The post-punk band Kurt Cobain always “stayed away from”
There’s no mandate dictating that every rock star must appreciate every subgenre of rock music. Just because someone may be honing their skills in a rockabilly band doesn’t imply they’ll spend their weekends immersing themselves in industrial rock in anticipation of a gig. Kurt Cobain, who had already carved out a distinct musical identity when the grunge wave emerged, intentionally chose to distance himself from Joy Division.
Considering his love of underground rock music, though, Joy Division seemed to be right in Cobain’s style. Before he had even started playing guitar, Ian Curtis had started making the kind of abrasive rock and roll that was about the torturous thoughts going around his head. Although that pain got translated onto the tape most of the time, albums like Unknown Pleasures have been the bedrock of post-punk for many, picking up the mantle of bands like Ramones and putting a dark twist on it.
On the other side of the pond, though, Pixies were also dabbling in their own warped form of punk rock. While they still loved the sounds of the various hardcore bands coming out at the time, Frank Black would pair that aggression with melodies that could have been in top 40 pop songs on ‘Here Comes Your Man’ and ‘Gigantic’.
For all of the dissonant punk that was coming from the underground, Pixies would be the ones who got to Cobain first, loving the sounds of albums like Doolittle when they came out. In fact, Nirvana probably owes Black a handful of royalty checks if we’re being fair, considering how much they aped their style when putting together classics like ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’.
When talking about his influences, though, Cobain admitted that he was still paying attention to what Joy Division was doing up until Curtis’ death in the early 1980s. While the music on their albums may have been interesting, Cobain said that he thought the music would end up carrying over too well into Nirvana’s music.
During their touring cycle, Cobain said that he has always tried to avoid Curtis’s songs, saying, “I stayed away from Joy Division because I heard a few of their songs and I know that I would probably really like it, and just the mystique about it and the stories I’ve heard. I know that’s the band to listen to”.
It’s easy to see where Cobain would have picked up on Joy Division’s reputation as well. Since he gravitated towards the sounds of punk acts like Flipper, each of those bands is a mirror image of what Curtis had been doing, albeit with a slightly faster guitar sound behind them.
Even though Cobain may have tried staying away from Joy Division, he managed to adopt many of their sounds whether he realised it or not. When working on In Utero, that kind of ramshackle production and songs that teetered on the edge of chaos were cut from the same cloth as songs on Closer, as both frontmen try their best to make sense of their own demons. Cobain may have been going down an extremely dark path towards the end of Nirvana’s run, but maybe he was avoiding Joy Division so he wouldn’t venture too far into the darkness.
