The Pleasures of Death

Kurt Cobain's Masochistic and Melancholic Persona

Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780807174692
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics.Drawing on critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate Cobain's texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions of his art. Cobain's distinctive version of grunge, understood as a subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an understanding of the self as part of a larger social order. Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain's writings independently of the artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive.By foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.

II TEXTS

LYRICS AND JOURNALS

3 COBAIN’S LYRICS

The Anxiety of Living as Male and Straight in a Misogynist and Heterosexist Culture

Kevin Allman: Does it make you laugh when people take apart all your songs and try to figure out what you’re saying?

Kurt Cobain: Oh, yeah. At the time I was writing those songs [Nevermind], I really didn’t know what I was trying to say. There is no point to analyze or explain it. That used to be the biggest subject in an interview: “What are your lyrics about?”

—KEVIN ALLMAN, “The Dark Side of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain” (381)

Cobain was a master practitioner within a genre known for producing innocuous, ambiguous, and, at times, unintelligible lyrics. He wrote songs that would seem, then, to resist a classic literary analysis in part because of the challenge of assigning a fixed, coherent, and comprehensive meaning to texts that often turn out to be “a fragmentary and elusive set of lyrics that sometimes degenerate into nonsense” (Beebe, 318). Even within the genre, however, Cobain has become a cliché in the sense that he is viewed by some listeners of independent guitar rock as the performer par excellence whose vocalizing, imprecise diction, awkward phrasing, elision of words, and muddled pronunciation often render his already difficult lyrics even more challenging to comprehend.

As Nick Soulsby indicates, Mad Magazine once gently poked fun at Cobain’s singing by proclaiming that all singers should be taught to “mumble like Kurt Cobain so there’ll be fewer incomprehensible lyrics [for fans and cover bands] to memorize” (Dark Slivers, chap. 8). In addition, in 1992 Weird Al Yankovic exploited the fact that much of the buzz surrounding the commercial success of Nevermind centered on listeners’ inability to decipher what Cobain was singing. In a song Yankovic titles “Smells Like Nirvana,” he expertly mimics Cobain’s singing. He begins the first verse of his version of Nirvana’s most popular song by asking “What is this song all about / How do the words to it go?” He then pleads with listeners to provide him with his own words. Yankovic concludes the verse, ironically, with a crisp diction that contradicts the very singing technique that he is satirizing: “Now I’m mumblin’ and I’m screamin’ / And I don’t know what I’m singin’.” In Cobain’s case, even when listeners succeed in deciphering his words, they typically deem his laconic lyrics to be especially cryptic, opaque, or nonsensical. And, as he himself writes in “On a Plain,” in a self-contradictory manner and with a certain degree of elfishness, “It is now time to make it unclear / To write off lines that don’t make sense.”

Most observers, like Sub Pop’s owner Jonathan Poneman and entertainment journalist Chuck Crisafulli, agree that Cobain’s lyrics display “a bent toward meaningful meaningless” (Crisafulli, 18). Yet most observers also insist that Cobain’s voice and his stage performance give sense to his nonsense and meaning to his meaninglessness, whether this unintelligibility is willful or inadvertent. In a similar manner, Cobain’s onetime girlfriend Tobi Vail asserts that listeners of certain songs, such as “Drain You” and “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” often “respond to the emotional quality of [Cobain’s] voice and the phrasing of his words rather than to the actual meaning of the songs (True, 228). And when assessing Cobain’s songwriting, Soulsby characterizes his genius as resulting from the combination of three features: the singular way he adopts a narrative perspective in his lyrics; the way he delivers lines in his most affecting songs; and the way he succeeds in expressing a specific take on contemporary social and cultural issues (Dark Slivers, chap. 10).

Contrary to the kind of analysis of Cobain songs that Soulsby, Crisafulli, and others propose, I take the written word as the principal object of my analysis. I put delivery and music performance in parenthesis. There exist already detailed commentaries on Cobain’s voice and style of singing. Nick Kent writes in The Guardian, for example, of the “full death-moan vocal effect of Cobain’s voice. His larynx-shredding voice,” Kent concludes, “is probably the key to his enduring appeal: It still delivers, [for instance], as he turns the word ‘pain’ into a multi-syllable crescendo screech on the otherwise forgettable . . . song ‘You Know You’re Right’” (“Isn’t There Somebody?”). There are also excellent analyses of the evolution and the significance of Nirvana’s guitar, bass, and drum sounds. Kent, Soulsby, and Crisafulli, among others, have provided comprehensive accounts and convincing analyses of all the music Nirvana has recorded. These studies include the specific sounds on each song and, quite often, a description of the relation between the music and lyrics as well as the musical connections between individual songs.1

Even though my introduction to most of the songs examined in this chapter has been by way of Cobain’s recorded voice and Nirvana’s music, I conclude that his written lyrics can and do stand alone as literary texts. Based on these written texts, I examine Cobain’s overall aesthetic and discursive practices by exploring how he goes about composing songs and inscribing them with specific meanings. I analyze his lyrics in order to demonstrate the ways some of the stories Cobain relates and some of the images he creates in his songs succeed in sketching the profile of a particular kind of masculine subject, one who experiences an acute anxiety about living as male and straight in a misogynist and heterosexist culture.

I do not comment on every song that Cobain has written; I direct my attention to a select group of lyrics that defines his signature style and that exposes the themes that preoccupy him. In particular, I refer to, but do not comment in detail on, several songs that critics have already thoroughly examined, like “Polly,” “Been a Son,” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Similarly, I shall not be especially concerned with the order in which he wrote songs. The chronology of composition is another topic that other writers have thoroughly covered. Some commentators, including Clark Humphrey and Gillian Gaar, as well as most of Cobain’s biographers, have documented the dates and circumstances of the writing and the recording of all the songs in Nirvana’s catalogue.2 Although I do not comment on the order in which Cobain composed his songs, chronology does tell us something significant about his lyrics because songs composed during the three distinct periods of his career display a similar structuring and content. One can distinguish between the songs written during the pre-Nirvana years (Fecal Matter), during the Sub Pop and early Nirvana period (pre-Nevermind), and the during the later Nirvana period (post-Nevermind).

In the pursuit of my ultimate objective in this chapter, it does prove at times to be daunting to attempt to ascribe a coherent meaning to any individual Cobain song. But in revealing the literary techniques that characterize Cobain’s lyrical production and in exploring the subjects he writes about and the images he creates, I demonstrate the precise manner in which his lyrics make sense or create nonsense. Through this process, instead of focusing exclusively on the content and the meaning of any particular song in isolation, I also highlight the interrelation between the songs. I examine how they dialogue with each other, thereby revealing the overarching themes and recurrent images that appear throughout Cobain’s lyrics as an ensemble. Beyond my immediate aim in this chapter, my ultimate objective remains to explore how Cobain’s creative writings, his journals as well as his lyrics, function to create a specific persona that Cobain takes great pains to cultivate.

Since Cobain has provided the transcription for only a few of his songs, primarily in his journals, it has been left to others to transcribe recorded versions of his lyrics. Fortunately, hundreds of Nirvana fans have done a commendable job in transcribing and posting lyrics on several websites.3 These fan-generated transcriptions have facilitated my work, but they do present a challenge. To begin with, Cobain is, as I suggest, notorious for mumbling as well as for his tendency to punctuate his singing with screams and other vocalizations. As a result, there can be a wide variation in what listeners hear on a recording. Frequently, listeners disagree on what constitute single words or phrases in many songs. Like most listeners, I find no song to be completely incomprehensible from first line to last. Some lyrics, however, like “In His Room” and “Endless, Nameless” are especially difficult to decipher.

In addition, the matter of exact wording is further complicated because there can be lyrical variation of a song depending on which recorded version one transcribes. Gaar reveals, for example, how different recordings of “All Apologies” sport different lyrics (14). “Very Ape” is another example of Cobain singing different versions of a song at various times, resulting in the online circulation of different transcriptions of this song. In this chapter, I take the studio-recorded versions of songs as they appear on Bleach, Nevermind, Incesticide, and In Utero to constitute the definitive versions of Cobain’s lyrics. Even though Cobain revised and edited certain songs, I subscribe to Soulsby’s conclusion that “once a song was brought to the studio, [Cobain] committed to that edition of the lyrics as the conclusive rendition” (Dark Slivers, chap. 10). For the songs on Illiteracy Will Prevail, which Cobain wrote prior to forming Nirvana, I use the demo recording posted on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTnPdp_Vt3Y).4

THE ORIGINS AND INSPIRATION FOR COBAIN’S LYRICS: PHANTASY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION

Even a cursory analysis of Cobain’s music and lyrics reveals that other musicians of his generation and from preceding generations have influenced him. He himself has indicated a fondness for American and British popular music of the ’60s and ’70s and an affinity for new wave, metal, hardcore, and alternative musicians of the ’80s and early ’90s. In fact, his songs reveal musical and lyrical influences from John Lennon and Paul McCartney (The Beatles); from Iggy Pop (The Stooges); from Eugene Kelly (The Vaselines); from Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill); and from Buzz Osborne (Melvins), among others. In particular, Cobain’s songwriting and singing share features in common with the lyrics and stage presence of two of his contemporaries, Michael Stipe (R.E.M.) and Morrissey (The Smiths). Stipe and Morrissey are two of the performers that Cobain cites in his journals as paradigmatic of a certain kind of songwriter he prefers:

It seems like there are only two options for [songwriters’] personalities. Either they’re sad, tragic visionaries like Morrissey or Michael Stipe . . . or they’re the goofy, nutty white boy, hey let’s party and forget everything, people like Van Halen or all that other heavy metal crap. (Journals, 44, emphasis added)

In addition, the lyrics and performance style of these two artists, like Cobain’s, also engage with the interrelations between music performance, masculinity, masochism, and melancholy.5

I do not, however, enter into the full details of these comparisons. This topic is yet another one for which biographers, as well as other scholars and music commentators, have already provided convincing accounts. These studies contextualize Cobain’s music and lyrical production within the overall history and evolution of twentieth-century American guitar-rock in general, and grunge specifically.6 Beyond Cobain’s place in the history of popular music songwriting, I am more interested in how his creative writings, overall, fit into the broader tradition of autobiographical and fictional writings that engage with notions of masculinity, masochism, and melancholy.

Although in this chapter I drill down into the content of Cobain’s lyrics in order to ascertain the nature and scope of the images and the subjects of his compositions, I do not set out, as indicated in the introduction, to uncover some previously undisclosed truth about Kurt Cobain the historical person. This chapter examines the structuring and the internal logic of his imaginary world, that is, the persona, characters, and narratives he invents. Therefore, I focus on how songwriting provides a way for Cobain to recreate himself by creating a persona. It is for this reason that I consider not only his lyrics but also his journals to constitute a fictionalized autobiography. His lyrics end up creating an imaginary subject that is neither real nor altogether made up. Instead, his songs present a phantasmatic version of Cobain’s subjective truth. As a result, they provide access to an emotional and psychical reality. In a 1991 interview, Cobain explains how at an early age he used writing “to escape from what . . . [he] had been surrounded by [and] to vent” his frustrations (Spiccia, 210). He has also spoken of his sense of isolation that writing partially succeeded in mitigating (Mullins and Mullins, 120).7

There is quite clearly a relationship between Cobain’s lyrics and his visual art. He recognizes and comments on this relationship on several occasions. Both forms of expression constitute a kind of collage, a juxtaposition of disparate words, images, or ideas. In the end, both modes of expression are nonlinear undertakings that possess a dream-like quality:

Phil Sutcliffe: A lot of time with your lyrics . . . it seems you use images within . . . one song which are very different [from one another]. Not obviously connected.

Kurt Cobain: Right.

PS: I wondered if that had anything to do with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading Kurt Cobain: Consolation for the Disconsolate
• I. Contexts: Music Histories and Masculinities
• II. Texts: Lyrics and Journals
• III. Theories: Masochism and Melancholy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index