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Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering, and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of punk rock. — Kurt Cobain
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CONTENTS 05// 07// 13// 4 // KURT COBAIN
EARLY LIFE MUSIC ARTWORK
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ACTIVISM LEGACY
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EARLY LIFE Influences that shaped his music LEFT: A young Kurt Cobain plays his guitar
Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, in Hoquiam, Washington, and grew up in the working-class logging town of Aberdeen. His father, Donald, was an auto mechanic and his mother, Wendy, a housewife. He came from a musical family: an uncle played in a band and a great uncle was an Irish tenor who appeared in the 1930 film King of Jazz. At four, Cobain began singing and playing piano, and gravitated to the music of bands ranging from the Beatles to the Ramones. When he was seven, his parents divorced and Cobain was shuttled among various family members. He went to live with his father after the divorce. On the weekends, he would visit his mother and his sister. He moved from home to home over the years and ultimately felt rejected by his family. When his father remarried, Cobain resented his stepmother Jenny and her two children. Feeling rejected by his
family, he quickly became withdrawn and unruly, developing a rebellious attitude he would later express in his music. At fourteen he got his first guitar and learned to play rudimentary rock and roll songs like “Louie Louie” and the Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl.” But he was bullied at school for choosing art and music over sports. Cobain began experimenting with drugs in his mid-teens, and he pushed himself farther away from his father. By his senior year of high school, Cobain decided to drop out. Around that time he began hanging out at rehearsals of local band the Melvins, where he met and befriended bass player Krist Novoselic. The two formed Nirvana and by 1987 the band was playing shows at Evergreen State College in nearby Olympia.
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MUSIC The power of Nirvana RIGHT: Cobain performing live with his iconic left handed Fender Jaguar
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In 1989, with drummer Chad Channing, Nirvana released its first album, Bleach, on the Seattle independent label Sub Pop. According to Jonathan Poneman, co-founder of Sub Pop, “Part of what was so captivating about Nirvana’s music was not so much its stunning originality, but its remarkable fusion of so many different strands of influence.” Despite their antiestablishment and punk tendencies, Nirvana made the leap to a major label in 1991 when they signed with Geffen Records and replacing Channing with Dave Grohl. That same year, they released Nevermind, which spearheaded a music revolution. When that album became a surprise hit, Cobain was thrust into a mainstream pop spotlight he never was completely comfortable with. With the raw edges of punk and the blistering guitars of metal, their sound was labeled “grunge”
for its murky and rough qualities. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth recalls Cobain’s musical sound, “Rage and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he was profoundly gentle and intelligent.” Nirvana smashed through the pretentiousness, leaving a huge, wrecking ball sized hole for ‘alternative’ music to climb through after them. Whilst ‘alternative’ was hardly new, the attention and opportunities Nirvana’s success brought allowed people to reconnect with music that felt more real, intimate and relevant.
Cobain gave rock ‘n’ roll its “soul, bite, & energy back for the disenfranchised youth of the early 90s.
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We just wanted to pay tribute to something that helped us to feel as though we had crawled out of the dung heap of conformity. — Kurt Cobain
LEFT: Krist Novoselic, Dave Grohl, and Kurt Cobain perform as Nirvana, photographed by Charles Petersen RIGHT: Cobain’s design for a Jaguar/Mustang hybrid guitar, the “Jagstang”
In 1993, Nirvana released their third and final studio album, In Utero. Nirvana intended the record to diverge significantly from the polished production of Nevermind. To capture a more abrasive and natural sound, the group hired engineer Steve Albini to record In Utero during a two week period. Albini recalls, “During the course of making the record I came to appreciate that they were genuine about their band and their music, that Kurt was capable of sophisticated thinking, and that they and their music were unique.” Cobain is often credited with slaying the bloated beast of stadium-rock that Nirvana’s success signaled the death knell of. It seemed that no longer were the likes of Guns’N’Roses and Mötley Crüe allowed to dominate rock with all their meaningless, arena filling bombast. Kurt Cobain’s raw emotion and the stripped back sound of Nirvana snatched back the zeitgeist. Whilst music had hardly been cleansed into a pure artistic pursuit, for people switching onto Grunge, it no longer had to be some distant, cynical career path
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full of gimmicks and commercialism. Cobain gave rock and roll its soul, bite and energy back for the disenfranchised youth of the early 90s. Cobain’s ex-girlfriend, Tracy Marander discusses Kurt’s love of underground music in Montage of Heck, saying, “I think he went in search of [the underground], and I think they found each other. He was searching for whatever made him feel like he wasn’t alone and that he wasn’t so different.” Cobain speaks of his influences in an interview, saying, “Punk Rock (while still sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone. We just wanted to pay tribute to something that helped us to feel as though we had crawled out of the dung heap of conformity.”
VERY THIN NECK
WHITE TORTIOSE SHELL PICKGUARD
MUSTANG SINGLE COILS & ELECTRONICS DOUBLE COIL PICKUP
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ARTWORK Creativity beyond music LEFT + CENTER: Cobain’s original patingings RIGHT: Cobain photographed by Jesse Frohman; the last formal photoshoot before his death
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Cobain spent a lot of his time exploring different creative outlets—writing, painting, drawing, and making collages. Tracy Marander spoke about Kurt’s creativity, “It was kinda funny, ‘cause sometimes he’d just sit there and watch TV for four hours. And you’d think he wasn’t creating, but he’d be playing guitar while he was doing that or think up stuff later, and then you’d go out for a few hours, and you’d come back, and there was a painting on the wall, or there was a big comic strip or whatever. He wrote a song. You know, recorded it.” Cobain also designed the album covers and wrote treatments for the videos. He even designed the t-shirts. “He was really a comprehensive genius when it came to the art of rock and roll,” said Danny Goldberg. Cobain is the artist responsible for the collage that graces the back-cover of In Utero.
Cobain saw lyric writing as an art similar to painting, “Music comes first; lyrics are secondary. Most of my lyrics are contradictions. I’ll write a few sincere lines, and then I’ll have to make fun of [them]. I don’t like to make it too obvious, because if it is too obvious, it gets really stale. You shouldn’t be in people’s faces 100% all the time. We don’t mean to be really cryptic or mysterious, but I just think that lyrics that are different and weird and spacey paint a nice picture. It’s just the way I like art.”
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He was really a comprehensive genius when it came to the art of rock ‘n’ roll.
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Cobain unknowingly inspired a new genre of fashion. Think the grunge look, which wasn’t really a look; it was actually what Cobain really wore. In an interview, Cobain talks about his style, “I don’t like things that are pretty and clean and nice, I can’t buy new clothes, I have to wear my old clothes. I mean, these are the same pants that I’ve worn for the last three years. This is a mohair sweater. I buy mohair sweaters secondhand. I like to buy old things. I like old, dingy, dirty things because they have more character. There’s more detail to weathered things. There’s more detail to decay. I can’t stand anything that’s new. So even though I’m a really rich rock star I have to wear old dirty clothes because it’s the only way I feel comfortable.”
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ACTIVISM Cobain’s progressive views LEFT: An excerpt from Cobain’s journals, published in 2002
As Cobain became famous, he began speaking out for feminism, gay rights, and other minorities and never stopped. He was decades ahead of his time in standing up for women and gays in the male-dominated world of rock. “If any of you, in any way, hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone,” he wrote in the liner notes of Incesticide. “Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” Cobain was very vocal about his hatred for people who mistreated others, often speaking out in interviews, “Rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth. And it happens every few minutes. Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song “Polly”. I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience. I would like to get rid of the homophobes, sexists, and racists in our audience. I know they’re out there and it really bothers me.”
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If any of you, in any way, hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! He also frequently wrote about his views in his journals, “I like the comfort in knowing that women are generally superior and naturally less violent than men. I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll. I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro-American invented rock and roll, yet has only been rewarded when conforming to the white man’s standards. I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro-American has once again been the only race that has brought a new form of original music to this decade (hip hop/rap).”
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Cobain was also pro-choice and talked about the hypocritical views of pro-life protesters in his journals, “Their logic is to kill living, breathing, free-thinking humans rather than unknowing, un-stimulated, growing cells, encased in a lukewarm chamber.”
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LEGACY Cobain’s everlasting impact RIGHT: Cobain was relatable because he wrote about relatable topics
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On April 5, 1994, in the guest house behind his Seattle home, a 27-year-old Cobain committed suicide and left behind an inescapable legacy. Cobain was the most important artist of the Nineties even though he lived for less than half of the decade. When Nirvana rocketed into popular consciousness in 1991 with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Cobain became the face and enduring icon of alternative rock. He was a musical genius who (briefly) brought punk rock into the mainstream, and a pop craftsman with a gift for setting simple melodies to noisy feedback and distortion. His coarse and grainy wail was the prototype for later alt-rock singers, and his tangled leads and hurricane-like power chords influenced countless subsequent rock guitarists and inspired many teens to start their own bands. In his lyrics, Cobain dealt with the thorny discomfort of growing up and railed about his inner demons. Like Bob Dylan, he hated the notion of being dubbed “the voice of a generation” – in Cobain’s case, Generation X – but got it anyway.
With Cobain you felt you were connecting to the real person, not to a perception of who he was - you were not connecting to an image or a manufactured cut-out. The greatest gift Cobain gave listeners was putting his honest pain into his lyrics. Cobain changed the course of where the music went. There are certain people where you can see the axis of musical history twisting on them: Hendrix was pivotal, Prince was pivotal, Cobain was pivotal. Cobain always seemed like he never wanted that kind of fame or the attention. Too fragile by half, wracked by personal demons and conflicts that he turned into his signature loud/quiet buzz bombs, he just couldn’t stand the pressure. Maybe he was too deep in it to realize that his brief period in the spotlight would echo for years, decades, and, it now seems, forever. What made him so special was that he seemed like a regular dude who stumbled into rock stardom and then recoiled from it when he reached the heights
that some people spend their every waking breath striving for. That is punk rock. Cobain isn’t fascinating because he killed himself, he’s fascinating because what he left behind was so real and raw that it transcends the time in which it was created.
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This book was researched, designed, printed and bound by Madalyn Harbert using the typefaces Helvetica and Trade Gothic, and printed on 32 lb. Birch Naturals paper stock. For references and sources please refer to the process document that accompanies this project. This project was produced in response to the GD01 class assignment Sequential Narrative at Kent State University, School of VCD, Fall 2015, with instructor Aoife Mooney.
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