Listening to all the discs at one sitting was equal parts tedium and revelation. Could there be a more perfect distillation of what made Nirvana matter? Cobain was a great poet of crappiness, a musician who began with the most unpromising materials thinkable and assembled them into three-minute bursts of demented perfection, ending in disaster. Turns out Cobain really doesn’t know how to play the song, which descends into monotonous fake-booking and finally atonalizes. He’s doing perfect Jimmy Page vibrato on the second note. Nirvana’s bassist, Krist Novoselic, says in the liner notes that he can’t remember whose house it was, but we can imagine a place like the ones seen in the accompanying DVD-gross carpet and brown wood paneling, the sort of house you might OD in, a house Cobain would have described, in his distinctive surfer-cracker accent, as “ des-ghest-ing.” The band is tuning and noodling between songs when somebody in the crowd barks, “Play ‘Heartbreaker!’ ” Then we hear Cobain say, “ I don’t know how to play it!” But a few seconds later he steps on a pedal, and the six monster notes that open the song come snarling out with totally unexpected competence: Der der der de-der der. With the Lights Out begins with a gloriously messy cover of the Led Zeppelin chestnut “Heartbreaker.” It’s 1987, and the band is playing a house party. It was through the grinding of this last paradox that his best stuff emerged. He was a guy with the looks of a J.Crew model who thought of himself as “rodentlike,” a fundamentally sweet person who practically writhed with loathing, a songwriter who was at his best when he indulged his genius for pop melody but who came from, and revered, a musical culture-Northwest punk-that valued deliberate crudity at the expense of all else. But it’s true nonetheless that he didn’t know what to do with his own beauty. He killed himself because he had a serious drug problem, serious psychological problems, and some kind of weird undiagnosed stomach ailment. I won’t be an idiot and suggest that this had something to do with his death. Love of color, sound, and words, /Is it a blessing or a curse?”Ĭobain could never answer that question for himself. “The fate of Kurt Cobain,” she sings, “junk coursing through his veins / And young Virginia Woolf- / Death came and hung her coat. She mainly writes delicate, otherworldly folk songs now, but “Rapture” is almost awkwardly direct. Veirs started out, like Cobain, playing punk in Washington State. Forgive the effusiveness, but I’ve had a whole little relationship with this song, which I started out thinking was the most pretentious thing I’d ever heard and now think is maybe the most purely transcendent thing I’ve heard in years. Which is why it’s so excellent, and so gratifying, that the past few months have seen the release both of the first song that deserves to be called an elegy for Kurt Cobain, Laura Veirs’s “Rapture” (off her truly odd and lovely fourth album, Carbon Glacier), and of With the Lights Out, a four-disc boxed set that manages, despite an excess of throwaway material, to be an appropriately eccentric testament to Cobain’s talent. All that remained, it seemed, was to hitch his corpse to a chariot and drag it through the mosh pit at Lollapalooza. Then MTV trumpeted the unveiling of a lost Nirvana gem, “You Know You’re Right,” which turned out to be a thoroughly terrible song. There has been clichéd legal wrangling over his estate. And there was the release, in 2002, of his appallingly mopey and adolescent journals, the mere thought of which should have sent his ghost into hiding. It began immediately, with the nationally televised spectacle of his widow reading aloud-while pausing for gratuitous critical asides-his suicide note. His mistreatment in death has been quite another thing. Not the sort of bad that would make you think, as Cobain evidently wished us to think, No wonder the dude was so fucked up. His fanzine tales of a traumatic home life, of constant beatings at the hands of psychotic redneck bullies, turned out, when biographers tracked them down, to be spun from some fairly customary teenage American nowhere stuff: neglect and boredom, mostly. Kurt Cobain tended to exaggerate the abuses he’d suffered in his youth.
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