Humorous rebuttals towards cliché bohemian ideals | Kurt Cobain,1967-94
Kurt Writing, Elizabeth Peyton, 2002
“Birds are and always have been reincarnated old men with Tourette’s syndrome having somehow managed to dupe the reproductive saga. They fuck each other and tend to their home repairs and children while never missing their true mission. To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. They know the truth. Screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears, but sadly we don’t speak bird.”
“I use bits and pieces of others personalities to form my own.”
“To wish you were someone else is to waste the person you are.”
“Friends are nothing but a known enemy.”
“They laugh at me because I’m different; I laugh at them because they’re all the same.”
“I’m not well read, but when I do read, I read well. I don’t have the time to translate what I understand in the form of conversation. I had exhausted most conversation at age 9. I only feel with grunts, screams and tones and with hand gestures and my body. I’m deaf in spirit.”
“My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have and sarcastic and hopefully humorous rebuttals towards cliché’ bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean it seems like there are only two options for songwriters – either they are sad, tragic visionaries like Morrisey or Michael Stipe or Robert Smith or there’s the goofy, nutty white boy – hey let’s party and forget about everything people like Van Halen or all that other heavy metal crap. I mean I like to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork*.”
“I like to calmly and rationally discuss my views in a conformist manor even though I consider myself to the extreme left.”
“I like to infiltrate the mechanics of a system by posing as one of them, then slowly start the rot from the inside of the empire.”
“I like to complain and do nothing to make things better. I like to blame my parents generation for coming so close to social change then giving up after a few successful efforts by the media & government to deface the movement by using the Mansons and other Hippie representatives as propaganda examples on how they were nothing but unpatriotic, communist, satanic, inhuman diseases, and in turn the baby boomers became the ultimate, conforming, yuppie hypocrites a generation has ever produced.”
“Words suck. I mean, every thing has been said. I can’t remember the last real interesting conversation I’ve had in a long time. Words aren’t as important as the energy derived from music, especially live.”
“Do your own thing. Others own their own thing. If you copy too much, you’ll find yourself in late night cocktail lounge cover band limbo.”
“I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American invented rock and roll yet has only been rewarded or awarded for their accomplishments when conforming to the white man’s standards. I like the comfort in knowing that the Afro American has once again been the only race that has brought a new form of original music to this decade: hip-hop/rap.”
“This song is dedicated to Frank Zappa, and River Phoenix, Fred Gwynne who played Herman Munster, Dixie Lee Ray, Thomas P, Tip O’Neil, and you, dumb ass, who just threw water on me.”
Kurt Cobain, Journals, 2002
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*dork =odd, socially awkward, unstylish person; also : an annoyingly stupid or foolish person : jerk.