Part 2. Kurt Cobain vs Björk

Part 2. Kurt Cobain vs Björk

Part 2. Kurt Cobain vs Björk

Time to go again with two more cultural icons that will face off with only my spurious criteria to separate them and only one winner emerging victorious. Can the King of Grunge defeat the Icelandic Queen? Is ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ more vital than ‘Big Time Sensuality’? And if Cobain is made of armpit farts and heroin, and Björk is made of volcanic lava and lemonade, then who comes out on top in a toe-to-toe musical throwdown?

Only one way to find out…

That Voice:

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I need a little fragility in a voice to connect. If I were to try and concoct Kurt’s voice in a lab then I guess I would pour the following ingredients into a beaker:

·       Two hundred thousand Marlboro

·       A bucket of patio cleaner

·       A few kilos of gravel

·       Some cacti

All that is missing from the above is the requisite amount of emotional pain to make the words sound tortured enough to appeal to pretty much any teen who didn’t grow up with a pony.

My favourite Nirvana listen is the Unplugged one which actually puts Kurt’s voice front and centre, allowing us to get close. The pain is right there in our ears: too raw, too haunted, too exposed, to make it comfortable listening. The song that closes the album – ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ – is the sound of someone singing in the abyss knowing the rescue party are never going to come.

You got pain? Share it with Cobain. He has a voice that can make your suffering seem like a smaller thing; you can’t compete. So, would I know this voice, if he was in a tree singing as I passed underneath his tree? Yes. Would I stop to listen in wonder or hurry along? Hurry along, actually – Kurt, you spooked me.

And I think I liked it…

Score: 8/10

I first heard Björk’s voice on John Peel’s radio show singing ‘Birthday’ (1987) when she was in The Sugarcubes. The chorus was a series of drawn out yelps and groans that showed Björk’s range to be that of some supernatural sprite. She sounded like she lived alone in an enchanted castle on top of a hill with only her own voice for company. As I imagine her dancing around the castle and singing to herself, a giant were-rabbit hops about outside and eats any visitors as if they were fleshy carrots.

At least, that’s what I understood from first hearing Björk sing. Sometimes, your mind has to fill in the gaps (especially back then when the internet and its awful ability to show you everything at any moment was still a distant dystopian dream). The Sugarcubes split up in 1992, so Björk has been a solo artist ever since. Her mega-hits – ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ & ‘Big Time Sensuality’ & ‘Play Dead’ – let her show off that voice. What makes it so compelling is partly the size of the voice compared to the singer, that and the wobble and grind she can apply to a single note as if putting it through effects pedals.

Would I know it if I heard it coming out of the bread bin as I made my morning coffee? Yes, I do believe I would. Would I release the Slavic-cheekboned punk pixie to cast a song-spell on me and take me back to her castle where she could toy with my body like a bored cat? Yes, definitely. I am weak and even as your plaything, Björk, I might find meaning in my shallow little life.

Score: 8/10

Wordsmithery

Underneath the bridge / The tarp has sprung a leak / And the animals I’ve trapped / Have all become my pets /And I’m living off of grass / And the drippings from the ceiling / It’s okay to eat fish / ‘Cause they don’t have any feelings.

The above lyrics come from ‘Something In The Way’ and, for me, it’s not hard to conflate the singer and the person – the image of the homeless, desperate, survivalist is not a giant leap away from Kurt as rootless, unhappy, heroin-addicted, musician. But it is also a brilliant verse of poetry, each line building on the last and ending with a rather sardonic kick in the teeth for pescatarians everywhere.

Polly wants a cracker / I think I should get off her first / I think she wants some water / To put out the blow torch

Isn't me, have a seed / Let me clip your dirty wings / Let me take a ride, cut yourself / Want some help, please myself / Got some rope, haven't told / Promise you, have been true / Let me take a ride, cut yourself / Want some help, please myself

Take one peek at Kurt Cobain and know that he isn’t going to be painting you a picture of nirvana at all. The lyrics here are from ‘Polly’ and his ‘bird’ is down in the gutter with him (Courtney Love?), sharing in the self-abuse, the self-harm, the neglect and self-loathing that goes along with addiction. As a song, however, its matter-of-factness has Kurt’s deadpan delivery to do it justice. This is me and the black well I live in, it declares; take a peek if you dare but don’t complain at what you see.

Cobain might not be a reader of obscure French literature (a la Morrissey) but he could nail down the grunge scene in words that made all those kids with long fringes and battered skateboards feel like they had someone who knew how they felt in early-90s Amerika.

Score: 6/10

She lives in this house over there / Has her world outside it / Scrabbles in the earth with her fingers and her mouth / She's five years old

Threads worms on a string / Keeps spiders in her pocket / Collects fly wings in a jar / Scrubs horse flies / And pinches them on a line/ Ohhh...!

She has one friend, he lives next door / They're listening to the weather / He knows how many freckles she's got / She scratches his beard

She's painting huge books /And glues them together / They saw a big raven / It glided down the sky / She touched it / Ohh...!

Today is her birthday / They're smoking cigars / He's got a chain of flowers / And sews a bird in her knickers / Ohhh...!

And thus Björk and The Sugarcubes announced themselves to the world. ‘Ohh..!’ indeed!

This picture of a ‘friendship’ between a five year old girl and some bearded guy that lives next door culminates in them smoking cigars together before he sews a bird into her underwear. Nothing at all to concern the Daily Mail crowd here, then… Strangely, it is not a million miles away from the dark imagery of Kurt in ‘Something In The Way’ although Björk seems to be channelling her inner Ian McEwan rather more furiously.

I'm a fountain of blood / In the shape of a girl / You're the bird on the brim / Hypnotised by the whirl

Drink me, make me feel real / Wet your beak in the stream/ Game we're playing is life / Love's a two-way dream

You won’t find Kylie describing herself as ‘a fountain of blood’ to open a song that’s for sure. Iceland has a rich vein of magical folklore to draw upon, including witches, elves, trolls and human/animal transformation, so it’s no surprise Björk channels these influences in her song writing. The fact that Björk sings with a supernatural voice lends itself to lyrics such as these.

She is, I discovered, not averse to drawing on a wide range of influences for her lyrics from the poetry of e.e.cummings to plundering Crave, a play by Sarah Kane, which has a list of themes that Kylie might not approach for her next disco banger: rape, incest, paedophilia, anorexia, drug addiction, mental instability, murder, and suicide

However, for each set of lyrics that go deep and wide there is plenty of rather plain-sounding stuff that bears little scrutiny. As her voice is an instrument itself, maybe there is a tendency to let it do the heavy lifting and convey meaning and emotion regardless of the lyrics.

Score: 6/10

Pound of Flesh

It’s no secret that Kurt Cobain’s relationship to his own body was one defined by disgust. A longstanding stomach complaint, and the accompanying pain and medication, meant Cobain carried himself through the world like a wounded animal. His drug and alcohol intake was a ‘fuck you’ to himself, to the broken-down vehicle that was his body.

On stage, Cobain did more than strum his guitar and stand behind his microphone. He could make his rage a visceral stage performance, try and break himself for the broken people in the crowd. He may have not done much more than many other rockers – thrash his guitar, fling his fringe about - but although it never looked like he was going through the motions, there must have been times when he didn’t want to be out there. Beyond strutting around and straining his vocal chords, though, he wasn’t going to be flashing the flesh like Kylie or swinging off a trapeze because the fans deserve a ‘performance.’ Grunge as a genre was never going to embrace the trappings of theatre.

If Catholics believe that the sacrament is partaking of the flesh of Jesus Christ, then maybe it is not stretching things too far to suggest that when our beloved rock messiahs annihilate themselves with drugs and alcohol, we like to share in their suffering by wearing the same clothes and buying the records and listening to them (whilst often also taking the same drugs as our idols). Kurt’s pound of flesh, whipped and eviscerated, is our pound of flesh. He just had the talent; we got to watch him disintegrate.

In the end, however, Cobain’s self-annihilation wasn’t in the service of his music so no extra points for putting himself through the mangler.

Score: 4/10

Björk strikes me as too clever and self-respecting to walk on stage or appear on an album cover with her sexuality weaponised to shift more units. The fact you could cut cheese on those cheekbones was irrelevant; the Icelandic punk princess was never going to become a volcanic vixen. Her first band was named Spit and Snot and if your roots are punk there’s only so far you’re likely to go down the Kylie-road to near-nakedness.

I guess the only thing to say here is that Björk makes no attempt to hide by getting her kit off. Instead, she lets us focus on her voice and exposes herself this way, the voice as the doorway to the ethereal world where that creepy paedophile is throwing a birthday party for that little girl but also a world where trolls let snowflakes fall on their tongues. If you were put on Earth to entertain the earthlings by some wonderful cosmic entity, then flashing your nipples during your half-time Superbowl performance is just a trashy use of your talent.

As a stage performer, who sings with the backing of various instrumentalists, she does little more than float about the stage but although throwing herself around might have made more of a performance, it would only have detracted from the voice if she was breathless and unable to give full range to her singing.

Still, can’t bump up her score more than…

Score: 3/10

Design Aesthetic

If Nirvana defined the image of grunge then it was at least one that anybody could adopt:

·       Grow your hair to your shoulders or thereabouts

·       Don’t wash it, or your clothes

·       Put things in your body to see if it dies

·       Look bored

The nihilism of the music married to the nihilism of the look. Don’t try; drop out then die. I guess a few points are gained for the cover of Nevermind and that iconic little grasping baby chasing the American dollar-dream but the heights of Spinal Tap-ism – overarching concept album with correlating stage set – was never likely to happen.

Score: 2/10

Björk is the artist with a vision. She likes to reinvent herself for each new album and change direction musically and visually. In short, she likes dressing up. In the video for ‘Human Behaviour’ there is a quick glimpse of many little cocoon-Björks wriggling around in a nest. Impossible to know her intention for that one but it amused me for a bit. For ‘The Gate’ video she is wearing a dress which took 550 hours to make, with 25,000 Swarovski crystals attached.

So what? you might say; any rich pop star might make similar extravagant gestures and, of course, there are myriad diva stories of indulgent, excessive spending on dressing-up costumes but with Björk I get the feeling the look is the performance and the message and the mood.

Not convinced? Well, let me conclude my argument with this: for her album Homogenic, Björk rang Alexander McQueen, then a little-known designer and Nick Knight, a photographer, and she explained her feelings and ideas about the music with the hope they could come up with something for the album cover. The result is a wild blend of geisha girl, Maasai neck rings, and hair inspired by Native American women of the Hopi and Tewa tribes to show her global influences and desire to portray something about the person she had become.

I guess when it’s just you up there and out there, you can’t keep turning up in your jeans or your old dressing gown. Still, my favourite thing about Björk might be that she wore a dress that looked like a dead swan to the Academy Awards and chose her moment in the spotlight to lay an egg on the red carpet. Mad? Yes, but also very funny when you consider the rather stuffed-shirt atmosphere of these events. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Björk lay an actual egg and for it to hatch with a half-dragon, half-spider emerging to eat the watching paparazzi by chewing their heads off as Björk improvises a jazz album over the top of their screams.

Score: 7/10

Carved a Space

I am speaking here as a white male born into a modern capitalist society, but I think all teenagers who share these beginnings should have that band they listen to in their teens that let them know that, ‘Yes, life is shit and meaningless but here is some music that gives shape to your angst-y rage tantrums’. Of course, it’s important to stop feeling like that at some point otherwise the obvious end point is the ‘stupid club’ of young dead wastrels. But while you are in that maelstrom of hormones and nihilistic stupidity, you need some music accompany your drug intake and to pogo about to at house parties with the lights off, throwing beer over everyone and stamping on each other’s scuffed boots.

I even like the fact that Nirvana can write a song like ‘In Bloom’ that openly despises its own fans for blindly liking their music. Nihilism has to destroy everything including itself and so when you hate everything, including yourself, it’s inevitable that Kurt ended things the way he did.

Personally, I like to judge a rock band by what else they can do except playing really fucking loud and fast so, again, I refer you back to MTV Unplugged and Nirvana operating on a different plane. Here they are intimate, slower, and softer, and without the wall of noise, Kurt sounds even more raw, even more pained, even better than ever, at least to me.

Did they change the world? No, of course not. Were they important? Yes, I think so. Grunge grew like a filthy mushroom in the shadows where the light of capitalism never dared shine. A space where the losers and drug-sniffers and lowlifes could be themselves, beautiful and ephemeral as moths, things of darkness who got their wings scorched and fell silently to earth.

Score: 7/10

Musically, Björk is a chameleon, shifting her colours to match her new surroundings, the world changing around her. Whilst never imitating, she was always adopting new elements into her music from jazz to punk to house. What linked it all was herself and that unmistakable voice that shifted up and down the register from howl to growl to screech to soaring birdsong.

I like to imagine that Odin pushed her into our world through some glacial fissure in an Icelandic lake and that when she emerged out of the water, all the fish wept to lose her. In a way, she has been too elusive to become iconic, a shape-shifter slipping in and out of our sight but she, too, did an MTV Unplugged and to see her there, barefoot on stage in a little yellow dress is to be reminded that Björk was somehow too natural for the synthesised world that we now inhabit, too hewn out of Icelandic rock and folklore to connect fully with the dull humans staggering around at bus stops and staring stupidly at their phones.

Maybe we couldn’t connect because she was just too cosmic.

Score: 5/10

Total score:

Kurt Cobain: 27                Björk: 28

I fell in love with Björk’s voice on first listen. Who the fuck is that, I thought, listening to ‘Birthday’. I bought the 12inch and found it had a collaboration with the Jesus & Mary Chain on the B side, showing her nascent desire to hook up with people she admired. Going through Björk’s back catalogue for the purpose of writing this, I found out how little of her music I had actually heard since about 1996. I found her output a mixed bag, to be honest, but I still love that voice and a lot of the videos are great.

Nevermind came out when I started university and it was on the jukebox all the time in my first year to the point where I couldn’t stand to hear any of it. So I went away from Nirvana for a long while. A friend working in a CD factory then gave me a free copy of MTV Unplugged and I found that I liked that a lot more and still do.

I tried reading a Kurt Cobain biography a couple of years ago but gave up. He wasn’t a nice kid, turned into a malformed adult, then a poor parent, and about halfway through I couldn’t bear to read anymore. It’s not like I didn’t know the ending and reading towards it was like observing a slow-motion car crash. Still, I am a sucker for the live-fast-die-young mythology and my inner nihilist keeps a corner of my heart permanently rooting for Kurt, asking him, like Jesus, to die for my sins.