity had succeeded, he had fulfilled his promise to enrapture and capture people with his art, and that is the problem.

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The art is a desire to escape from the trauma of a boring life, or one that should have been. Cobain's strange drift into the low-life, even whilst wealthy, is a chase after an illusion that the world is a terrible place and should be lived terribly. His constant attempts at obliteration through the use of heroin and those failures could only have secured in his misbalanced mind how a failure he really was. Unable to attack society, except through his art, Cobain, who at heart is a good kid, develops a superego, which generates an internalised emphatic structure towards those he loves, his wife, kid and family, but the struggle to live up to what he perceives to be the true societal mores only leads to him withdrawing into a world where he feels safe from defeat and destruction - himself.

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There are those who hyperventilate when Cobain is declared a genius, vowing he is nothing but a punk rocker, an epitaph he would have smiled at. But a closer study of his lyrics reveals a true artist in the technical sense of the word. He was forever trying to reach that point of self content with the image/sound he wanted others to hear or see that his ultimate failure as the artist was like many others, and I include van Gogh here, to fail to see his own creative spark as given. The suppression of the ego over the ideal will always lead to this and it is a shame, but without the destructive completion to this misunderstanding, the ego would reign over the art and this only ever leads to mediocrity and vanity. Kurt Cobain died c. April 5, 1994.