#featuring the worst most meaningless fucking commentary ever

[possessable]

OKAY NOW THAT MEMORIES OF BATTLE MODE IS OUT I CAN DO A BOSS RANKING FINALLY

7. GOUMANG - i don't even want to replay this one

6. YANLAO - Eh? Not that bad, but nothing to write home about. Memories of this fight are fading from my mind actively as I type. What was I thinking about again? Something about a claw…

5. YINGZHAO - A solid first boss—nothing extraordinary, but I can't think of anything bad to say about it. Does a good job teaching the player how to parry. It's fun trying to Unbounded Counter the attacks when you normally wouldn't be able to in the game's regular progerssion. I like The Yingzhao.

4. JI (Tie) - I like the little gimmick where you can choose his next attack, that's really fun. Fun fight. I feel it sort of goes on too long though, much like Ji's life—or doesn't have enough variety of attacks, something like that. It's a nice fight though.

4. LADY ETHEREAL (Tie) - Fun fight. This was my favorite when I first played the game. uh. Wh. What happened? Why is she not even in the top 3 anymore? Wh? Anyway. It's really fun having to discern Lady Ethereal from the clones and attack accordingly and I love the infinite arena but, same as Ji's, still feel like it goes on too long.

3. JIEQUAN - Very fast paced and aggressive. I love it. His teleporting in the 2nd phase is really fun. I had forgotten how much he Erratically Jumps Around during his fight it's such a contrast to Eigong's very methodical and composed one. Can you tell I compare every fight to Eigong's because she's the only boss I was able to replay for several months

2. THE FENGS - I HATED this fight when I first played the game it was my LEAST favorite. But. It's. It. It…grew on me…? Fuxi's nice consistent attack patterns are a really fun contrast against Nuwa's Random Bullshit Go and it's really fun to…What's wrong with me? How did this happen?

1. EIGONG -

[lifeonashelf]

COBAIN, KURT

Dying was definitely the worst thing that ever happened to Kurt Cobain.

That may not read like a particularly brilliant statement. You’re saying: “Taylor, I’m sure if you solicited any random sampling of people to compile a list of the worst things they could imagine happening to them, dying would end up at the top of most of those lists” (although, it would land below “being married to Courtney Love” on mine). However, the reasons I’m positing this in regards to Cobain are only tangentially related to the most common side effect of death being an immediate cessation of one’s mortal presence on this earth. Explanation: Cobain’s too-short life was characterized by profound and abiding existential pain, so in his specific instance I presume ending that life at least came with the not-unwelcome corollary of providing a respite from his suffering. Besides, the manner of his death left ample evidence that he sincerely did not want to be alive anymore, so it’s unlikely he was overly concerned with side effects. In case there’s any misconception that I’m somehow endorsing Kurt Cobain’s suicide, please feel free to text me and I’ll gladly forward you a selfie so you can see the tears that are filling my eyes right now as I revisit the devastating final chapter of a man whose music means the world to me. Yet, somehow, the strip-mining of his memory that began the very day his body was found strikes me as a tragedy which nearly equals what was done to that body.

Tucked away on one of my shelves, you will find a bootleg box set entitled Into the Black (I mean that figuratively; you will not find it—if you really want to see it, I will get it down for you; seriously, don’t start touching my shit). I procured this anthology upon its release in 1994, and back then it had the distinction of being the richest available source of previously-unreleased Nirvana live performances and songs that were never included on any of their albums. Such a find would be largely meaningless today, when a quick internet search can immediately unearth all of those tracks within seconds. But for a distraught fan to whom the prospect of facing a world where there would never be any new Nirvana music again seemed unbearable, Into the Black was an immensely cathartic salve for me at a time when I desperately needed it. The scope of the compendium remains impressive—I think it’s a way better collection than the official With the Lights Out box set that came out 10 years later—and by presenting the included material in chronological order, all the way from Nirvana’s first demo cassette to a complete recording of their final North American concert, the seven hours of tunes on Into the Black provide about the most fitting and comprehensive Kurt Cobain encomium ever delivered.

Which is part of what makes the final track on the anthology arrive like a dagger to the soul and the ears. There really isn’t a name for this closing selection—after all, it isn’t even a song. But the creators of Into the Black had to call it something in the track listing. So they called it exactly what it is: “Courtney Love’s Complete Eulogy For Kurt Cobain.”

This recording was played for a crowd of several thousand despondent fans who gathered in Seattle for a public memorial on April 10, 1994, two days after Cobain’s body was found. Its manifestation occupies a limbo unique to itself, half significant historical document, half ghoulish tabloid spectacle. Though the song “Miss World” was released on March 28, in a very real sense, it was this Courtney Love recital that served as the first proper single from Hole’s Live Through This, which would be released forty-eight hours later and subsequently propel her music career to previously unthinkable heights—a result that arguably stemmed as much from Love’s deft public navigation of her grief process as it did from the fact that Live Through This is a fucking incredible record.

Reactions to “Eulogy” (for lack of a better title) will inevitably vary by listener. If you view Courtney Love as an unfortunate casualty of Kurt Cobain’s war against himself, you will probably hear a shell-shocked widow valiantly facing her worst nightmare. If you view Courtney Love as one of the likely reasons Cobain loaded his shotgun on April 5, 1994, you will probably hear an unhinged harpy using the most intimate words her late husband ever wrote against him in a monstrously demeaning fashion. Over time, I’ve come to rest somewhere in the middle of those two poles, so I don’t quite know what to make of the recording now. What I do know is that I never want to listen to it again, and don’t really need to since it’s still vividly burned into my brain from past spins—I couldn’t bring myself to revisit it while authoring this segment about it. Because even in 1994 when I was playing Into the Black endlessly, even when I was struggling to make sense of something that seemed utterly senseless, and even when the message Love was delivering was allegedly intended for anguished fans just like me, my reaction to that audio was exactly the same as I assume it would be today: I shouldn’t be hearing this.

“Eulogy” essentially features Courtney Love narrating Cobain’s suicide note in its entirety. Since photographs of the document have subsequently surfaced in numerous places, a cursory review plainly reveals that despite Love’s proclamation on the tape that she elected to omit parts of the letter about herself and their daughter Frances “because they’re none of your fucking business”, she does in fact share nearly everything that appears on the page. Irrespective of that, her rationalization is a bizarre one—after all, it can be sensibly argued that nothing in that epistle was really the “fucking business” of anyone outside Cobain’s immediate circle. The mere reading itself denotes a sort of indecent invasion, but it is the peculiar spin the author’s self-appointed spokeswoman put on the broadcast that truly makes it astonishing. Love didn’t simply orate Cobain’s note, she annotated it, interjecting frequently to pose her own biting counterpoints to his words, sometimes leveling these ripostes directly at him, sometimes addressing her running commentary to the royal listening we. Her delivery veers between naked tear-choked agony that will move you no matter how you feel about her, and primal hissing vitriol—at one point on the recording she instructs the entire crowd to call the man they came to mourn “asshole.” It is the sound of a woman purging an entire spectrum of very private emotions in a very public way, it is an unseemly peek under the mortuary drape of a man who had just shot a gaping hole in the hearts of millions, and it is extremely uncomfortable to listen to.

I do not know Courtney Love. I have no desire to know Courtney Love. Only she could tell you how actively she calculated the channeling of her deceased husband’s musical legacy into the birth of her own. I cannot definitively state that Courtney Love exploited Kurt Cobain’s death to make herself famous; it’s not nearly that simple. I can state this again, because it’s true: Live Through This is a fucking amazing record, and it probably would have been a next-level hit even without the supernatural timing of its arrival and the uncanny way several of its key tracks seemed to capture what all of us who were shattered by Cobain’s suicide were feeling at that moment in time. But regardless of her intentions, the transmission she delivered at the Seattle Center on April 10, 1994 was undeniably indecorous. The very circumstance of it feels wrong, and witnessing it via that recording feels even worse. I didn’t want to know what that note said. I wish I didn’t know what that note said. And I wish I could listen to Live Through This—which is, to reiterate, SUCH A FUCKING GREAT RECORD—without inescapably pinpointing it as the moment Courtney Love became the first person to strike gold at Kurt Cobain’s gravesite.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of the excavation.

Elsewhere in my apartment, on the bookcase directly to the right of the desk at which I’m sitting, you will also find no fewer than six biographies about Nirvana. In relation to the sum of available material, my library isn’t even close to complete; after a while, I stopped buying every associated text as they were published (once you read a half-dozen volumes about a band that only existed for a half-dozen years, redundancy becomes an issue—also, reading about Nirvana is always a dispiriting experience because no matter how good the book is, you’re inevitably going to reach THAT chapter eventually). Filed next to those is Cobain, a coffee table book which assembles almost every Nirvana-related article that appeared in Rolling Stone during their career. And directly beside that rests an even larger coffee table book entitled Journals. Kurt Cobain is the credited author, which I suppose makes sense, since nearly every word therein is in his handwriting. Nevertheless, that attribution becomes difficult to digest when you consider that the tome was released in 2002—given that Cobain had been dead for 8 years when Journals came out, I’m naturally skeptical about the scope of his involvement in the project.

I have a hard time accepting that this book exists. On one hand, the drawings, correspondence, and scribbled musings which comprise its pages offer a rare and informal glimpse into the mind of one of my favorite songwriters of all time. Yet a much larger part of me can’t discount my impression that by glimpsing these things I have in essence sneaked into Kurt Cobain’s room and picked the lock on his diary. It seems highly improbable he would have ever published this material in this form of his own volition; actually, I suspect he would have been mortified if these logs were leaked while he was alive. The justification, one would suppose, is that Cobain is a singularly iconic figure and remains an object of fascination, therefore any piece of himself he took the time to immortalize in writing has intrinsic value (even a dip recipe he got from his mom, evidently). Except the absence of his agency over this particular venture indicates that the significance of the content showcased in Journals was determined solely by outside agents. Cobain was actually fairly prolific given the brevity of his career—it would take a book roughly the same size as Journals to assemble all of the lyrics he wrote for Nirvana’s catalog. Yet, like any artist, he put most of his work through rigorous internal scrutiny and editorial refinement before he unveiled it to an audience; he was the only person who decided if and when it had value. A lot of the poetry featured in Journals was eventually funneled into Nirvana compositions; those are the pieces we can presume he was ready to share with the world—because he, you know, did share them. But when it comes to the numerous drafts of personal letters that appear throughout the tome, it seems innately obvious he did not want those to be read; if he did, he would have fucking sent them to the people they were addressed to and they wouldn’t still be present in his notebooks to be pilfered.

When the release of this relic was announced, the rabid fan in me was of course curious, and I knew this was an item I wanted in my library. But the altruistic side of me always grappled with that desire; I could never quite concur that Cobain’s inability to object constituted a license for me to read work that he chose to keep to himself. Obviously, Journals was a guaranteed best-seller, which is precisely why it was published (oh, I was never snowed by that “a way for his fans to better understand him” bullshit; I have no doubt “a way for his fans to spend money” was the primary purpose this tome was meant to serve). It certainly has intriguing bits, particularly the sections that show sketches Cobain made for early Nirvana t-shirt designs that were never produced and the numerous mixtape track-listings he itemized (sadly, due to his fondness for bands so deeply obscure they are outside the scope of even a collection as large as mine, I don’t have all the listed tunes to faithfully reproduce any of them for my own listening pleasure).

Other articles such as a grossly-gushy sweethearts note to Courtney Love and a childish screed addressed to MTV are far less interesting to me, since the only parts of Cobain they help me “better understand” are parts I already know far more about than I care to. Good and bad are basically negligible designations here anyway, since the revelatory bits and the patently trivial snippets are all culled from the same invasive pedigree. It certainly didn’t assuage my conflicted feelings about reading Journals when I opened the book and saw that the very first sentence printed in it is, “Don’t read my diary when I’m gone”… a request that becomes somewhat clouded by what Cobain wrote two lines later: “please read my diary… look through my things, and figure me out.” I did look—I looked cover to cover—but since I listened to all of Nirvana’s records long before that, I already had Kurt Cobain figured out about as much as I imagine he wanted myself or any of his fans to. A photocopy that confirms he did ordinary things like pay his phone bill doesn’t do much to augment my appreciation of all the extraordinary things he did.

By exhibiting monumental developments like Cobain’s first stab at the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” alongside snippets of humdrum humanity like his jotting down of the 1-800 number for NordikTrack, a chronicle like Journals is ostensibly meant to show that even a man who was exalted as a demigod used to put on his Daniel Johnston shirts one sleeve at a time just like the rest of us. If so, the very existence of Journals negates its own premise, since none of its content would be considered even remotely noteworthy if said content wasn’t scribed by Kurt Cobain—which only advances the misguided hero-worship that plagued his quintessence and encumbered a future suicide victim with spiritual baggage he never welcomed nor desired. Even with my limited understanding of what Kurt Cobain’s art meant to him, I am certain he would never have wanted a book like Journals to happen. Just as I am equally certain that the inflation of his esteem to such excessive heights that his admirers would be itching to read the undisclosed documents he kept in his underwear drawer played a large part in the events of April 5, 1994.

I guess this is as good a time as any to explain why a songwriter who was never a solo artist is the subject of his own entry here—especially since I just chastised the publishers of Journals for giving him special treatment. It’s true that nearly every piece of music Cobain had his hand in was issued under the Nirvana masthead (except for that collaboration with William Burroughs I wrote about a long time ago… but I’m trying to forget that ever came out since it’s not much more enjoyable to listen to than “Eulogy”). Yet, thanks to the same vulturous machinations I’ve been recapping throughout this piece, the Kurt Cobain discography does indeed include one solo album to date. There is an itty-bitty asterisk next to that item, though:

* Kurt Cobain’s solo album came out twenty-one years after Kurt Cobain died.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain did not participate in the making of Kurt Cobain’s solo album.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain’s solo album is not technically an album.

Oh, also * Most of the songs on Kurt Cobain’s solo album are not actually songs.

Oh, and lastly * When Kurt Cobain recorded this solo not-album of mostly not-songs, he had no idea that anyone was ever going to hear it.

The sort-of record I’m referring to was assigned the title Montage of Heck, which is needlessly confusing for anyone familiar with Nirvana’s history, since Montage of Heck was originally the title Cobain bestowed upon one of his earliest demo cassettes. The Montage I’m examining in this essay bears no relation to that one; rather, Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is an ill-considered compilation that was released in conjunction with a congruently-monikered and congruently ill-considered 2015 documentary. Licentiously-hyped as one of the most profound musical portraits ever unveiled, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck was directed by filmmaker Brett Morgen, who was granted unprecedented access to Cobain’s personal archives and shaped that material into an allegedly insightful study of the artist’s epigrammatic life and shocking death. Since she had already exhausted the potential for monetizing her late husband’s sketchpads, Courtney Love upped the ante for this project by allowing Morgen to use the family’s personal home videos as the film’s major selling point—evidently, neither party gave a shit that two decades earlier Cobain expressed how violated he felt when strangers invaded his private life in a song bluntly entitled “Rape Me”.

I’ll keep my review of the biopic Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck brief—mostly because I didn’t enjoy it at all and the overriding emotion I was left with after watching it was anger. But it is worth mentioning here, since it was similarly levied with the purported intention of making its viewers “better understand” its subject. Strange, then, that the two most memorable moments in the movie are unabashedly salacious, and both are focused on candid glimpses of Courtney Love’s behind-the-scenes comportment rather than her husband’s. If you’re wondering what Love’s breasts looked like in the early-‘90s, or if you relish the notion of watching her toddle around the couple’s apartment in a state of opiated incoherence in the presence of their baby daughter… then, brothers and sisters, this film is the Casablanca of that specific genre. But anyone seeking a meaningful exploration of what kind of person Cobain was outside the limelight is bound for disappointment since Montage mostly underscores his least appealing traits, the unpleasant facets of his humanity that we as fans have trained ourselves to banish from our thoughts as we continue applauding his inimitable artistic contributions. Aspects which, of course, Courtney Love is central to. Her odious presence throughout the documentary, and indeed in Cobain’s orbit, serves as a manifest reminder that a man we lionize for writing some of the most exquisite songs of all time was also deeply in love with a vulgar, revolting succubus. And perhaps this is a key reason why revisiting him via panegyrics like Montage of Heck and Journals always leaves a sour aftertaste—as long as Courtney Love has stewardship over his legacy, the worst thing Kurt Cobain ever did will be always be a principal figure in each new celebration of the best things he did.

In addition to her boobie videos, Love also turned over a box of cassette tapes to Brett Morgen (if memory serves, this batch of recordings was dutifully referred to as a “treasure trove” in every press release about the project I read). Morgen cherry-picked a few bits of music from this lot for usage in his movie, which were naturally cobbled into a soundtrack that was touted to fans as a cache of “previously-unheard music by Kurt Cobain.” Since the filmmaker was ostensibly the one who decided what portions of the tapes to appropriate, he is recognized in Montage of Heck’s liner notes as its “Executive Producer”—a dubious acknowledgement that gives Brett Morgen the distinction of being the only person in the history of audio engineering credited with producing an album whose recording he wasn’t actually present for, by an artist he never even met.    

Morgen’s pastiche job doesn’t merely form the basis of Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, it is the disc’s entirety. Stripped of any historical provenance generous listeners may feel obligated to apply, what the proffered material basically amounts to is a half-hour of Kurt Cobain getting stoned in his living room and fucking around on a series of out-of-tune guitars. I wasn’t present for Morgen’s listening party, so I can only speculate on how much music was available for him to sift through, or what the stuff he rejected as inadequate sounded like. But this much is clear: the pieces he chose to disseminate on Montage of Heck range from drearily frivolous to blatantly insulting. The disc offers no real insights (unless you didn’t already know Kurt Cobain got high or played guitar, I suppose), and fans searching the conclave for Nirvana songs that might-have-been will merely discover that Cobain was sensible enough not to pursue an inane number called “Burn My Britches” any further than the two-minute segment he toyed with on his couch here.

Perhaps fittingly, the disc opens with the unmistakable bubbling of a bong, which effectively sets the tone for what follows: Cobain yodeling to warm his pipes up before launching into a rudimentary power chord sequence and yodeling over that for a little while for no apparent purpose (at least Morgen gave the cut a suitable title—it’s called “The Yodel Song”). Elsewhere, attempts are made to tie this cycle of doodles into the songwriter’s established canon, such as the inclusion of the promisingly-dubbed “Scoff (Early Demo)”. Yet, while the prospect of hearing a preliminary version of the 7th-best number on Bleach may seem like cause for celebration, the actual track lands like a slap to the face once you hear that this extract which Morgen judged as precious enough for commercial immortality merely consists of Cobain scat-growling gibberish lyrics over the tune’s main riff until the tape unceremoniously cuts off 38-seconds later; identifying this nothing-morsel as a rough draft of the song “Scoff” is akin to calling a piece of paper with the word “It” typed on it a rough draft of A Tale of Two Cities. Such is the caliber of material spotlighted on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, a “treasure trove” that would have been better left buried.    

One of the few genuine items of interest among the detritus is “Reverb Experiment”, which consists of three minutes of droning throwaway instrumental noodling, but still sounds kind of cool since a lot of it sounds like the refrain of Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask”. There’s also a fairly well-formed idea called “Desire” that might have been turned into something striking if its author had chosen to develop it, and the closing number “She Only Lies” is noteworthy since it features Cobain working out an idea on bass guitar instead. Regardless, nothing on Montage of Heck justifies the ballyhoo that accompanied its release, and even the marginally decent pieces are unworthy of mention on their composer’s resume—although, Brett Morgen certainly got a great resume item out of the deal; now he can call himself a “filmmaker / record producer.”

However, this was Kurt Cobain who documented these scraps on the battery-operated boombox in his apartment. And he’s an icon, remember? So—said Brett Morgen and Courtney Love and everyone at Universal Music who had their dollar-bill-mounted fishhooks in the water of this endeavor—Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings shouldn’t be treated like some gratuitous cash-grab collation of idle time-killers which Cobain thought so little of he didn’t bother revisiting most of them again. No, no, no. This is an Event. Try this: Montage captures a peerlessly illustrious artist as his fans have never heard him before, in his rawest, most intimate form, no studio, no audience, just a man and his guitar seizing inspiration out of the ether and channeling it into his instrument as he explores new incarnations of the sound that made Nirvana the band that launched a revolution. Well, hey, that sounds pretty good; we can really shift some units with an idea like that. The only problem is, if we’re going to treat this thing like a legitimate album, it has to have a legitimate hit single we can sell it with. And how do you dig a unicorn out of a pile of lo-fi cassette tapes that live in a shoebox?

Luckily, Brett Morgen found just the solution for this quandary inside that shoebox.

“And I Love Her” was issued with all the buzz of an actual lost Nirvana song—it was even pressed on 7” vinyl like a proper single. It didn’t really matter that the sound quality was wispy, nor that the performance wasn’t particularly polished. This was a recording of Kurt Cobain playing a fucking Beatles tune, dude, and not only was it previously-unavailable, no one even knew it fucking existed. And the internet went apeshit. The cosmic synchronicity of this find couldn’t have been scripted any better: the architect of the band who electrified the zeitgeist in the 1990’s covering the band who electrified the zeitgeist 30 years earlier, arguably the only other rock group in history whose rapid ascension to immortality Nirvana’s was comparable to. The concept alone was glorious, and it wasn’t merely some music nerd’s wetdream—this Moment in musical mythology Actually Happened.

Here’s the thing, though: Kurt Cobain’s rendition of “And I Love Her” only has significance because people desperately wanted it to, NEEDED it to. It was still just a lark the dude recorded in his living room one lazy night, and it still sounds just as slapdash as every other fragmentary living room lark featured on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings. There isn’t anything especially revelatory about Cobain esteeming The Beatles so highly that he learned to play one of their songs—both his backstory and his discography are liberally sprinkled with evidence he appreciated the Fab Four’s work, and in case you missed the homages there, nearly every piece of literature ever written about Kurt Cobain has helpfully cited the “Beatle-esque hooks” in songs like “About A Girl” and “In Bloom” to underline his unambiguous approbation. Even casual Nirvana fans were surely already well aware that Cobain enjoyed playing songs by musicians he admired—the dozen-or-so covers in the band’s repertoire and the fact that nearly half the tunes which comprised their legendary MTV Unplugged performance weren’t written by Nirvana provided some telling clues on that front.

The level of hype which heralded the arrival of “And I Love Her” (and Montage of Heck as a whole) intimated that a vital missing piece of the Kurt Cobain puzzle had finally been unearthed. Yet the disc supplies nothing more than a disenchanting anticlimax once you actually listen to it and ascertain that the venerated songwriter’s busy-work wasn’t all that impressive. Perhaps this is more a result of a faulty selection process—I’m willing to imagine there is some truly fantastic material on those tapes which Brett Morgen overlooked for whatever reason—but whether or not Cobain’s archives are ripe with undiscovered gems, the resounding impact of The Home Recordings is much the same as that of Journals: nearly everything in that time capsule would be appraised as inconsequential nonsense if it wasn’t Kurt Cobain’s nonsense. Which takes us right back to the pitfalls of deifying any musician to such a degree that every note they ever played is assigned an implied indispensability, even the botched ones that actually make them sound like a less gifted musician than they were.

Besides, we Nirvana fans already got our missing piece. That happened in 2002, with the release of the band’s self-titled greatest hits package. The one I bought despite owning every record which sourced that compilation, solely because there were three minutes and thirty-eight seconds of music on there I had never heard—the one and only known completed and previously-unreleased Nirvana song: “You Know You’re Right”. (Although, Courtney Love had the audacity to debut that tune way back in 1995 when she performed it as part of Hole’s MTV Unplugged set—seriously, sometimes I wonder if every single thing she’s done in the past 25 years has been predicated on a willful and concerted effort to make everyone who loves Nirvana hate her; although, her campaign of terror has made it nearly impossible to even mention Nirvana without also mentioning her, so maybe she’s a fucking genius).

In stark contrast with the nebulous scribbles on Montage of Heck or the interesting but inessential rehearsal tracks which dominated With the Lights Out, “You Know You’re Right” is indeed a revelation of almost religious proportions, a roaring burst of dynamism that is as powerful as anything else in Nirvana’s catalog—the lone tantalizing taste of a fourth record the band would never get to make, a frozen moment of fragile optimism captured just before the world as we knew it ended. “You Know You’re Right” is fucking AWESOME, and its explosive potency is all the more impressive considering that the lone recording of it which exists was essentially the group’s first stab at it. It is one of my absolute favorite songs in a catalog bursting with favorites. And I cried the first time I heard it. And I cried the second time I heard it. And the third… And, 17 years onward, I cried when I listened to it moments ago.

Plenty of Cobain’s tunes have this effect on me. Still, “You Know You’re Right” is a singular case. And I know exactly why that song, above all others, devastates me the most. It’s not because the lyrics are especially poignant, even though they are. It’s not because the track’s intoxicating promise reminds me of precisely how much all of us lost on April 5, 1994, even though it does. The reason “You Know You’re Right” tears my fucking guts out every time I hear it… is because that was it. That was the final song Nirvana recorded. And after it came out, there would never be any more. “You Know You’re Right” was the moment I had to say goodbye to Kurt Cobain forever.

I did that. And I think it’s time for the rest of the world to let him sleep, too.

Over the years, I have accumulated bootlegs of more than 200 Nirvana concerts. Roughly 150 of those shows are phenomenal, and plenty of them are of strong enough audio quality to warrant an official disclosure. That is the true “treasure trove,” a nearly limitless stockpile of unreleased Kurt Cobain recordings that could fuel a supplementary Nirvana release every single year for the rest of human history. And we already know he wanted an audience to hear that music, because he stepped onto the stage and played it for them. Since the continued fracking of his legacy is inevitable, by all means, the Cobain estate should absolutely tap into that wellspring whenever the marketplace is clamoring for fresh product or Courtney Love is clamoring for further cosmetic augmentation. I’ll buy every goddamn disc they put out, and I’ll probably buy them all on vinyl, too. And if you, personally, feel the need to explore the more obscure corners of Cobain’s discography, there are already plenty of places you can look—start with the single for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, where you’ll find the tremendous B-side “Even In His Youth” and a killer alternate recording of “Aneurysm” that blows the version on Incesticide out of the water.

Hey, I’m a fan first and a snarky asshole second; I get it. I can surely identify with the sustained hysteria enveloping his heritage. Cobain’s suicide was the single most traumatic event of my teen-hood, and all these years later I can still tell you where I was, what I was wearing, and even what I was eating when I first heard the horrifying news of his departure (my family’s comic book store in Anaheim Hills, a Groo the Wanderer t-shirt, and a foot-long tuna on white from Subway). Still, even then, I had a firm pragmatic grasp on my grief. Kurt Cobain wasn’t my mentor, my hero, someone who embodied the man I hoped to eventually be when I reached his epoch of then-unimaginable elder statesmanship (hey, when you’re fifteen, 27 seems like an eternity away—at the time I assumed when I was Cobain’s age I’d probably be doing all sorts of old-people shit like buying a house and raising babies… or at least finally having sex). He wasn’t deity to me, he was simply someone responsible for some of the most imperative music in my life; unfortunately, since music has always been a lot more imperative in my life than deities, his abrupt absence was crushing nonetheless.

But the nature of Cobain’s subsequent beatification seems to suggest that many of his fans choose to remember him as something more, a shooting star that painted a tapestry of light across the heavens before inexorably crashing down to earth, “the grunge-poet voice of a generation” and all that. Hell, to many people, he was. But despite his canonization by the masses, Kurt Cobain was not a messiah and never strived to be. He was flawed and beautiful and complex, and a mystery even to himself—in other words: he was just as fucked-up and human as any of us. Kurt Cobain is not some riddle to be solved; we will never decode him because he didn’t stay the course of his journey long enough to find out who “him” really was or would become. And his awful conclusion will never make sense, because there’s ultimately nothing sensible about putting a shotgun in your mouth and ending a life that meant so much to so many when it had barely just begun.

As we near the 25th anniversary of Cobain’s death, let’s resolve to (finally) allow him his humanity again, and to allow the still-buried pieces of his spirit he chose to keep solely for himself to remain interred with him. Because we’re only paying disservice to the topsoil of his legacy by continuing to dig. And besides, we have Bleach, we have Nevermind, we have In Utero, we have Unplugged, we have a few-dozen additional non-album tracks, and we have “You Know You’re Right”—Kurt Cobain already gave far more of himself to the world than any of us were entitled to ask for.

So if you want to “better understand” him, you won’t achieve that by reading his diary, or seeing his widow’s areolae, or hearing him offhandedly strum some ditty from his childhood to amuse himself. The best avenue available for those of us who never met Cobain to look through his things and figure him out is lighting a candle, putting on a set of headphones, and letting the breathtaking majesty of “All Apologies” surge out of those speakers and into our souls. There is no more intimate way to honor him than that. Nor should there be. Understanding Kurt Cobain isn’t necessary. As long as we understand his music, and we understand what it means to us.

We don’t need his secrets. We have his songs. And for anyone who truly holds the memory of Kurt Cobain in their heart, that’s enough.

 March 25, 2019

[gruby88]

The story clerks is kind of amazing. A lower-middle class kid from suburban New Jersey starts working at a video store, where he mets a guy heavily into movie. He broadens his horizons enough with some Independent Film Fair hangouts, a place where future classics like Linklater’s „Clacker” would appear. The kid, known as Kevin SMith, get so into it he ges to cheap canadian film school to make his own movies.

He drops out mid-semester, because school is boring and boring things are just not interesting. But he assembles a rudimentary crew of rpoducer Scott Mosier and cinematographer Klark, makes some credit card fraud for 30k dollars and starts making his debut movie - Clerks.

Shot over a month at a store Smith worked at - the movie is basically two dudes just having a weird day at work. They talk in a very verbose style, giving this sophistication to the most inane of topics while serving wacky customers and slowly bulding up to a broader lesson the love subplot signifies.

In spite of it’s blue collar setting of a convinience store, the movie appears to be ideologyless. IThe characters, or rather maybe SMith himself, seem to have no real  thoughts about politics. There’s no big boss acting as villain. there’s no goals.  A guy who sells chewing gum starts a riot in the store but that never gets any commentary, it’s just a gag. There’s just empty void of depression. And 90s kinda were like that. Reagan and Tatcher turned the world into a capitalist hellhole, everything seemed meaningless beyond monetary value, with no real way out of the system.

It still does btw.

And thus, the valued commodity of early 90s was realness. The was a market for what we believe to be real. Swearing, being drunk in public, greasy haired rockers were not the world finally manning up to some sick guitar riffs, it was an open craving for somethig real. Something raw. Or at least as raw as we can stomach, there’s a reason why pretty boy Eddie Vedder got famous, and shit-slinging rockers like GG Allin just remained too hot for tv.

And realness wasn’t just to be consumed, it gave us hope that we can too become recognizable for just being ourselves. And it times before reality tv, vlogs, instagram stories and facebook posts - to scratch that itch we had to look for people like us on the big screen. For validation that our averageness is significant in some way.

And Clerks was the perfect movie for the generation of directionless stoners, loners, geeks, nerds, outcasts, mclovins of their time. It was just two dudes being smartasses for 90 minutes.

So how does CLerks hold up in 2020?

Welp.

The movie itself is kinda good. Very funny still. It encapsulates early 90s attitude of not giving a fuck pretty flawlessy with worst attitued played up to maximum. There’s no stakes, characters hardly have an arc to follow, it just kind of is. It meanders with no purpose and that kind of is the point. It’s lack of effort seems to be intentional to signify the lack of effort in the characters. It’s as dull as your life, but also has all the things that make it bearable. The funny friend. The fact that low-paying jobs have the best stories because you mostly deal with other low-income people wh are usually insane from all the stress.

C A P I T A L I S M

One thing that caught my eye was contempt for store customers. You’d think Smith would find compassion for fellow low-classians, but no. I wroked commerce so I know, the best stories are the ones about people you don’t hold too dear to your heart and called names to their face because they just put you past the tipping point. But politics of clerks is basically - look at this dumb motherfuckers interrupting me doing fuck all at my job. There’s no hint of irony or self-awareness. Like, at some point the cool guy, Randall fucking GRAVES, just spits water at a guy point blank for being kinda stupid about tabloids. And is presented as the guy we want to be, the cold calculated friend with instant funny comment about anything.

I guess this is a display of Kev-dawgs immaturity. He is not aware, that what he perceives as cool carries a broader social commentary and a lesson that’s beyond a joke about customers being weird. Which is kinda part of the charm. That Smith doesn’t know, or simply doesn’t care that he shows us the worst people ever, which is why it’s so authentic. It’s brutal when put like that, but it is the voice of the part of america that gets the worst jobs. And this is what they think of you. That you’re assholes for making them work. ANd that speaks to countless generations of kids who would never have a voice in cinema. There was never a cool representation for chubsters with affection for superheroes. They want to believe that their lack of sex skills will result in a girl mistakenly fukcing a corpse in pursuit of them and not just straight rejection.

And it works like that because the movie is pretty consequenceless for our main characters. Randall has no stakes in anything and just spits onelines. He throws some food around which I guess is pretty dramatic, but that’s about his impact on the story.

The story centers around the main character of Dante. A guy who has unexplanedly two women fight for his affection even thouth his bed skills seem to be comparable to rigor mortis. And is just an asshole to both off them. He scolds his girlfriend for having broad sexual past, and then gets mad when he learns that his ex moved on. Lots of room for improvement as a person.

Anyways, his lesson? Ditch the ex who will most likely never recorver and is now useless as you can’t fuck, and go back to your main chick. This is actually the whole arc of the movie. Dante learns that his options are limited, and he should bank on girls that actually can stand him. And it’s not even my interpretation, the movie ends with the director, playing the iconic  SIlnet Bob, explaining the movie to us via a monologue to the main character.

But all of this makes the movie work. Becuase it perfectly captures tht moment in life when you’re kinda too naive to figue out that having good taste in movies does not a good person make, but also old enough to not be dismissed or get in trouble for challanging the status quo.

Even after dogma, where peoles good will towards smith reached its peak and for a second he was about to enter the mainstream legit, not just as an indie wonder funny guy. He was not treated as seriously as after Clerks. And smith ate it up. He played into it. 90s Kevin is way more full of himself than his later laid back slacker persona of the public speaking era. Kevin loves the implication that he is this working class genious, the smartass philosopher of the gen x, taking popular culture and treating it like art. Big words. And he is not wrong, lthout his takes.. usually are.

Kevin is prominently featured as an intro interviewer for Josh petersen, indie distributor that wrote  book about how he performs the most boring aspect of the movie making - selling the thing.

But seeing this movie now, being 10 years older than kevin when he made it. I can feel the excitement of voice emerging, and „that’s beautiful, man”.