“A songwriter”: The artist Kurt Cobain aspired to be remembered like
He may well have spent his tragically brief career establishing himself as the poster boy for grunge, but Kurt Cobain was far more than just a noise-making upstart. His love and knowledge of music was encyclopaedic, and he often dipped his toes into a variety of different genres to accumulate his influences. While his songs with Nirvana were often drenched in fuzz and distortion, you could tell that deep down there were some pop sensibilities about him.
There’s often been plenty of talk about Cobain’s obsessive list-making, which saw him catalogue his favourite records of all time in his posthumously published journals. Within these lists, there were nods to classic and beloved acts like The Beatles and REM, but then there were acknowledgements of slightly more obscure and raucous acts like Flipper and Rites of Spring thrown in for good measure, demonstrating his eclectic tastes.
Cobain even went as far as showing his softer side through Nirvana’s infamous MTV Unplugged live performance and album, where the band stripped back a number of the band’s hits and threw in covers of David Bowie’s ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and a cover of the classic folk song ‘In The Pines’, erroneously mis-titled as ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’. If this wasn’t a demonstration of someone whose tastes stretched far beyond grunge and alternative scenes, then it’s not certain what more he could have done to prove himself in this regard.
The performance showed Cobain’s versatility as a musician as well, giving a solid representation of how well his style was just as suited to playing acoustic ballads as it was to making a racket with his band. However, due to his untimely death in 1994, the world was never given the opportunity to hear more of what he had to offer in this regard, meaning that Cobain is often remembered more for his contributions to grunge.
But how did he want to be remembered by his fans? Was he more interested in the idea of solidifying his status as a pioneer of grunge and a rebellious upstart, or did he want people to recognise the fact that he had a tender side that enjoyed folk, country and other acoustic styles?
Seemingly, it was the latter that he was more interested in, as during a 1993 interview with music journalist Laurence Romance, he revealed that he had grand designs of reinventing himself as an acoustic troubadour. “It might be nice to start playing acoustic guitar and be thought of as a singer and a songwriter, rather than a ‘grunge rocker’,” he claimed. “Then I might be able to take advantage of that when I’m older. I could sit down on a chair and play acoustic guitar like Johnny Cash or something, and it won’t be a big joke.”
While the MTV Unplugged set could have been a reasonable indicator of where his career trajectory was heading, Cobain never truly had the opportunity to assert himself as the next Johnny Cash, and while it would undoubtedly have been exceptional to hear him write songs akin to ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, the discography that Cobain and Nirvana left behind is more than solid enough to remember him by.
