Kurt Cobain and the Nihilistic Void: The Cost of Ignoring Johnny Rotten and Marcel Duchamp

What if Johnny Rotten had been smart, compassionate, and musically-inclined? And… what if he appeared in the early 1990’s instead of the mid 1970’s?

Well, he might look like Kurt Cobain.

The purpose of this article is to explore the possibility that Cobain killed himself because the Sex Pistols had already done it all -- in a rock arena -- already. They killed rock & roll. They completed rock & roll, as pointed out by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces.

How did they do it? By co-opting dada, the World War I era anti-art.

Now, Nirvana was not anti-art. And the Sex Pistols were. But Kurt Cobain’s angst is indicative of the un-winnable situation he was in: he wanted to do what the Sex Pistols had already done. But once rock was dead, it couldn’t be killed again.

He was on a spiritual journey. But he was unfortunately nostalgic.

We did lose a great soul when Kurt Cobain murdered himself.

Kurt Cobain and the nihilistic void

Cobain could not face the nihilistic void of the post-Sex Pistols era. Who can? It’s a question worth pondering. Can any individual “stay alive” these days? That is: is there anything for any of us to do anymore? Is there a hero’s journey to be taken?

Was Cobain unable to face the fact that the romantic heroic journey he wanted to take was irrelevant by the time he appeared in the 90’s?

So he did what he could: made Nevermind and In Utero, spat at the cameras, gave the finger to his crowd, did an acoustic Unplugged set, tried to turn us on to his musical influences. But ultimately the most revolutionary rock figure of the past 30 years was just drawing with crayons on the void of the post-satellite Android Meme era; earning a good living but unable to face up to the reality of the situation.

No more artists?

The nihilistic void of today is a tough one to face for anyone with that old “I wanna be an artist and make a difference” bug. It seems pretty clear to me that this is an old, dead romantic notion. No change is coming through the arts or rock music, is it? Nothing revolutionary.

So where is the revolution coming through today? I would suggest it is the new media, as they appear.

The Internet began to be widely available right as Nirvana was dying out: 1993, 1994. (Kurt killed himself on April 3, 1994, and his body was discovered on April 5.)

How could anything that Kurt Cobain envisioned “doing for the masses” have had a collective impact anywhere on the order of the Internet or cell phones? But he probably would’ve been satisfied with nothing less, more or less.

Ween learned from Duchamp and the Sex Pistols

A good example of one of today’s bands that knows their place is Ween. They have transmuted many of the same energies that Cobain felt and churned them out as humorous music. It is not self-reflective and it does not take itself seriously. It is a consistent type of music to make in the post-Duchamp era we live in. Ween’s music is not trying to deny that art itself was killed/completed when Marcel Duchamp turned a urinal on its back, signed it “R. Mutt”, named it Fountain, and got it displayed in a gallery in 1917.

Sixty years later, Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols copied the essence of Duchamp’s Fountain and made it appear as… Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

It is no coincidence that Kurt Cobain picked Nevermind as the title for Nirvana’s breakout album.