Thursday 5 April 2012

Alan McGee: Kurt Cobain RIP

"I remember coming back from the States the week before Nevermind came out with a CD from Geffen for me and Bobby Gillespie. We both found it mind-blowing as a collection of songs. In these pre-packaged pop times, I find the thought of somebody these days having the balls to sign a Kurt Cobain almost impossible. I watched the Brits and apart from Noel Gallagher it was just pop as in out and out corporate pop music.
Cobain was obsessed by William Burroughs, one of the great thinkers of recent times. In the book The Journals Cobain reveals that he wanted Burroughs to appear in the video for the lead song off Heart Shaped Box. The Journals sketch the evolution of the video's symbol-laden, elliptically autobiographical narrative.
At first, it was to star William Burroughs, who Cobain evidently revered as a long-lived defier of convention and for his aleatoric compositional technique, morbid mythology, and sardonic W.C. Fieldsian cynicism. Here was the first scene, expressing Cobain's sense of himself as repository of Burroughs' artistic spirit: "William and I sitting across from one another at a table (black and white) lots of blinding sun from the windows behind us holding hands staring into each others eyes. He gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of me. Medical footage of sperm flowing through penis. A ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters my body"."
Via Huffington Post UK

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