Two songs about suicide “Going Going Gone” by Bob Dylan and “Dumb” by Nirvana. They are flip sides of the same story. One the disquiet before the end and the latter the peace in a decision being made. Both songs are so unobtrusively devasted, so matterly of factly over with it.
Dylan sings “Not much left to be said, it’s the top of the end and has death ever been this sexy, desolation so off the cuff as the song leads him inexorably to the exit sing. Dylan is so east Coast here, it’s so wintery, so watching snowflakes coming down and the late afternoon drift into eventide and everything in the song slowly and wearingly coming to a stop. Cobain sings in a bright lit summer early afternoon and Cobain is sitting in the shade, shades on, smiling to himself, completely withdrawn from everyone around him and I do mean every one. This song is beyond anti-social and into the realms of sociopathic. It is not dumb, it is insane.
The songs are inverted parenthensis. “Gone” appears to be about action, but it isn’t. It is entropic, the second rule of thermodynaics, Dylan is cooling down to rome tempurature: his living isn’t a movement, it is a full stop… he is just gone. Cobain seems to be lolling on a summer’s day, licked by the sun, happy in his quietness. But that’s not what is happenning. What is happenning is Cobain waiting: the song all occurs in mid-movement: Cobain is ready to end it, he is ready to jump, he is really to end his life through a violent self hating act and in mid-movement he stops and let’s a wave of happinees roll over him because he is no longer in the midst of his addiction, his turmoil, in this song he is Patti Smith’s “Just a boy beyond it all”.
The songs are textbook suicides:in one the suicide is saying goodbye and in the other the suicide is poised to leave us.
They’re just going.