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'There are no more Cobains at the top.' (Photo by Frank Micelotta(
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.
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