Why we need more Kurt Cobains Music should give a voice to broken souls

It’s been 30 years since Kurt Cobain blew his own head off with a shotgun. It’s impossible to imagine mainstream rock success in bed with that kind of despondency in this day and age. Rap might harbour that kind of extreme contradiction. That’s because it hasn’t lost all vitality within the culture. It remains to some extent a safe space for transgression. I can see Ye losing his shit Cobain style someday, for instance. But nobody in rock and roll. There are no more Cobains at the top. The ecosystem which provided for their ascent in the first place has been totally destroyed. Back then, during the early Nineties — the dying embers of the heroic phase in the counterculture — Cobain’s angst and ultimately his self-slaughter only compounded his artistic credentials.

Of course, we used to say: “It’s the ones who’ve cracked that the light shines through.” Needs re-working this adage, bequeathed to us by Leonard Cohen, via Jeffrey Lewis. Needs stripping of its misleading naiveté. I always picture a roof, a roof with a great big crack in it. It’s only under a broken roof you can absorb what’s actually going on outside the safety of your hermetically sealed sanctum. The ones who are cracked let the light in, sure, from time to time, when it’s light out, when the weather’s decent. But for the most part, as in Cobain’s case, the ones who are cracked also let in the damp, the rain, the drawn-out black chill of winter. I’m guessing Cohen was at least vaguely aware of this dilemma. That with truth, comes discomfort. All the same, I didn’t hear it like that at age 18. Crack = integrity. That’s all I heard. It would have been nice if there’d been a disclaimer.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews recently, on the promo trail for a new album, and people frequently ask me if starting a band is a good idea, as if I’m an authority on the subject. The situation was bad enough decades ago, I tell them. Damaging enough. Unhealthy enough. Back then — pre-web, pre-Spotify deciding you deserve nothing — people were still crushing their minds chasing the dream, but they at least had the homes they’d bought through record sales to overdose in when the time came. They had space for failure both professional and personal. The more an artist is given the room to fail, the greater the capacity for success. But artists are no longer worth anything in society. The licence we formally granted them is gone. We’ve given up on Cohen’s maxim entirely. If you’re cracked, you probably need to be therapised out of existence.

I don’t want to come off negative. There is a good side to playing in a group, even in this dark, offensively inoffensive period of paint-by-numbers indie vapidity. It’s just I despise the good side even worse than the bad. It’s like with drugs, the high should bear the weight of your resentment, not the come down. The come down is your friend. The come down might stop you from mugging yourself forever. The high is what deforms you. The first 117 gigs I performed were dogshit bar one. All I was doing was rolling around town humiliating myself in pubs. Then some night you chance upon a small crowd that will go batshit for pretty much anything. And then your life as you knew it is over. You will never make it to adulthood. You will crave that fix until you’re dead. You will hanker for it whether you have anything to say or not. The art will frequently come second. The love, the delicious adulation, will come first.

These articles, the book I co-wrote, my journals, they are the beginnings of an exit strategy, a literary life raft with which I hope to salvage something bearable from the coming storm of middle age. Something that doesn’t demand my having to Frankenstein myself, to enmesh myself with the hopes, dreams and dreary shortcomings of others to make my living. That’s actually the worst of it. Especially if the people you’ve got on the squad are arguably even more cracked than you are. How your identities get all molten and confused. This character splicing is of course also what makes a great band. Once you merge, stylistically, spiritually, philosophically, you can act and think as one. This is of great use to you, what with your trying to keep time, and cultivate a strong group aesthetic. Nirvana for instance, they don’t sound like a few guys, they sound like one guy. The problems truly begin when this bizarre soul congealment bears real-world fruit, and a murderous over-excitement begins to brew. Long-forgotten personal boundaries have no hope of re-emerging in the sudden climate of smash-and-grab opportunism.

Becoming an artist is all about access to irresponsibility. With irresponsibility often comes marginality sure, but at least you get out in the open. Those who compute the world aesthetically — the overly sensitive — clock very early on in life that the price of civilisation is this incredibly dull thing called repression, and they start trying to hustle their way out of that agreement accordingly. I will live by my imagination. My contribution will be the uniqueness of my very persona. This might demand your sinking into squalid self-absorption and penury, but at least the future will bear your signature. That is unless you drift into the notion that maybe you should start a band. In which case, the future will bear several signatures. Whose signature has more prominence will almost certainly become an issue. Because being in a band means that you have to share everything.

I don’t consider myself a musician. Not really. I can play, a bit. I’m more of a performance artist. A performance artist and a lyric whore. Music is just the medium with which I happen to earn rent money. More than any other type of artist, musicians are eternal children. It’s why so many of them — like Cobain — don’t make it past 27. And the bigger the star, the more freakish the Peter Pan syndrome should things drag on too long, Michael Jackson being the prime example, who went as far as actually building his own personal Neverland. There’s nothing comparable in any other medium.

But consider the talent these people are lumbered with. If you can coast through life by simply making sounds, why develop the rest of your brain? Music, to paraphrase Schopenhauer, is not like the other arts, it isn’t an intermediary between idea and will, but will itself. Everything else is just tracing shadows on sheafs of paper and rolls of film. Music transcends all that pedantry, any causal notion of law and logic. It is primeval. Pre-verbal. A realm of pure intuition.

What happens when these beings of pure will club together in groups will always be of some fascination to the general public. The paradox is too severe, bears too much sweet schadenfreude. Failure is the key component in comedy, and few things are so rich in failure. The widescreen interpersonal schisms — they quench an egotistical demand for high drama within the group, and a perverse love of watching other people fail outside of it. But: to live outside the law, you must be honest, as Bobby D sang. Your freakishness, of which you made a song and dance, of which you demanded the world celebrate, is now inescapable, calcified, permanent. You will be known henceforth by the crudely rendered cartoons you elaborated to replace yourselves. Your alter ego, initially your deliverance from unadulterated boredom, you soon find to be nothing less than the guarantee of your permanent exile. It’s important to remember that this is what you wanted. I have a feeling that it’s something the Nirvana frontman tried very hard to forget.

Luckily, we’re reaching the end of the band era. The further we roll from its heyday, the more I reckon my incredibly meagre stock is likely to rise. Once all of the old guard finally croak, people will turn to the only dregs they have left. The last turds on the block. Against my better judgement, I hope to be among those turds. There will only be a handful of us left, the real deal who went out and properly fucked up our lives on account of a few hooks and the odd Nazi-themed video.

For the most part, “rock and roll” today feels like a silly turn of phrase. A euphemism out of time, it means “hard on then move on”. Not exactly the vibe anymore. The medium has been reduced to a middle-class pageant for people who fancy a little more colour in their lives. I can’t remember the last person to really let the light in, the light and the drizzle and the dark. That’s because folks aren’t steeped in enough dysfunction. It sickens me, the politesse and consideration with which some of these new-fangled groups conduct themselves. The endless groaning about mental health. You’re supposed to break your soul. Any band worth its salt is a machine for cultivating and harbouring cracked souls.

To refute the systemisation of utterly everything at the price of full social ostracisation, there is no stronger aesthetic. To tell yourself the world is flat and live accordingly, because you feel ontologically more at home in a world with a beginning and an end, a world that looks and feels like a story… few things take more guts in an age as brutally formulaic as this one. Idiocy, drug abuse, infantilism, depression, schizophrenia, these are not ailments, these are the price of resistance. These are the bravest symptoms of a worldwide disease one might call metaphysical nihilism. A disease that insists on the supplanting of reality with a quantification of reality. A band is a machine for arrested development, and what could be more crucial than an arrestation of development in a world that can’t switch itself off, even as — to lift from Cobain’s final words — it chooses to burn out, rather than fade away?

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Lias Saoudi is the frontman of Fat White Family and the Moonlandingz, and the co-author of Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family and the Miracle of Failure

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