"It's OK to eat fish, cuz they
don't have any feelings." - Kurt
Cobain
Kurt Cobain and the Art
of Destruction By
Eddy Bugnut
The term 'Generation X' was used
by novelist Douglas Coupland in 1991 to describe
a generation of twenty-somethings who were
"fanatically independent individuals,
pathologically ambivalent about the future and
brimming with unsatisfied longings for
permanence, for love, and for their own home."
As front man for the Seattle-based music group
Nirvana and one of the founding fathers of
'grunge rock', Kurt Cobain still remains, now
fourteen years after his death, one of the most
revered artists of that generation. By looking
at his work we can better understand how certain
values held by Cobain and expressed in his music
led not only to his great accomplishments as an
artist but also to his ultimate destruction.
His songs were like
nursery rhymes. They were so simple that even a
kid strumming an electric guitar for the first
time could play them. It is this simplicity that
is one of Cobain's most notable achievements in
music. Classical composer Frederic Chopin once
said, "It is simplicity that emerges with all
its charm as the final seal upon art."
In the 1980's virtuoso guitar players
led by the likes of Edward Van Halen, Steve Vai
and Joe Satriani dominated rock music. These
guitarists became innovators in the fields of
melody and harmony (the study of chords and
chord movement) and were also technical masters
of their instruments. Like all innovators though
their ideas were soon gobbled up by those who
continued to recycle them without ever
contributing to them. It followed that pop music
began to lack imagination as musicians started
valuing technical ability more than musical
content.
In the late 1980's songs such
as Nirvana's 'About a Girl' and 'Sliver' went
against the trend of popular music and would
foreshadow the tremendous transformation pop
music would make during the next 3 years. These
songs consisted of three or four chords and
simple, repetitious melodies that
displayed Cobain's talent of stripping down a
song to its very essence. He inserted
major chords into contexts traditionally
reserved for minor chords. He created song
structures that repeated segments three or six
times rather than the traditional four or eight
times. His guitar solos, when present, were
usually tortured variations of a song's melody.
When it came to writing
music, Cobain was a perfectionist, relentlessly
tweaking song structures and melodies until they
became fully integrated with each other.
Lyrically however, Cobain expressed a value
system somewhat inconsistent with those values
he presented in his music. By his own admission
he attached a higher value to the music than to
the words which, although fascinating, were
often dim reflections of an unfocussed mind.
While he worked diligently in crafting musical
structures, his vague lyrics, amalgamations of
disjointed images and unfinished thoughts, were
frequently thrown together from journal entries
in the moments prior to being recorded. He wrote
lyrics using themes of drug use, co-dependency,
and self-loathing. Not only did Cobain reject
values expressed in many lyrics of the 1970's
and 80's, but also more significantly he
expressed apathy and indifference towards the
whole idea of having goals and values in the
first place.
Kurt Cobain was an outsider
to both his peers and his family. While choosing
values that supported his desire to be different
from those around him he seems also to have
rejected many values that are essentially human.
It is clear that Cobain did not place a high
value on human life and ultimately he expressed
this by committing suicide in 1994. If it is
true that a man realizes happiness by achieving
and maintaining his highest values then by
choosing to attach such high value to drug use
and self-loathing Cobain was probably most happy
when he was destroying himself. He consistently
expressed values in his work that were not
conducive to his survival but only to his
destruction.
