Since ‘Montage of Heck’, the news about Kurt Cobain haven’t stopped and it is now certain that a new Cobain album will be released this summer… What? How long are they gonna milk this cow? There may be a lot of enthusiastic fans but honestly, that was my first thought. And when I say they, it concerns a lot of people but mostly director Brett Morgan and Courtney Love, who seem to never get enough off this corpse which has been cold for more than 21 years.
While sorting through the material he had accessed to, Morgen found lots of tapes, hours and hours of home recordings, and he probably thought, why not releasing this stuff to make Cobain’s ashes even more uncomfortable? Morgen said this to Bedford + Bowery:
‘We’re going to be putting out an amazing album this summer that I think will answer that question,’ said Morgen ‘[The album of home recordings] ‘will feel like you’re kind of hanging out with Kurt Cobain on a hot summer day in Olympia, Washington as he fiddles about. It’s going to really surprise people. Just to be clear, it’s not a Nirvana album, it’s just Kurt and you’re going to hear him do things you never expected to come out of him.’
But what can we expect to find among these tapes, just demos of unfinished songs recorded by a teenager? Even more than this: ‘The audio ran the gamut from jam sessions with Courtney, some jam sessions with various friends and Nirvana, his first demo tapes, his Fecal Matter demos, his mix tapes and oral canvases like Montage, a lot of silly spoken word stuff and not-silly spoken word stuff like the story he told of losing his virginity, covers of the Beatles songs, it just ran the gamut. And a lot of sound effects and a lot of sound design.’
It’s 107 cassettes and probably a lot of never-heard-before music, but the question is, what would Cobain have thought about this new release? People may say it doesn’t matter because he is dead, and releasing material after the death of songwriters is done and done again, but I would just want to point out two things: the only reason they are releasing these cassettes now, when they have been sleeping in a storage for 21 years, is another way to promote Morgen’s movie, and this is one again very self-serving…
Then we have to wonder what they will end up cherry picking among these 200 hours of audio. In the movie, they play ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ just after Courtney Love saying Kurt killed himself because he thought she was cheating on him. The song obviously reinforces the narration, and because I am not a superfan of Nirvana, I didn’t know this song and was led to believe it was addressed to Courtney. Well, first it’s a cover, and if you look at Nirvana’s setlists, you can see that the band performed the song many times and as earlier as 1989, way before Courtney even came into the picture. There are many examples like this and the movie is extremely misleading in this sense. So I don’t expect anything better for this album.