I received this DVD to review and will be viewing it this weekend. I know it will be an emotional experience for me.
An intimate and moving meditation on the late musician and artist Kurt Cobain, based on more than 25 hours of previously unheard audiotaped interviews conducted with Cobain by noted music journalist Michael Azerrad for his book "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana." In the film, Kurt Cobain recounts his own life - from his childhood and adolescence to his days of musical discovery and later dealings with explosive fame - and offers often piercing insights into his life, music, and times. The conversations heard in the film have never before been made public and they reveal a highly personal portrait of an artist much discussed but not particularly well understood. Written by AJ Schnack
7 comments:
looks interesting
Anytime I see something about Kurt Cobain, I hope that it's about how his wife conspired to have him killed. Unfortunately, this doesn't cover that. It does look like an interesting self-portrait and it should be interesting to see if it dissects his own dishonesty and phoniness and gets to what really led him to make two decent albums and the incredible pile of dung that was In Utero.
(I got a review copy too, so my review should be up before long.)
Barbara: Enjoy your review--I hope the interviews are at least moderately interesting to sit through.
Well said, Bob. Although I hate to see anyone go early for any reason, someone killing themselves at a young age shouldn't automatically make them immune from legitimate analysis and criticism. Cobain was no god, no Lennon, no Morrison. Let's not treat him like anything close to any of the three.
-- david
Bond, yes it should be.
Bob, would not be surprised at all if what's her name had him killed (I don't want to taint my blog by typing her name here). It sounds like you don't like Kurt. I don't think he was phony. I think he was real and he honestly didn't want the fame as much as he wanted to share his music.
David, I will agree with you - he's not a Jim or a John. I doubt there ever will be anyone to compare to them. But I don't compare him....I just look at him for who he was and its sad that he's dead.
I think his fame created credibility issues in his own mind. It went against the DIY ethic he supposedly embraced. he knew it was wrong, yet he couldn't help himself. I think he was an average artist who was in the right place at the right time. He was a misfit all his life and then suddenly, most of his fan base were the type of kid that used to beat him up. I'm sure it was very confusing, but he didn't handle it very well. Other bands from the same scene found success on their own terms (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and to a lesser extent Screaming Trees and Mudhoney), but Kurt got wrapped up in the media circus of his own life and then put out one of the worst albums of the 90s to near universal praise.
I guess because I came out of the punk scene myself and I was into grunge maybe a couple or so years before it broke, the whole sell-out to fame seems so obvious to me. This stuff was never supposed to be huge. Like punk, it wasn't really intended for the masses and then all of the sudden, it was huge and Kurt Cobain was at the forefront, parading it in front of the world.
A friend of mine once compared him to Jim Morrison... The rationale being that both of them had a tremendous impact on music but for both of them their impact on music, as big as it was, was incredibly brief. People not of their generations/eras tend to have a more difficult time understanding their music and their impact on music.
That being said I understand/understood Morrison far more than I ever understood Cobain. And Morrison was gone before I even came into the world. I respect and appreciate that Nirvana's music really spoke to a lot of people from my generation... I just wasn't one of them.
Perplexio, I guess you can't explain what these lines mean either:
"A mullato!
An Albino!
A mosquito!
My Libido!"
Seriously, what's that about? I understand "I feel stupid and contagious," but the stuff about mosquitoes and libidos doesn't connect with me.
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