The one thing Kurt Cobain wanted to be remembered for
It’s hard to really gauge the kind of legacy that Kurt Cobain wanted to leave behind in Nirvana.
He may have been proud to have touched a nerve whenever he worked on his records, but no one would have looked at someone that openly resented how his own records sounded and say that he was proud of everything he did. He could always see the flaws in everything that he did, but he was looking to be remembered for something much bigger than being the voice of a generation.
Because, really, being considered a Bob Dylan-esque figure was usually the last thing on Cobain’s mind when he started making tunes. The biggest bands that he followed were underground acts like Melvins and Flipper, and while he may have had a sweet tooth for pop music when making his own songs, no one would have expected some scrawny kid from Seattle becoming the next biggest thing in popular music.
Then again, not many people could write the kind of songs that Cobain did, either. A lot of the passion in his vocals was what did the job whenever he started singing, but it was about much more than him screaming at the top of his lungs on every one of his songs. These were complex tunes, and even if Cobain joked that he didn’t know the first thing about music theory, he did have a great ear for pop hooks when he started putting together the bones of what would become Nevermind.
Take ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, for example. The drums might be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the intro to the song, but once Cobain comes in during the verse, his melody is far more sophisticated than anything else coming out of the underground. This was a tune that could have worked just as well if it were played as a solo piano piece, and yet most people only remembered the screaming vocals in the chorus to that song.
Granted, it’s not like Cobain made it easy for people to dissect what he was talking about. He was all about focusing on the sounds of words rather than whether or not they connected to each other, but that didn’t make him any less of a songwriter than his peers. Sure, Eddie Vedder may have had a much more verbose vocabulary whenever he started working on Pearl Jam songs like ‘Jeremy’, but there’s a good chance that no one could have made a song as sullen as ‘Something in the Way’.
And despite being known as one of the most unhinged guitar players in history, Cobain felt that he would rather be remembered as a songwriter more than anything, saying, “[I consider myself] a songwriter. I have no desire to get any better as a guitar player. I’m not into musicianship at all. I don’t have any respect for it. I just hate it. To learn how to read music or to understand arpeggios and Dorian modes and all that stuff, it’s just a waste of time.”
There are probably musical scholars who cringe at that last paragraph, but it’s not like everyone needed lessons to excel in their field. No one was listening to Green Day to hear one of the most complex musical passages ever created, but Billie Joe Armstrong could normally make the best pop song that anyone had ever heard ,even if all he was using was a couple of power chords.
It might have taken someone like Cobain to break down the door for those kinds of songwriters, but it wasn’t like he had to respect the craft of songwriting every single time he played. He was far more interested in playing from the heart, and it turned out the rest of the world had a lot more respect for people that could open themselves up like that than an artist that tried to play a million notes a minute.
