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Pained expression: metaphors of sickness and signs of‘authenticity’ in Kurt Cobain's Journals

Jessica L. Wood

Popular Music / Volume 30 / Issue 03 / October 2011, pp 331 - 349DOI: 10.1017/S0261143011000389, Published online: 21 September 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0261143011000389

How to cite this article:Jessica L. Wood (2011). Pained expression: metaphors of sickness and signs of ‘authenticity’ inKurt Cobain's Journals. Popular Music, 30, pp 331-349 doi:10.1017/S0261143011000389

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Pained expression: metaphorsof sickness and signs of‘authenticity’ in Kurt Cobain’sJournals

J E S S I CA L . WOODDepartment of Music, Duke University, Box 90665, Durham, NC 27708, USAEmail: [email protected]

AbstractThis article investigates the relationship between biography and authenticity within the aesthetics ofgrunge musician Kurt Cobain, using the 2002 Riverhead Press volume of his journals as a primarysource. Focusing on Cobain’s fascination with the human form and with bodily fluids, I argue thathis idea of the ‘sick body’ functioned as a central metaphor that shaped his approach to variousmedia (prose, lyrics, drawing and singing) such that there was a homology between these differentforms. I draw on excerpts from the Journals to show the meanings that he associated with the ‘sickbody’, including the ways in which it indexed his own biography of physical pain and social margin-alisation. Using the Nirvana song ‘Hairspray Queen’ as a case study, I then show the interactionsbetween musical and linguistic signs of the sick body and how these interactions reveal Cobain’sideas on music’s meaning. Ultimately, I argue that in song lyrics and performance, Cobain prizedscatological imagery, eviscerating vocals and unintelligible lyrics as a means to signal the ‘authen-ticity’ of his art.

Introduction

In his biography of Kurt Cobain, Charles Cross tells the story of Nirvana’s 1989 road-trip with the band Tad. As the story goes, Tad’s lead singer, Tad Doyle, suffered agastrointestinal ailment and had to vomit every morning before the van coulddepart. Cobain reputedly loved this ritual, describing Doyle’s upheaval as a workof art. One of Doyle’s band-mates, Kurt Danielson, recalled how Cobain wouldrespond to the occasion:

He would stand there patiently, holding this plastic tub with a delightful glitter in his eyes.He’d look up at Tad expectantly, and finally Tad would puke, and it would just come outin a glorious, colorful flow, and Kurt would catch it all. No one else got to hold the tub; itwas Kurt’s job and it was his delight. (Cross 2001, p. 140)

Cross goes so far as to say that ‘in some ways, Tad’s gastrointestinal systembecame Kurt’s muse that fall’ in 1989 (Cross 2001, p. 140) and, in fact, Cobainbased the song ‘Breed’ (first called ‘Imodium’) on the medication Doyle took for

Popular Music (2011) Volume 30/3. © Cambridge University Press 2011, pp. 331–349

doi:10.1017/S0261143011000389

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frequent bouts of diarrhea.1 Cobain himself suffered digestive ailments, including achronic stomach condition, irritable bowel syndrome and frequent vomiting, ail-ments which did not improve with his heroin habit and relentless touring schedule.These physical conditions shaped his life and subjectivity; he once mused that if arock ’n’ roll opera were to be written about him, it would be ‘all about vomiting gas-tric juices’ (Cobain 2002, p. 185).

Cobain’s Journals, published in 2002 by Riverhead Press, attest to the impor-tance of his health and body to his aesthetic ideals and output. The volume ofexcerpts was compiled from 23 of Cobain’s personal notebooks (some 800 pages),purchased from Courtney Love for $4 million. It contains, in approximate chrono-logical order, handwritten prose, copies of newsletters, scrawled notes on gig logis-tics, drafts of song lyrics, and numerous drawings. These fragments arepredominantly handwritten, often on stained notebook pages, filled with cross-outs,marginalia and drawings.

Having studied the larger archive of journals from which the publishedvolume was excerpted, Charles Cross notes that ‘his [Cobain’s] songs and his journalentries . . . were obsessed with the human, bodily functions: Birth, urination, defeca-tion, and sexuality were topics he was accomplished in’ (Cross 2001, pp. 90–91) andthat ‘the anatomical world accounted for 90 per cent of the themes he wrote aboutand the art he created’ (Cross 2008, p. 40). Among the excerpts in the publishedJournals are comic strips, self-portraits, short stories about bodily fluids, lists ofself-identifying physical features, essays on the viscerally embodied aspects of musicalperformance, as well as autobiographical accounts of his digestive ailments. Together,these various fragments show the importance of the ravaged body to the whole ofhis multimedia output. Further, they demonstrate a homology between his differentexpressive avenues – essaying, drawing, singing, song writing and performing.

Cobain’s understanding of the sick body came from his life experiences as athin male with chronic stomach problems, scoliosis, a heroin addiction, and a stageroutine that featured regular stage diving, equipment smashing and prolongedscreaming. His sickly physique marginalised him among the mainstream ‘jock’ cul-ture of his high school and hometown, such that he associated this body type withoutsider status. As a symptom of malnutrition and digestive illness, of harrowingtouring schedules, and of heavy drug use and a performance practice that hurt hisvoice and spine, the sick body also came to stand for a life of hardship, intensityand physical risk.

Drawing on the Journals fragments, I will first argue that for Cobain, hardship,intensity and risk comprised an ideal of ‘authenticity’ – an ideal that shaped hisapproach to politics as well as aesthetic forms. In the Journals fragments in whichhe critiqued Reagan-era politics, heteronormative masculine pressure or mass marketarena rock (to name a few examples), the sick body offered a repertoire of metaphorswith which to signal the intensity and authenticity of his opinions; if semantics andcoherence were lost along the way, this was further proof of the intensity of theexpressive act. Lastly, I argue that in song lyrics and performance, Cobain prized sca-tological imagery, eviscerating vocals and unintelligible lyrics as a means to signalthe ‘realness’ of his art – that is, his art came from the ‘gut’.

In this paper I aim to show a way to study historical punk or rock formationsthrough the lens of an organising metaphor, one that is translated into variousmedia – visual art, prose and lyrics, as well as music. I treat Cobain as a casestudy and do not, for example, explore the ways that this metaphor circulated

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among fans of the hardcore and grunge scenes in the late 1980s and 1990s.Additionally, I have narrowed my focus to his voice: one specific parameter withinCobain’s and Nirvana’s various musical tools. Thus, I do not in this space considerthe role of the ‘sick body’ in the band’s instrumental techniques, in the relationshipbetween the instruments and vocals, or in the band’s physical movements about thestage – though it appears from the Journals that this metaphor did shape other aspectsof Nirvana’s performances.

Authenticity and grunge

The authenticity-vs.-commercialism dialectic has been a predominant theme in rockand punk scholarship, and claims to authenticity have been theorised as centralwithin both genres. Scholars have parsed this authenticity into several components:a politics of social marginalisation; freedom from the demands of a large record label;independence from mainstream pop song formulas (and conventions of ‘pleasant’sounds); and a performance practice revealing of the ‘real’ emotions or experiencesof the musician (Frith 1981; Brackett 2000; Moore 1993). Punk’s authenticity hasalso encompassed an aesthetic of ‘anti-talent’, valuing unpractised, three-chord tech-niques, cheap equipment, lo-fi recording quality and unstudied spontaneity; Frithnotes these features, for example, in his account of the 1970s British working-classpunk movement (Frith 1981, p. 159).

In the band’s early years, Nirvana seemed to manifest many of these definingelements of authenticity: a lo-fi recording aesthetic; marginal status in terms of bothsocial class and musical mainstreams; as well as musical techniques that seemeduntrained or even haphazard. The band developed amidst local underground rockscenes, first in Aberdeen, then Olympia, and finally Seattle.2 With the help of fan-zines and the independent label Sub Pop, the underground scene in Seattle and sur-rounding towns had been cultivating a genre that the media termed ‘grunge’.3Grunge tended to be characterised by low-pitched and distortion-heavy instrumen-tals, gravelly, raspy singing, and a pulse slower than that of hardcore punk. In a read-ing similar to Dick Hebdige’s (1979) critique of punk style, Michael Azerrad suggeststhat the genre of grunge arose out of a localised rebellion against Seattle ‘yuppie’ cul-ture, manifested in a number of ways, including the ironic reappropriation ofworking-class attire (Azerrad 1995, pp. 2–3).

Biographies of Cobain similarly foreground his rebellious stance in relation tohis lifetime on the margins. A child of blue collar, divorced parents, he felt like anoutsider at home, in high school, and in the economically depressed towns ofAberdeen and Montesano, Washington, where he grew up.4 He was drawn topunk music in high school largely for its anti-establishment associations, as ameans to articulate a subcultural identity. His marginalised experiences at homeand at school were the reference point for what Sarah Ferguson has called grunge’s‘politics of damage’; Ferguson argues that the ‘social identity’ of grunge musiciansthematised ‘psychological damage – with all its concurrent themes of child abuse,drug addiction, suicide, and neglect’ (Ferguson 2007, pp. 283–5).

Following the platinum success of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind, Cobainworried that he had sold out on his ‘indie’ beginnings, that he now belonged to main-stream commercial pop – essentially, that he’d lost his authenticity. Cobain scholar-ship has thus tended to frame him in terms of the dialectic between his underground

Pained expression: metaphors of sickness in Kurt Cobain’s Journals 333



identity and his post-Nevermind star status (Fish 1995; Jones 1995; Mazzarella 1995;Kahn 2000; Mazullo 2000). Some of this work has shown how Cobain resonatedamong 1990s youth as ‘the voice of a generation’, and how songs such as ‘SmellsLike Teen Spirit’ served as anthems of disenchantment for young fans. This workhas tended not to focus on details of specific songs or writings, but rather onCobain’s interview comments, dress and general performing style. Exceptions tothis include Duane Fish’s exhaustive study (1995) of Nirvana song lyrics, in whichhe discovers a recurrence of certain topics (drugs, sex, suicide and violence), andof writing strategies (paradox and metaphor) – but it is not within the scope of hisarticle to consider the sounded, musical manifestations of these themes. In anotherexample, Tim Hughes (2006) examines minute musical details in a bootleg recordingof a particular 1990 Nirvana performance, showing how Cobain and Nirvanaachieved their distinctive ‘intensity’. However, it is not within his project to definethis intensity, or to link it to specific biographical and social contexts.

Mark Mazullo (2000) examines the commercialism–authenticity dialectic inCobain’s aesthetics and brings this dialectic to bear on particular songs: ‘EndlessNameless’ (the hidden track from Nevermind) and Nirvana’s cover of ‘The ManWho Sold the World (from the MTV Unplugged performance). While ultimatelyI do not agree with Mazullo’s evaluative argument (that Nirvana’s output was less‘progressive’ than Cobain’s interview comments suggest), I appreciate his attemptto link details of Nirvana’s music (in his case, vocal timbres, song structures, ampli-fication equipment and drum patterns) to broad aesthetic and social formations ofhardcore punk, prog rock, heavy metal and grunge. In what follows I make a similarattempt to connect specific details of Cobain’s verbal, visual and musical style to hisaesthetic and social ideal of authenticity.

Cobain on the authentically ‘uneducated’ voice

Julie Grau of Riverhead Press referred to Cobain’s Journals as ‘an intimate, unadult-erated portrait’, and commented in an interview that:

As you would imagine with anybody’s personal journal or diary, it’s uniquely revealing ofwhat that person was thinking and moved to record in writing at any particular point intheir life. The important thing is that these journals represent Kurt Cobain’s life and histhoughts . . . This is a book that is going to stand on its own. It’s by Kurt Cobain. There’s nopoint comparing it to anything anyone else has written, because these are his words.(quoted in Cohen 2002)

The fragments may have been penned by Cobain, but what they reveal is com-plicated by the same sorts of factors which Simon Frith identifies as problems withinterpreting ‘the voice’ in the performance of song texts: namely, whose voice isexpressed in the performance of those lyrics – the singer’s, the lyricist’s, the song’sprotagonist’s? (Frith 1996, pp. 185–6). As Frith asks, ‘Is music really so transparentlyexpressive of personality? Is a voice?’ (Frith 1996, p. 185). Thus, it is important toquestion Grau’s claim of transparency in the Journals. Charles Cross notes thatCobain often showed his writings to friends and that ‘his journals would lie openaround the apartment’ (Cross 2001, p. 165). Additionally, Cobain frequently wrotehis personal thoughts in epistolary mode, beginning with the salutation ‘hi’ andusing the second person without referencing anyone in particular. Whether Cobain

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composed some or all of these fragments with some kind of imagined audience inmind, or whether he adopted the second person in order to write ‘in character’,the issue remains that there are multiple ‘voices’ at play in his Journals – his voiceas a writer, his voice as the (possibly fictional) protagonist of a narrative, his voiceas his everyday self. In fact, it seems as though putting on character (and ‘puttingon’ his audience) was an important part of his creative process.

Conscious of the complications surrounding ‘the voice’ of his Journals, Cobainfilled them with warnings against the literal interpretation of his writing. Forexample, he opens one stream-of-consciousness essay with this disclaimer,

This is not to be taken seriously. This is not to be read as opinions. It is to be read as poetry. Itsobvious that I am on the educated level of about 10th grade in high school. Its obvious thatthese words were not thought out or even re-read.5 (Cobain 2002, p. 175)

In marking his words as improvised (‘not thought out or even re-read’), Cobain dis-courages his readers from interpreting his remarks as his ‘real’ voice. Rather, hiswords are to be read as poetry, as verbal performance. Later on the same page, hewrites: ‘I’ve always reverted back to the conclusion that man is not redeemableand words that don’t necessarily have their expected meanings can be used descrip-tively in a sentence as art. True English is so fucking boring’ (Cobain 2002, p. 175).Elsewhere in the Journals, he again cautions:

I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up but my primal sincerity. I likesincerity. I lack sincerity. These are not opinions. These are not words of wisdom, thisis a disclaimer . . . its not even a poem. Its just a big pile of shit like me. (Cobain 2002,p. 99)

In these passages, Cobain articulates a distinction between two sorts of writing. Thefirst sort features ‘primal sincerity’, symptoms of which include misspellings, scato-logical metaphors and runaway sentences generated by free-association. (This delib-erate carelessness corresponds to ‘anti-talent’ prized within the punk formulations ofauthenticity noted above.) The second sort of writing features ‘thought-out’ argu-ments and an ‘educated’ style, free of misspellings, slang and grotesque language.Within this dichotomy, scatological language is linked to the ‘primally sincere’mode of writing – such that, scatological language marks the writing as ‘authentic’.

Another of Cobain’s deviations from writing conventions includes his use ofhomonyms and invented spellings – such as his juxtaposition of ‘liking’ and ‘lacking’sincerity (above), ‘womban’ instead of ‘woman’ (Cobain 2002, p. 186), ‘t-shurts’instead of ‘t-shirts’ (p. 103), or ‘Beef Strokin’-Off’ instead of ‘Beef Stroganoff’(Cobain 2002, p. 121). Often, the new spellings contained some reference to thehuman body. These spelling deviations are another way that Cobain critiques theclassed, mainstream aspects of ‘correct’ language use; they are a means to performan ‘uneducated’, ‘working-class’, outsider identity.

Metaphors for authenticity

As stated above, Cobain references the sick body in order to mark his anti-establishment stance, to express his relationship to the world around him, and tomark the intensity of his opinions. Before ‘Nirvana’, Cobain toyed with a number




of scatological and food-oriented band names, such as Poo Poo Box, Egg Flog,Whisker Biscuit, Puking Worms, Pukearrhea, and Throat Oysters; his first bandwas called Fecal Matter (Cross 2008, pp. 37, 39). Scatological references appearthroughout his lyrics, prose and drawings as well – examples include the lyrics‘I’m on warm milk and laxatives’, ‘pee-pee pressed against my lips’, and ‘poop ashard as rock’.6 The ultimate litany appears in the song ‘Mexican Seafood’, whenhe writes ‘Now I vomit cum and diarrhea/On the tile floor like oatmeal pizza’.7 Asimilar vocabulary appears in his prose writing as well, used as a set of metaphorsthrough which to relate experiences, to advance critiques of US political cultureand, in some cases, to conjure fantastical narratives. For example, in the followingpassage on his process of amassing musical and literary repertoire, he describesthe new materials as a kind of fluid to be ‘soaked’ in by his body.

I was once a magnet for attracting new offbeat personalities who would introduce me to musicand books of the obscure and I would soak it into my system like a rabid sex crazed junkiehyperactive mentally retarded toddler who’s just had her first taste of sugar. (Cobain 2002,p. 189)

In another fragment, Cobain describes the journey of some beads of sweat asthey drip from the armpit of an elderly man. Through his unconventional use ofpunctuation and grammar, the scenario in this passage flows in run-on sentences,with verbs not immediately calling out to the specific subjects they modify.

Starting from the arm pit of an old man in a rush of slow motion-flood gates, blownwide-open. Sweat butter melts downward through the valleys of ripe, pink-prune skin,wrapped loosely around his brittle arm, congregating at the tips of uncut, jaundicedfingernails, beads meet and breed, then jump to their death. They land as a splash onsmoothe thighs of infants lying limp on beds of mohair . . . (Cobain 2002, p. 114)

The narrative feels hallucinatory. Whereas in psychedelic rock, the languagemight include cosmic and pastoral imagery, Cobain’s verbal repertoire insteadfocuses on bodies, body fluids and food. Following the tendency that Duane Fish(1995) identifies in Cobain’s writing style, the above passage does not tell a cohesivestory, and functions more as a fragmented, fantastical layering of images – a layeringin which sweat becomes personified as the agent of the narrative. Rather than com-municating a believable scenario, Cobain instead pursues an effect both improvisa-tory and uncouth; they are no doubt words and scenarios likely to bemarginalised within contexts of the US educational system and of the commercialpop song.

The same repertoire of images appears in Cobain’s essays on music and politics,where he often uses metaphors relating to gluttony, disease and rape. In severalplaces in the Journals, he critiques the US right wing, linking it to a politics of anti-abortion, misogyny, white supremacy and corporate control (Cobain 2002,pp. 167–70, 259). In these instances, bodily fluids index a conglomeration of feelingsand experiences – sickness, intensity, rebellion – the kind of ravaged authenticity thatfor him came from high-risk living. One such passage reads:

I had a cigarette in my hand, I thought it was a pen. I started writing a letter to mycongressman. I told him about misery and corruption and bat cave death rock girls whohave danced at nude clubs in the city while trying to get off drugs and how they really,really care and if more vegetarian vampires could concentrate on disclaimer-malpractice,

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sitting in the dark channeling the combined energy of all the lost infant souls in this sphere orrealm then we could all sip licorice-flavored alcoholic beverages down by the lazy rivers of therhone or rhine. I don’t have a beef with you, or a terrible, bitter, starvation for or in general.and its really hurting my lungs . . . (Cobain 2002, p. 161)

In this vague assessment of US politics, Cobain seems to be referencing thenational problem of drug addiction, an issue central to the White House agendaduring the Reagan and first Bush administrations – and one with personal resonance,particularly after a September 1992 Vanity Fair article suggested that his wifeCourtney Love took drugs during pregnancy with their daughter. In the Journals pas-sage, Cobain suggests that addicts are sincere (they ‘really, really care’), whereas veg-etarians are hypocrites (in that they are also vampires). He portrays these twopolitical camps through food and drug-related metaphors: ‘licorice-flavored’ alcohol,beef, starvation and lungs. He changes the meaning of the colloquialism ‘to have abeef’ by taking the phrase literally, and juxtaposing the act of beef eating with itsopposite (starving). He uses the beef metaphor as a launching pad for free-association, and subsequently veers to a seeming non sequitur about his lungs. Thiswriterly ‘move’ is likely a playful one in part. But, because those body, food anddrug metaphors were tied to his own physical traumas, they also mark the authen-ticity of his opinions. By including phrases about alcohol, beef and lungs, he invokesthe intense feelings that were linked to his food experiences. Body fluids, and the pro-cesses that produce them, mark the authenticity of the feeling behind his critiques.

Cobain’s marginal body

The Journals demonstrate Cobain’s anxiety around his small physique. While alwayson the thin side, he became increasingly gaunt when his digestion ran amok and hisheavy drug use began. In the Journals, Cobain refers to his body as ‘enemic [sic],rodent-like’ and ‘malnourished’, and writes ‘I’ve been the same bird weight sinceI’ve had the dreaded gut rot’ (Cobain 2002, p. 182). In one essay, cited above, hesuggests that a rock opera be written about him, ‘a rock opera all about vomiting gas-tric juices, being a borderline anorexic-Auschwitz-grunge-boy’ (Cobain 2002, p. 182).Later, he writes that ‘every time I swallowed a piece of food I would experience anexcruciating burning nauseous pain in the upper part of my stomach lining’, that‘there were many times that I found myself literally incapacitated in bed for weeksvomiting and starving’, and that at one point, ‘the pain left me immobile doubledup on the bathroom floor vomiting water and blood’ (Cobain 2002, p. 197).8 In a sec-tion on the results of a heroin binge during a European tour, he recalls that he spentthree days ‘sleeping, kicking, vomiting’ and suffering ‘the worst gas you’ll everknow’ (Cobain 2002, p. 194).

In several of the Journals’ drawings and prose fragments, Cobain represents hisbody as sickly and skeletal. For example, to one notebook page, he attached a cartoo-nist’s portrayal of him singing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (see Figure 1). The cartoo-nist’s image is of a powerful Cobain, broad-shouldered, with substantive face,neck and chest muscles visibly tensed. Below this clipping, Cobain sketches his‘real’ body – a narrow torso, emaciated with ribs showing. In other fragments, helists identifying features of his physique with an undertone of self-ridicule.Parodying an ID card (Figure 2), he describes his height as ‘smarter than Chris[Novoselic]’ and his weight as ‘borderline anorexic’ (Cobain 2002, p. 260). In a list




of personal characteristics (accompanied by a drawing of a bug-covered leg, Figure 3)he writes ‘I am obsessed with the fact that I am skinny and stupid’ (Cobain 2002,p. 124).

In life, he attempted to make himself look bigger by purchasing mail-orderweight-gain powders and wearing layers upon layers of clothes, even on trips tothe beach (Cross, 2001, p. 91). Former girlfriend Tracy Marander remembered, ‘Hedidn’t wear shorts unless it got really hot because he was so self-conscious abouthow skinny his legs were’ (quoted in Cross, 2001, p. 91). But while his small sizewas a feature to be masked in the everyday (because it placed him on the marginsof masculinity), it was something to be marked in creative practice (because itgave him status as marginalised). In the Journals he performs exaggerated versionsof those characteristics that made him an outcast, portraying his physique as prepu-bescent or female. For example, in one passage he notes ‘They [his school mates] hadhair down there long before I stopped playing with dolls’ (Cobain 2002, p. 105).Describing himself when he was 13, he recalls ‘I was a rodent-like, underdeveloped,hyperactive spaz who could fit his entire torso in one leg of his bell-bottomed jeans’(Cobain 2002, p. 105). Twice in the Journals, Cobain refers to the soreness of hisbreasts. In a draft of a letter to a friend, he writes ‘Lately my nipples have been reallysore. Can males lactate?’ (Cobain 2002, p. 131). And in a self-description later on,‘I am male. Age 23 and I’m lactating. My breasts have never been so sore not even

Figure 1. Cobain’s self-portrait, in which he draws a torso beneath a cartoonist’s rendering of his head.

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after receiving titty twisters from bully-school mates’ (Cobain 2002, p. 124). Thisstance seems partly to do with what Greil Marcus calls ‘the deliberate removal ofall attributes of entitlement (in [Cobain’s] case primarily maleness) and their replace-ment by attributes of abjection’ (Marcus 2000, p. 752).9 It also seems to come from hisown feelings of exclusion for his health, class, politics and musical style.

For Cobain, this sickly self existed in opposition to ‘the jock’ – a personaembodying a mainstream of athletic, heterosexual masculinity that seemed to dom-inate his surroundings in high school, in Aberdeen, in US right-wing political culture,

Figure 2. Cobain’s mock-identification card appears on the lower left.




and in musical scenes of rock and hardcore punk. In one fragment, he representsAmerican capitalists as jocks, culminating his rant with a series of bodily metaphors:

Hi, yeah, all isms feed off one another, but the top of the food chain is still the white, corporate,macho, strong ox male. . . . And the hairy, sweaty, macho, sexist dickheads will soon drown ina pool of razorblades and semen, stemmed from the uprising of their children . . . (Cobain 2002,pp. 167–8)

Figure 3. A page from Cobain’s Journals in which he lists various self-identifying attributes.

340 Jessica L. Wood



He explains in another passage that hardcore emerged out of 1970s punk, when the‘jocks who already had short hair from the wrestling team got involved’, using it as‘an excuse to fight’ (Cobain 2002, pp. 96–7).

The jock was also a character he had encountered in his mother’s boyfriend, PatO’Connor, a sort of bully who called Cobain a ‘faggot’ for not bringing women home(Cross, 2001, p. 52). For Cobain, the ‘jock’ was responsible for oppressing not onlyminorities and women, but also diminutive men. Cobain’s fascination with highschool, evidenced in interviews, song lyrics, prose and music videos, centred onthe conflict he felt between these two body types and the subjectivities to whichthey referred.

The meaning of screams

Among the hallmarks of Nirvana’s sound was Cobain’s ravaged singing. Featuringscreams at the top of his pitch range, his approach was one discouraged by vocalpedagogues on account of damage to the voice.10 His vocals drew on an inheritedrepertoire of stylised growls, rasps and shouts from blues, country, and eventuallymainstream rock traditions. As previous scholars have noted, loud and ravagedvocal timbres have been prized within rock ideologies as evidence of expressive auth-enticity, as proof that a performance is the materialisation of true feelings and real-life hardship (Middleton 2000, p. 34–5). In the genres of punk and heavy metal,both of which influenced Cobain, screaming vocals likewise have served as signsof a singer’s genuine emotional and physical investment.11 From punk’s 1970s begin-nings, artists opposed the reified sentiment of commercial pop songs by incorporat-ing vocal markers of ‘raw’ feeling and of untrained or ‘ugly’ technique (Frith 1981,p. 158–9; Middleton 2000, p. 34).

Hardcore punk bands of the late 1980s, as well as the grunge bands they influ-enced, similarly signalled their authenticity via ‘unmediated’, abrasive vocals.Singers such as Buzz Osborne (from the Melvins) and Tad Doyle (from Tad) beltedpast their tightened vocal cords to create a raspy sound that evoked heaving, or thatat least that suggested physical strain to the voice.12 In some instances, hardcorebands conjured sounds of human sickness. Scratch Acid and the Butthole Surfers,for example, included moments of vocalised vomiting in their songs ‘Mess’ and‘Lady Sniff’, respectively.13 Cobain thus was not unique in his use of eviscerated tim-bres. Indeed, part of what made these timbres meaningful for him was their preva-lence in the 1970s and 1980s punk contexts with which he identified.

Descriptions of Nirvana’s live performances and recordings tended to focus onthe ravaged nature of Cobain’s singing – a singing style that in some instancesapproximated heaving, as in the abbreviated grunts following the verses in‘Tourette’s’ (In Utero) or in the final phrases of ‘Hairspray Queen’ (Incesticide).

His high-volume, raspy singing voice was often dramatised in journalistic cov-erage. Numerous articles circulated the trope that the volume and breaks in his tim-bre indexed either Cobain’s bodily investment in the act of performance, or hisintense and painful biography. Journalists found a variety of descriptors for thesetimbres, such as ‘menacing growl’, ‘an irritated marble-mouthed snarl’, ‘sandpaperhowl’, ‘plaintiff groan’, ‘primal howling’ and ‘battered croon’.14 One critic remarkedon how he ‘sings with a growl and a sneer in his voice’ and another noted that‘Cobain’s voice, moving from a zombie drone to an anguished croon to a primal




scream, is the album’s [In Utero] most potent ingredient. He sings with an honestythat is fearless and literally brutal.’15 Another wrote that ‘Cobain pushes the wordsso hard it’s as though he’s trying to vomit them out’, that ‘he croons, growls andthen screams from the pit of his stomach’ (Savage 1997, p. 332), and another that‘. . . you’d swear sometimes Cobain would sing like [Paul] McCartney if only hehadn’t spent his life swallowing razor blades and fighting back bile’ (Sullivan1993, p. 45). It is difficult to say whether these assessments originated from the jour-nalists (and not the press releases). What they do show, however, is the massive cur-rency of the idea that Cobain’s timbre and life were directly linked.

In more than one interview, Cobain himself remarked on the physical pain hisscreamed style of singing caused and at one point said that he would sometimes ‘singand cough up blood’ (Fricke 1993, p. 64). His biographer Michael Azerrad noted:

Ironically, Kurt’s [stomach] condition may have had something to do with his agonised wail.Or vice versa. Asked to pinpoint the source of the pain, he indicates a spot just below hisbreastbone – it also happens to be exactly where he says his scream originates. (Azerrad1993, p. 305)

In a New York Times interview, Cobain explained the relationship between sicknessand emotion relative to his music:

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’spsychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where thecurvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m alwaysin pain, and that adds to the anger in our music. I’m grateful to it in a way. (Reynolds 1991,p. H34)

He once told Rolling Stone, ‘I was always afraid that if I lost the stomach problem, Iwouldn’t be as creative’ (Fricke 1994, p. 34). Charles Cross has stated that ‘. . . Kurtmost certainly suffered the artist’s predicament: the very reasons he felt pain werethe fuel that drove his artistic passion. His dysfunction was his greatest gift andhis heaviest burden’ (Cross 2008, p. 9). For Cobain, pain enhances emotional urgencyat the same time that this urgency in turn causes pain in his throat, stomach andspine. Pain and urgency are linked to an extent that his ailments, as well as thevocal techniques that exacerbated them, index an emotionally ravaged ‘angry’ –in other words ‘authentic’ – subjectivity. The link between physical pain and expres-sive authenticity are what give the damaged body significance within Cobain’soutput.

Music, for Cobain, provided an element of physicality and feeling not availablein other expressive registers. In one essay he praises the Aberdeen,Washington-based band, the Melvins, a band that, like other hardcore punk bandsof the late 1980s and early 1990s, sometimes included food and body imagery intheir lyrics and song titles.16 In the essay, Cobain writes: ‘WORDS aren’t as importantas the energy derived from music . . . IN one live MELVINS performance you wont beable to understand very many words, as is with any band, but you will FEEL thenegative ENERGY’ (Cobain 2002, p. 59).

Later in the Journals, Cobain writes: ‘I exhausted most conversation at age nine.I only feel with grunts, screams and tones and with hand gestures and my body’(Cobain 2002, p. 115), echoing the common Western trope that ‘music is the languageof emotion’. I would argue, however, that there was more feeling invested in his

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writing than he admits. His multiple drafts of lyrics and letters, as well as his exper-iments with alternate spellings, indicate his interest in language’s aesthetic and com-municative potential, even in its conflicted and arbitrary aspects. Further, CharlesCross notes at least one moment in Cobain’s journaling when he wrote ‘with somuch pressure the pen went through the paper’, possibly indicating the intense phy-sicality of his writing process (Cross 2001, p. 165). Where music trumps language forCobain, then, is in its power to give it meaning as visceral and biographically rootedcommunication. In moments of recorded and live performances when the words areunintelligible, the fact of their unintelligibility signals intense, ‘authentic’ emotion.

The place of screams in Nirvana recordings

Among his commercially recorded works, Cobain sometimes confines his brokentimbres to phrase peaks, such as at the midpoints of the verses of ‘About a Girl’,or at the chorus endings of ‘Floyd the Barber’ (0:43–0:44; 2:04–2:09). Other songs fea-ture more extended periods of cracked vocals – often with Cobain belting lyrics in hisupper register, at high volume and with raspy timbre for the duration of the entiretrack (‘School’ and ‘Beeswax’), or for the duration of the chorus (‘Lithium’ and‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’). In some cases, he increases volume and rasp for repeatsof the verses and choruses. In the song ‘Territorial Pissings’, for example, witheach repeat of the chorus, his voice not only becomes louder but it also breaksincreasingly into a rougher and rougher sound.

Cobain also tends to conclude formal sections with what I would term vocal‘cadenzas’: wordless, raspy wails in his upper register. He concludes the chorus in‘Paper Cuts’ with an extended wail before continuing with the verse in a screamedtimbre (1:28–2:16). He sings a similar cadenza in ‘Aneurysm’ on the last word ofthe chorus (3:28–3:36) and in ‘Negative Creep’, at the end of the second repeatof the verse (1:24–1:31). In many of these examples, Cobain gives extra emphasisto these raspy sections by surrounding them with sections of straight-toned, quietersinging.

The album containing fewest of these moments is Nevermind – the album withinNirvana’s small output considered the closest to mainstream pop. Isolated examplesof vocal cadenzas include the scream before the final verse of ‘Drain You’ (2:29–2:31)and the screeched verses in the hidden track ‘Something in the Way’. In In Utero hereturns to more of the vocal techniques of Incesticide and Bleach – including cadenzasat the ends of choruses in ‘Scentless Apprentice’ (on the word ‘Away’) and in moreextended ones in ‘Tourette’s’ (0:33–0:39; 0:55–1:02; 1:23–1:30).

Rock critics have pointed to the more accessible melody and hook-orientedstyle of Nevermind. Compared to the others, this album includes fewer irregularitiesin song structure; for the most part, the songs of that album follow a standard patternof alternations between quiet verses and loud choruses. Momentum in a Nevermindsong is generated as Cobain sings verses with increased volume and rasp with eachrepeat; choruses similarly become increasingly rasped, breaking into more and morepitches.

Following the album’s release, Nirvana members expressed displeasure withthe ‘pop’ aspects of the album. Cobain commented in one interview that ‘It’s[Nevermind] such a perfect mixture of cleanliness and nice, candy-ass production . . .

It may be extreme to some people who aren’t used to it, but I think it’s kind of




lame myself’ (quoted in Berkenstadt and Cross 1998, p. 99). According to Berkenstadtand Cross, the album’s producers, however, recalled the bandmembers being happierwith the album than their comments let on, making it possible that Cobain’s criticismsweremore a symptomof his ambivalence towards itsmainstream success than of qual-ities of the recording (1998, p. 99). Cobain apparently had to fight to have the hiddentrack ‘Endless Nameless’ included on the album, presumably because of its non-commercial aspects. This track starkly contrasts with the rest of the songs on thealbum, and recalls Nirvana’s earlier work from the late 1980s. From the start ofthe song, verses are screamed to the point of unintelligibility; the track ends with thesound of Cobain smashing his guitar.

The place of screams in ‘Hairspray Queen’

In trying to understand how Cobain may have understood authenticity within hisperformances, I am drawn especially to his pre-Nevermind recordings. These includea wider range of vocal techniques, as well as idiosyncratic formal structures. I havechosen to focus on the song ‘Hairspray Queen’ because it manifests the full range ofCobain’s repertoire of timbres and includes the lengthiest cadenzas of Cobain’s com-mercially released output. Additionally, the lyrics of the song seem not seem to makeliteral ‘sense’. This case study can hopefully suggest ways that Cobain’s early workcan be used as a window into his aesthetic ideals, as a site through which to study theinteraction between his screams and lyrics.

Cobain had written ‘Hairspray Queen’ by January 1987, as documented by aband rehearsal video from that date.17 It was on the set-list of Nirvana’s first publicperformance in March 1987, and it continued to be a set staple during 1989–1990.18 Astudio version was eventually included on the 1992 compilation album Incesticide.Cobain’s handwritten lyrics for the song appear in the Journals (Cobain 2002, p. 50).

The song’s theme sets up an antagonistic relationship between the narrator andthe protagonist, the hairspray queen. ‘Hairspray queen’ may be a reference to 1980sUS high school culture (and the prevalence of hairspray-oriented styles among teens)in the way that ‘teen spirit’ in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ signified (albeit indirectly) inthe early 1990s as a youth-oriented deodorant and as a US high school subculturalidentity.19 If this is the case, then the lyrics could be read as an indirect responseto mainstream high school culture, as embodied by the coiffed hairspray queen.Chuck Crisafulli, on the other hand, suggests that the song may have been intendedas a taunt to a mainstream rock club audience (Crisafulli 1996, p. 73); this seems poss-ible considering the song’s harrowing, deliberately ‘ugly’ vocal approach.

The central antagonism is set up in the first iteration of the verse, with an alter-nation between two basic lines: ‘I was your enemy’ and ‘you were mine’ (seeFigure 4). On the recording (beginning at 0:49), Cobain screams these lines, overdriv-ing the words using his chest voice in his top register, creating heavy rasp and severalsimultaneous pitches for each syllable. He drops to his low register every two orthree syllables. As the verse progresses, he forces the air out harder, leading tomore breaks in the upper tones.

As he breaks up his tones through overdriven delivery, he obscures the wordsthrough subtle use of repetition, homonyms, articulation and breathing. The lyricsheet contained in the Journals (Cobain 2002, p. 50) shows that he wrote stuttersinto the line ‘I was your enemy’, so that it first reads ‘I was your your enemy’ and

344 Jessica L. Wood



then ‘I was was your enemy’. The repeat of the words ‘your’ and ‘was’ appears to bea composed feature of the song, standardised on his lyric sheet.

Additionally, he alternates between similar-sounding versions of the two basiclines, playing with the sounds of the words ‘mine’ and ‘mind’. As his lyric sheetshows, while lines two and four contain the primary phrase ‘you were mine’, linesone and three include variations: line one reads ‘I was your mind’ and line two‘you would mind’. Further, he uses the word ‘mind’ in line one as a noun, and inline three as a verb, deriving a third homonym out of that same syllable.

Figure 4. Cobain’s handwritten lyrics to ‘Hairspray Queen’.




Finally, his lyric sheet also shows his transformation of the word ‘enemy’ into ahomonym. He writes the word split in two and with an ‘e’ at the end, grafted ontothe ‘y’: ‘ene-mye’. By line three, he eliminates the ‘y’ so that the word appears‘ene-me’. Other fragments in the Journals show Cobain writing a word over and over,gradually chancing upon ‘meaningful’ homonyms, as in his invented spelling of‘woman’ as ‘womban’ discussed earlier. Thus, it is possible that in the process of writ-ing the word ‘enemy’ repeatedly in his lyric sheet, he discovered that the word ‘me’could be found in the word ‘enemy’, if he broke the word down and spelled it phone-tically.20 For Cobain, such a discovery – that theword for the first person (‘me’) is foundin theword for the antagonised secondperson (‘enemy’) – exemplifies his view (quotedabove) that ‘words don’t necessarily have their expectedmeanings’, that contradictorymeanings can sometimes be found within the same word.

His vocal delivery further obscures the verse lyrics. Among his techniques, themost obvious is his broken, screaming timbre, which makes the verses challenging tounderstand and to endure physically. That the verse is intentionally loud and dama-ging is noted in the chorus that follows, where Cobain sings ‘ears rang/your earsrang’ (1:00–1:10).

Additionally, ends of phrases are slurred into subsequent beginnings, while hetakes his breaths in the middle of verse lines, rather than at their end. His breathingplacement thus allows him to slur the final syllable of each verse to the beginningword of the next, resulting in emphasis on the words ‘me-you’, and non-emphasison the complete phrases ‘I was your enemy’ and ‘you were mine’. On the lyricsheet, he draws emphasis to particular syllables within the word ‘enemy’ to interferewith its meaning; in performance, he draws emphasis to the syllables ‘me-you’, poss-ibly to obscure communication of the semantic meaning of the line.

Cobain’s tactic changes with the appearance of chorus II (1:51), where he mini-mally fleshes out the hairspray queen’s character: at night, she is a ‘wishful goddess’and a ‘disco goddess’. When this chorus returns for the second time, he adds the lines‘itch so modest’, ‘crisco lochness’, ‘fishful goblets’ and ‘mouthful omelets’. Theseimages arise through free-association based on the rhyme scheme, metre, and arepertoire of body and food-related words. The litany of images seems thematicallyunrelated to the verse, as though he is making a point not to tell a cohesive story. Atthe end of both chorus II sections he adds a vocal cadenza on the word ‘god’ (spelled‘GAWD’ on his lyric sheet): a wordless melisma travelling to the top and bottom ofhis registers. The first time such a cadenza appears, it lasts approximately 12 seconds(2:03–2:17). The second of these seems to derail the entire song, lasting nearly 30seconds and including clear moans and raspy groans (3:37–4:06). Towards themiddle of the cadenza, he glissandos upward with a heavy, car engine-like growlin his tone (3:45–3:50). The climax of the cadenza occurs with several measures ofvocalised heaving, in which he uses his stomach to force air in short spurts throughconstricted vocal cords (3:51–4:03). He ends with a simple, clear-toned moan (4:04–4:06).

The intensity contained in these cadenzas is above all physical, as Cobainoverdrives his vocal apparatus in his high-pitched, high-volume screams. Weknow about the lasting and painful effect of this mode of singing from the Journalsand from biographical accounts. It is a performing style seemingly incongruouswith the lyrics, lyrics rendered semantically meaningless by the delivery; in thisrespect ‘Hairspray Queen’ calls to mind Cobain’s description of the Melvins’ live per-formances, that ‘you won’t be able to understand very many words, as is with any

346 Jessica L. Wood



band, but you will FEEL the negative ENERGY’ (Cobain 2002, p. 59). The physicallypainful experiences of performing and hearing ‘Hairspray Queen’ – as well as theexperience of not being able to hear the lyrics – are meaningful because they arerooted in Cobain’s biography of physical pain and social marginalisation. Further,as a veritable catalogue of anti-mainstream markers (painful timbres, unintelligiblelyrics and runaway improvisations that ultimately derail the song), the song‘means’ in relation to an audience situated in a late 1980s musical moment wherecommercialist pressure was felt as an oppressive, omnipresent force.

Conclusion

I have argued here that the ‘sick body’ functioned for Cobain as a central metaphor,one that he translated into multiple artistic forms and that encapsulated his idea ofauthenticity. The centrality of this metaphor echoes Dick Hebdige’s early theorisationof punk style, in which he argues that drug-use, music, ‘insurrectionary poses’,‘vomiting’ and ‘spitting’ were part of a homology connected to punk meaning-making (Hebdige 1979, p. 126). As stated above, Cobain’s homology emerged largelyfrom cultural contexts of hardcore and New Wave punk scenes. A more thoroughstudy of Nirvana and their surrounding underground music contexts could thereforeinvestigate how the figure of the sick body circulated among fans and performers, ineveryday talk and fanzines, in rehearsal moments, in audience behaviour, andamong other bands of that particular time and place.

For a band credited with ending a major musical genre (punk) there has beensurprisingly little scholarship around Nirvana or its front man. Possibly, this isbecause of the seeming impenetrability of Cobain’s lyrics, or because of the formulaicverse-chorus-verse, soft-loud-soft-loud song structures that seem not to reward care-ful study. Possibly the figure of Cobain and the meaning of Nirvana’s music seems‘overdetermined’ by the mass media to an extent that makes fresh, non-clichéd analy-sis hard to imagine. In my view, by shifting the analytic parameters to be less aboutformal structure and the semantic meanings of the lyrics, and more about thoseaspects of music and writing prized by Cobain, one gains a fuller appreciation ofhis individuality as an artist, and of the amount of change taken in his approachto song-writing and performance during his short career. For example, songs fromlater in his career contain more obvious references to his life experiences and politicalopinions. Hopefully, this article demonstrates that different moments of Cobain’scareer require different interpretive strategies.

Finally, I also hope to have shown that, despite Cobain’s claims to a haphazard,unschooled process, he invested deep, careful attention in theminute details ofwords –down to the level of letter and syllable – and that the role of scatological language inhis lyrics and prose is more than a means to antagonise a ‘mainstream’ – that itindexed and brought to bear the specifics of his life that, for him, grounded theauthenticity of his expression.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Christina Gier, Nicola Dibben and an anonymous reviewer fortheir comments on earlier versions of this article. All images are used with




permission from the US and UK divisions of the Penguin Group. Lyrics to ‘HairsprayQueen’ and ‘Mexican Seafood’ are used with permission from Hal LeonardCorporation. Lyrics to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ reprinted with permission fromHal Leonard Corporation, Murky Slough Music and Alfred Publishing Company.I also need to thank the Gustave Reese Endowment of the American MusicologicalSociety.

Endnotes

1. Everett True (2007, p. 157) gives a similar accountof the same tour.

2. Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle are all cities inWashington State, USA.

3. Jim Berkenstadt and Charles Cross (1998, p. 127–8)contend that Nirvana was not actually a grungeband, having a less ‘heavy’ and more pop-orientedsound.

4. See especially Azerrad 1993, Cross 2001 and thefilm Kurt Cobain: About a Son (Schnack 2006).

5. Cobain tends not to use apostrophes in hisJournals writings. In this article I have chosennot to correct any instances of his grammatical,capitalisation or spelling errors.

6. The line ‘I’m on warm milk and laxatives’ comesfrom the song ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, In Utero (1993).‘Pee-pee pressed against my lips’ and ‘poop ashard as rock’ both appear on Bleach (1989), in‘Floyd the Barber’ and ‘Mr. Moustache’,respectively.

7. The song is included on Incesticide (1992).8. He gives a similar account in an interview with

David Fricke for Rolling Stone: ‘For five yearsduring the time I had my stomach problem . . .It was to the point where I was on tour, lyingon the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’thold down water. And then I had to play ashow in 20 minutes and I would sing and coughup blood. This is no way to live a life.’ SeeFricke (1994, p. 34).

9. This assessment appears in reference to Cobain’scross-dressing.

10. In his high-volume singing and shouting, Cobainuses his chest voice in his upper registers. Writingabout voice cracking in adult male singing,Richard Miller explains the physical strain causedwhen a man continues to use his chest voice atand beyond ‘the upper extent of his habitualspeech range’, writing ‘were he to continue totry to speak, he would need to call or shout. Hecould manage to use his “call voice” for anadditional brief segment in the ascending scale,

but only with great effort and considerable dis-comfort. He would probably be incapable ofshouting beyond that point without subjectinghis instrument to serious abuse’ (Miller 2004,pp. 165–6). Clifton Ware calls this type of singing‘chest voice belting’ and cites this as an exampleof voice abuse (Ware 1998, p. 200).

11. For a discussion of the meanings of vocal distor-tion in heavy metal, see Walser (1993, p. 42).

12. The Oxford Dictionaries Online gives to “rise andfall spasmodically”, and to “make an effort tovomit; retch” as meanings for the verb “toheave”. See “heave”, at http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/heave?region=us (accessed 31July 2011)

13. ‘Mess’ appears on Scratch Acid’s album GreatestGift (1991) and ‘Lady Sniff’ on the ButtholeSurfers’ Psychic. . . Powerless. . . Another Man’s Sac(1985).

14. These descriptions appear in Karen Schoemer(1991) and David Fricke (1993, 1994).

15. See Michael Snyder (1993) and Edna Gundersen(1993).

16. Examples include ‘Over from Under theExcrement’, ‘Leech’ and ‘Happy Grey or Black’from Gluey Porch Treatments (1989), ‘GrindingProcess’ from 10 Songs (1991) and ‘Pearl Bomb’from Houdini (1993).

17. The video is included in Nirvana: With the LightsOut (2004).

18. See liner notes to Nirvana (2004).19. Cobain did not learn of the deodorant brand until

after he had written the song. The title referred toa line of graffiti written by one of his friends(Kathleen Hanna from the band Bikini Kill) on hisbedroom wall, which read ‘Kurt smells like teenspirit.’His friendwasaware of theproduct, however,having seen ads for it on television (Berkenstadt andCross 1998, p. 650, Cross 2008, p. 53).

20. It is also possible that he was interested in thesimilarity between the words ‘enemy’ and‘enema’.

References

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HarperCollinsWest), pp. 1–14Berkenstadt, J., and Cross, C. 1998. Nevermind: Nirvana (New York: Schirmer Books)Brackett, D. 2000. Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley, University of California Press)

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Cobain, K. 2002. Journals (New York, Riverhead Books)Cohen, J. 2002. ‘Publisher acquires “intimate” Cobain journals’, BPI Entertainment News Wire, 26 FebruaryCrisafulli, C. 1996. Teen Spirit: The Stories Behind Every Nirvana Song (New York, Carlton Books)Cross, C. 2001. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (New York, Hyperion)Cross, C. 2008. Cobain Unseen (New York, Little, Brown)Ferguson, S. 2007. ‘Kurt Cobain and the politics of damage’, in The Rock History Reader, ed. T. Cateforis

(New York, Routledge), pp. 283–5Fish, D.R. 1995. ‘Serving the servants: an analysis of the music of Kurt Cobain’, Popular Music and Society, 19/2,

pp. 87–102Fricke, D. 1993. ‘Sleepless in Seattle: “In Utero” by Nirvana’, Rolling Stone, 665, 16 September, pp. 63Fricke, D. 1994. ‘Kurt Cobain’, Rolling Stone, 674, 27 January, pp. 34Frith, S. 1981. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York, Pantheon Books)Frith, S. 1996. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press)Gunderson, E. 1993. ‘Nirvana’s “In Utero”: grunge reborn’, USA Today, 21 September, pp. 1DHebdige, D. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York, Methuen)Hughes, T. 2006. ‘Nirvana: University of Washington, Seattle, January 6, 1990’, in Performance and Popular

Music: History, Place and Time, ed. J. Inglis (Hampshire, Ashgate), pp. 155–71Jones, S. 1995. ‘Covering Cobain: narrative patterns in journalism and rock criticism’, Popular Music and Society,

19/2, pp. 103–18Kahn, S. 2000. ‘Kurt Cobain, martyrdom, and the problem of agency’, Studies in Popular Culture, 22/3, p. 83–96Marcus, G. 2000. ‘Comment on Mark Mazullo, “The man whom the world sold”’, Musical Quarterly, 84/4, pp.

750–53Mazullo, M. 2000. ‘The man whom the world sold: Kurt Cobain, rock’s progressive aesthetic, and the chal-

lenges of authenticity’, Musical Quarterly, 84/4, pp. 713–49Mazzarella, S.R. 1995. ‘“The voice of a generation”? media coverage of the suicide of Kurt Cobain’, Popular

Music and Society, 19/2, pp. 49–68Middleton, R. 2000. ‘Rock singing’, in The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. J. Potter (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press), pp. 28–41Miller, R. 2004. Solutions for Singers: Tools for Performers and Teachers (Oxford, Oxford University Press)Moore, A. 1993. Rock, the Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Buckingham, Open University Press)Reynolds, S. 1991. ‘Boredom+ claustrophobia + sex = punk Nirvana’, New York Times, 24 November, p. H34Savage, J. 1997. Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop Media and Sexuality, 1977–1996 (New York,

Vintage Press)Schnack, A.J. 2006. About a Son [film]. Shout! (Factory SF 10719-BI)Schoemer, K. 1991. ‘A band that deals in apathy’, New York Times, 27 September, p. C30Soanes C., and Stevenson A. (eds.) 2008. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 12th edn (Oxford: Oxford

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Wesleyan University Press)Ware, C. 1998. Basics of Vocal Pedagogy: The Foundations and Process of Singing (Boston, McGraw Hill)

Discography

Butthole, Surfers. Psychic. . . Powerless. . . Another Man’s Sac. Latino Bugger Veil, LBV-03. 1985Melvins. Gluey Porch Treatments. Ipecac Recordings, IPC-12. 1989Melvins. Houdini. Atlantic, 82532-2. 1993Melvins. 10 Songs. C/Z Records, CZ002. 1991Nirvana, Bleach. Sub Pop Records, SP 34b. 1989Nirvana. Incesticide. David Geffen Co./Sub Pop Records, DGCD 24504. 1992Nirvana. In Utero. Geffen Records, DGCD 24607. 1993Nirvana. Nevermind. David Geffen Co., DGCD 24425. 1991Nirvana. With the Lights Out, Geffen Records, B000372700. 2004Scratch Acid. The Greatest Gift. Touch and Go, T & GLP76CD. 1991



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