Word: kurt
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...When Kurt Cobain took his life at the peak of Nirvana’s popularity in April 1994, critics were quick to draw comparisons between his suicide and the accidental death of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious. Superficial parallels were quickly noticed—Cobain and his loudmouthed peroxided wife, Hole front-woman Courtney Love, were habitual heroin users; Vicious and his notorious bleached-blonde companion, Nancy Spungen, were also well-known junkies. Cobain and his wife even checked into hotels under Vicious’ real name, John Ritchie. Still, the most common association made between the two musicians...
...Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were to the Olympia indie-cum-grunge scene what Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols were to punk rock—what began as an esoteric musical offshoot of political turmoil (in the case of punk, economic and social turmoil in late-1970’s Britain; in the case of indie, rebellion against traditional gender roles in music and disdain towards the mass marketing of an art form) was deliberately sold as bandwagon rebellion. As Bart Simpson said while the Smashing Pumpkins played in front of him at Lollapalooza, “making teenagers depressed...
When Nirvana's Kurt Cobain died of a self-inflicted shotgun blast in 1994 at age 27, it marked the end of a short life plagued by family troubles, heroin addiction and struggles with fame. His story certainly wasn't heavenly, but it was heavy, and Cross--a grunge sponge who conducted 400 interviews for this serious, substantial biography--lays it all out vividly. Extraordinary access to Cobain's unpublished journals helps the narrative move like the best Nirvana anthems: a slow build, some off-kilter rhythms, softly seductive passages followed by loud screams and a devastating finish. Smells like...
...romantic idealism, as documented in "Things Have Got to Change," to his fiery streak, laid down for all to hear in "Somebody Else's Princess." If the tunes were riveting, it could be as much of a privilege to dive into Crowe's brain as Bob Dylan's or Kurt Cobain's, but Crowe's music, like Thornton's, is competent, inoffensive and short on surprises. While Thornton's record is country-inflected and Crowe's is in the vein of Bruce Springsteen, they are both deadly serious and seriously ponderous. As musicians, both men appear to emote first...
World War II gave some American writers images that burned deep to the core of their work and became, sometimes, its chief theme: the bombing of Dresden for Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), the contradictory lunacies of command for Joseph Heller (Catch-22). This scarcely ever happened to American painters or sculptors. But to one in particular it did. It was war, as much as anything else, that made an artist out of H.C. (Horace Clifford) Westermann Jr., that imbued him with raucous suspicion of the "normal" life he was supposed to be defending and filled him with horrible sights...