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发信人: eeric (流云), 信区: Music
标 题: TIME杂志评价Kurt Cobain的一生
发信站: BBS 荔园晨风站 (Thu Apr 5 16:34:45 2001), 转信
TIME Domestic April 18, 1994 Volume 143, No. 16
Kurt Cobain was the dour, brilliant leader of Nirvana, the multiplatinum
grunge band that defined the sound of the 1990s. Last week he killed
himself.
BY BRUCE HANDY Reported by Lisa McLaughlin/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los
Angeles and Dave Thompson/Seattle
The last weeks of Kurt Cobain's life were filled with turmoil and
anguish - and gossip. Rumors floated through the music industry that the
singer-songwriter's band, Nirvana, was breaking up; that Cobain, who
had survived a tranquilizer-induced coma just six weeks earlier, had
suffered another overdose. The stories seemed to be justified when the
group unexpectedly backed out of headlining the Lollapalooza tour this
summer.
The truth, it turns out, was that Cobain, who claimed to have overcome
an addiction to heroin, was indeed abusing unspecified drugs. A
record-industry source told TIME that two weeks ago Cobain's wife
Courtney Love, front woman for the group Hole, gathered doctors and
friends together in Seattle, the couple's home, to try to scare Cobain
into dealing with his problem; Nirvana's managers even threatened to
drop Cobain from their roster unless he got cleaned up. The intervention
seemed to work, for Cobain checked into a California treatment center.
But according to a missing-persons report filed by his mother, he fled
early last week. Seattle police periodically checked Cobain's house,
finding no traces of the singer.
Last Friday, an electrician visited the house to install a security
system. When no one answered the front door, he walked around the house,
peering through windows. He thought he saw a mannequin sprawled on
the floor, until he noticed a splotch of blood by its ear. When police
and the coroner broke down the door, they found Cobain dead on the
floor, a shotgun still pointed at his chin and, on a nearby counter, a
suicide note penned in red ink, reportedly ending with the words "I love
you, I love you," addressed, a source said, to Love and the couple's
19-month-old daughter Frances Bean.
Kurt Cobain, dead at 27. The news came as a shock to millions of rock
fans, and MTV pre-empted its usual programming for hours of J.F.K.
-like mourning, with a somber Kurt Loder playing the Walter Cronkite
role. Given Cobain's talent and influence, however, the reaction was
understandable. Nirvana came from the music-industry equivalent of
nowhere,with a rough-edged first album recorded for a chiselly $606. The next,
Nevermind, released 2 1/2 years ago, contained a series of crunching,
screaming songs that also had catchy melodies, part punk, part Beatles.
Selling almost 10 million copies and knocking Michael Jackson's
Dangerous from the top of the charts, the album fibrillated the psyche
of a generation. It also launched the commercial vogue for grunge and
made Seattle famous for something other than cappuccino, rain and bad
professional sports. Before long, equally abrasive Seattle groups like
Pearl Jam (a Nirvana rival), Mudhoney and Alice in Chains joined Nirvana
high on the charts. The New Liverpool, Rolling Stone called the city in
early 1992 (launching searches for the New Seattle).
Cobain was at the center of it all, the John Lennon of the swinging
Northwest, a songwriter with a gift for searing lyrics as well as
seductive hooks, a performer with a play of facial expressions so edgy
and complicated that they rivaled Jack Nicholson's.
If the loss of an oddly magnetic, brilliant musician was jolting,
though, the manner of his death was not entirely unexpected. Cobain
spoke so openly on the subjects of drugs and depression and suicide that
writers searching for easy obituary ironies didn't have to look very
hard. Cobain himself even began joking about it; a song called I Hate
Myself and I Want to Die was recorded but dropped from the last album.
"It was totally satirical, making fun of ourselves," Cobain told a
reporter earlier this year. "I'm thought of as this pissy, complaining,
freaked-out schizophrenic who wants to kill himself all the time. I
thought it was a funny title."
Love, an alternative-rock star in her own right, was in Los Angeles at
the time of Cobain's death but reportedly flew to Seattle Friday
morning. While talking to the pop-music critic Robert Hilburn of the Los
Angeles Times early last week, Love broke into tears describing her
husband's recently fragile condition. "I just don't ever want to see him
on the floor like that again. He was blue," she told Hilburn, recalling
Cobain's overdose in Rome last month. "I thought I went through a lot
of hard times over the years, but this has been the hardest." A source
who had been close to Cobain confirms what
now seems obvious: the European incident, labeled an accident at the
time, was an unsuccessful suicide attempt. "You don't take 50 pills by
accident," notes the source. Two weeks after returning to Seattle from
Rome, Love had to call police when Cobain locked himself in a room along
with some of the guns he enjoyed keeping around the house; police
removed four weapons that day, including a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic
rifle.
Growing up in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen on Washington's
Pacific coast, Cobain had, by his account, a relatively happy
childhood until his parents, a cocktail waitress and an auto mechanic,
got divorced. He was only eight at the time, and he claimed the
traumatic split fueled the anguish in Nirvana's music. He shuttled
back and forth between various relatives, even finding himself
homeless at one point and living under a bridge. His budding artistry
and iconoclastic attitude didn't win him many fans in high school;
instead, he attracted beatings from "jocks and moron dudes," as an old
friend once put it. Cobain got even by spray-painting QUEER on his
tormentors' pickup trucks.
Cobain formed and reformed a series of bands before Nirvana finally
coalesced in 1986 as an uneasy alliance among Cobain, bassist Krist
Novoselic (a hometown friend) and eventually drummer Dave Grohl.
Cobain married Love in 1992, when the band was first peaking on the
charts, when she was already pregnant with Frances Bean, and when both
parents had already developed heroin habits (Love claims to have
with some of the guns he enjoyed keeping around the house; police
removed four weapons that day, including a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic
rifle.
Growing up in the depressed logging town of Aberdeen on Washington's
Pacific coast, Cobain had, by his account, a relatively happy
childhood until his parents, a cocktail waitress and an auto mechanic,
got divorced. He was only eight at the time, and he claimed the
traumatic split fueled the anguish in Nirvana's music. He shuttled
back and forth between various relatives, even finding himself
homeless at one point and living under a bridge. His budding artistry
and iconoclastic attitude didn't win him many fans in high school;
instead, he attracted beatings from "jocks and moron dudes," as an old
friend once put it. Cobain got even by spray-painting QUEER on his
tormentors' pickup trucks.
Cobain formed and reformed a series of bands before Nirvana finally
coalesced in 1986 as an uneasy alliance among Cobain, bassist Krist
Novoselic (a hometown friend) and eventually drummer Dave Grohl.
Cobain married Love in 1992, when the band was first peaking on the
charts, when she was already pregnant with Frances Bean, and when both
parents had already developed heroin habits (Love claims to have
kicked hers immediately after finding out she was pregnant). "It's a
whirling dervish of emotion, all these extremes of fighting and loving
each other at once," is how Cobain described the marriage last year,
proudly showing off nasty fingernail scratches on his back.
It was Nirvana's unexpected stardom that seemed to eat at him. He
appeared unusually tortured by success, even in a profession famous
for containing people who are tortured by success. "He was a very
bright, sweet, generous and caring individual, perhaps a little too
sweet and sensitive for the business he was in," says Michael Azerrad,
author of Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Danny Goldberg, the
former head of Nirvana's management company who now runs Atlantic
Records, says, "In all the years I knew him, he had very mixed
feelings about being on this planet."
Goldberg remembers another of the band's handlers once asking the singer
why he was moping. "I'm awake, aren't I?" Cobain replied.
He suffered the usual torments of the underground poet moving into the
mainstream, and was worried that his band had sold out, that it was
attracting the wrong kind of fans (e.g., the guys who used to beat him
up). True, he liked the money that went with mall-rat adulation. But
in interviews he exuded a pain beyond standard-issue superstar whining.
He said his heroin use was a kind of self-medication for stomach pains,
but what he really seemed in search of was psychic equilibrium.
"None of this would have happened had he not been famous," insists
Daniel House, a friend of Cobain's and the owner of an independent
record label in Seattle. "When Nirvana started catching on, he was
kind of bewildered. His music was so personal, it amazed him when people
came out in droves to hear it."
They were there, though, because Cobain conveyed meaning and even beauty
in his harsh recordings. His lyrics could be sour, occasionally
frightening if opaque. Take these simultaneously blase and acerbic lines
from the group's biggest hit, Smells Like Teen Spirit: "And I forget
just why I taste/ Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile/ I found it hard,
it was hard to find/ Oh well, whatever, never mind." Cobain's
sometimes fierce, sometimes weary growl, the sometimes convulsive,
sometimes grating guitars, the very loud drums: all of it communicated
anger, maybe loathing, definitely passion, no matter how inchoate.
His subject was the same perennial, youthful fury captured by the Sex
Pistols, before they too self-destructed, and by the Who, before Pete
Townshend survived to purvey nostalgia to Broadway theatergoers.
Youthful nihilism may not be new, but no artist invents all his
materials; it's what he does with them that counts, and Cobain wrote
great rock songs as he explored a familiar theme with genius.
Last year a journalist visited a home he and Love were renting before
they moved into the house in which Cobain would end his life. He had
decorated one of the walls with this graffito: NONE OF YOU WILL EVER
KNOW MY INTENTIONS. It could serve as his credo as well as his epitaph.
"Guess we won't be getting the deposit back on the house," he joked.
--
爱你,不长
就一生
※ 来源:·BBS 荔园晨风站 bbs.szu.edu.cn·[FROM: 192.168.36.84]
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