Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

The Deified Kurt Cobain

I have long been conducting a gruelling campaign, based on the premise that Nevermind has been the subject of a broad campaign of musico-historical revisionism, aimed at elevating it to the status of Masterpiece.  Of Turning Point.  Of Magnum Opus.

Far be it from me to appear not to like it.  It was a great album.  A Great Album, indeed.  Undoubtedly influential.  I have listened to it so often that I need to give it a break on occasion.  But now it is discussed as if it gave birth to all that came after.  To hear bands on MTV2 discuss it, one would think that grunge and alternative metal, in 1991, sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Cobain.  One would also imagine that it was instantly recognised as being the founding document of a new way in metal.  Nobody with a taste for the genre will admit to thinking otherwise, any sooner than they would admit to disliking The Pixies, or finding the Velvet Underground "a bit too arty".

The premature death of a famous and undoubtedly influential artist like Cobain always leads to hagiography and exaggeration.  Contemporary album sales of Doors records were modest.  But by the time Oliver Stone made his bloated tribute to Jim Morrison(Denis Leary thereupon: "I'm drunk, I'm nobody, I'm drunk, I'm famous, I'm drunk, I'm dead"), everyone was wistfully remembering those days spent dropping acid and listening to Riders on the Storm in a San Francisco commune.  Sid Vicious was a talentless pretty boy with a taste for heroin and a penchant for wife-beating.  But dying elevated him to the outer sphere of deities.

It can even work later in a fading career.  John Lennon in The Beatles was the real deal: half of the greatest and most prodigious song-writing partnership pop has ever known (keep your Bacharachs, and even your Pet Sounds).  But by the time he dies he'd wasted years on dreadful, dreadful music.  Imagine is an awful song, for all that A Perfect Circle managed to reveal its potential to be something better through the simple expedient of changing such minor details as the key, the instrumentation and the tune.  Woman is worse yet, and made none the better for being about Yoko Ono.  But a few .38 calibre slugs changed all that: number ones all round (keeping the far superior Vienna by Ultravox off the top spot, into the bargain).

And of course, it's not just music: Brando was ten times the actor James Dean ever was, but he had the foolishness to get old and fat instead of dying to remain forever pretty.

Anyway. Nirvana: The Myths

• Myth number one: "Nirvana re-invented rock, and gave birth to alternative rock and grunge."  No.  This is not true.  I could moan on about Mudhoney and Sonic Youth and the Pixies and lots of esoteric stuff, but just take a look at Kerrang magazine's contemporary albums of the year lists at http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/kerrang.html for mainstream progenitors: Nevermind was two years after Faith No More's The Real Thing.  Over the previous three years Jane's Addiction had released nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual.  Mother Love Bone, Atom Seed and The Almighty had already been around, and in the same year as Nevermind emerged, so did Alice in Chains and Soundgarden.
• Myth number two: "ah, but Nevermind was so good that it made an impact those other bands never did."  No.  Look at that list.Nirvana is sitting there at number four for the year, as voted by readers.  Alice in Chains (with far from their best or most accessible album) are not far behind.  Soundgarden, you will notice, are at number 2, beaten only by one of Metallica's best albums (the eponymous Metallica).  People liked alternative metal already.  The idea that Nevermind lifted the scales from their eyes and changed rock forever came after Cobain died.
• Myth number three: "time told on that one: Nevermind was simply the best album."  Bzzzt.  Wrong...  For once, the readers of Kerrang were spot on.  Nevermind was not the best album of all time, nor was it even the best album that year.  It was unlucky to be beaten by Mind Funk.  I admit.  That was a real House Party 2 vs E.T. mismatch.  But Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger deserved its place.  And 1994's Superunknown vies with Faith No More's Angel Dust for the position of finest flowering of the genre.

Don't get me wrong: I too like to think that King Kurt I is not dead, but instead sleeps under a hill, waiting for music's hour of need so that he can once again emerge and rule, saving us from Genesis.  But read the reviews of In Utero, then look at the difference in writing about Cobain post-mortem.  From "tired and uninspired" to "genius who changed the face of music" in two easy barrels.