For someone who's been dead for 13 years, Kurt Cobain is on quite a hot streak: Last October, Forbes anointed him the top-earning dead celebrity of 2006-- mostly thanks to widow Courtney Love selling off her 25% of his publishing rights, but also to a Nirvana catalogue that still moves over a million units annually. And earlier this year, when British advertising firm Saatchi + Saatchi appropriated his image for a controversial Doc Martens campaign, the ensuing uproar-- and subsequent withdrawal of the ads-- showed that Cobain's non-conformist ideals could still redeem him from beyond the grave.
Of course, as the legacies of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix have shown, it's inevitable that a brief superstar music career will be transformed into a sustainable, posthumous cottage industry that sells myth as merch. But in Cobain's case that process has been particularly accelerated: In the past decade we've already seen a hackneyed conspiracy-theory documentary (Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney), a thorough, sensitive biography (Charles Cross' Heavier Than Heaven), the 2002 publication of Cobain's journals and a demo-saturated three-CD Nirvana box set (2004's With the Lights Out) that felt more like an invasive, archeological excavation than a definitive overview of a band's work.
So what can AJ Schnack's new Cobain documentary, About a Son, contribute to this hagiography? Unlike the aforementioned works, it has the uncanny effect of making its subject seem like he's still alive. By setting revelatory audio interviews with Cobain-- conducted by writer Michael Azerrad for his 1993 Nirvana book, Come as You Are-- to contemporary, serene images of the cities he inhabited (Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle), the film relates Cobain's experiences in those places to the faces of those who live there today, suggesting a history that's still in the process of being written. And it does this without ever showing Cobain's face (at least not till the credits) or using a note of his music on the soundtrack.
Following a suitably melancholic acoustic overture by Steve Fisk and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, About a Son itemizes the significant phases in Cobain's life with the songs that soundtracked them: his blue-collar background (Arlo Guthrie's "Motorcylce Song", CCR's "Up Around the Bend"), his punk-rock epiphanies (the Melvins' "Eye Flys" and Bad Brains' "Banned in DC"), his equally fervent embrace of K Records-style naïve-pop (Half Japanese's "Put Some Sugar On It" and future Nirvana cover "Son of a Gun" by the Vaselines) and his idealized notion of fusing post-hardcore dissonance with classic-rock conventions (epitomized here by Butthole Surfers' "Graveyard" and Scratch Acid's "Owner's Lament", the latter of which Cobain describes as "like an Aerosmith song, but really fucked up.") Mixed with excerpted conversations from the film, the overall effect is essentially that of a Cobain-curated edition of Late Night Tales or Back to Mine-- and makes for a handy crash course in 1980s underground rock for new Nirvana fans who've never filled out a Touch & Go mail-order form.
But as the storyline progresses toward Nirvana's major-label courtship and post-Nevermind success, the song selection becomes more symbolic than biographical, and the relationship between the film and soundtrack album becomes more muddled, due to a lack of explanatory commentary. Though the soundtrack features various Cobain quotes about fame and media scrutiny, it skips over key, candid conversations about falling in love with Courtney (perfectly soundtracked in the film by Teenage Fanclub's "Star Sign", which isn't featured here), his heroin use and disillusionment with Nirvana.
The inclusion of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" and Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues" speak for themselves as narrative devices, but the appearance of Iggy Pop's outsider anthem "The Passenger" feels random when heard without Cobain's accompanying story about an awkward meeting with Capitol Records. And while Mark Lanegan's 1990 ballad "Museum" makes for a fitting credit-roll hymn, the album is appended with a campfire singalong from Gibbard, a cover of Beat Happening's "Indian Summer". Its appearance here seems almost incongruous given its unabashedly sentimental presentation, and the fact that other, more representative songs from the film (Queen's "It's Late", the Breeders' "Iris") didn't make the album cut. It's not always a soundtrack's job to tell the exact same story of its film, but with a more considered use of contextual quotes and a slightly more expanded song selection, About a Son could've achieved that ultimate ideal of a soundtrack that makes those who haven't seen the film feel like they have.
Of course, as the legacies of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix have shown, it's inevitable that a brief superstar music career will be transformed into a sustainable, posthumous cottage industry that sells myth as merch. But in Cobain's case that process has been particularly accelerated: In the past decade we've already seen a hackneyed conspiracy-theory documentary (Nick Broomfield's Kurt and Courtney), a thorough, sensitive biography (Charles Cross' Heavier Than Heaven), the 2002 publication of Cobain's journals and a demo-saturated three-CD Nirvana box set (2004's With the Lights Out) that felt more like an invasive, archeological excavation than a definitive overview of a band's work.
So what can AJ Schnack's new Cobain documentary, About a Son, contribute to this hagiography? Unlike the aforementioned works, it has the uncanny effect of making its subject seem like he's still alive. By setting revelatory audio interviews with Cobain-- conducted by writer Michael Azerrad for his 1993 Nirvana book, Come as You Are-- to contemporary, serene images of the cities he inhabited (Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle), the film relates Cobain's experiences in those places to the faces of those who live there today, suggesting a history that's still in the process of being written. And it does this without ever showing Cobain's face (at least not till the credits) or using a note of his music on the soundtrack.
Following a suitably melancholic acoustic overture by Steve Fisk and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, About a Son itemizes the significant phases in Cobain's life with the songs that soundtracked them: his blue-collar background (Arlo Guthrie's "Motorcylce Song", CCR's "Up Around the Bend"), his punk-rock epiphanies (the Melvins' "Eye Flys" and Bad Brains' "Banned in DC"), his equally fervent embrace of K Records-style naïve-pop (Half Japanese's "Put Some Sugar On It" and future Nirvana cover "Son of a Gun" by the Vaselines) and his idealized notion of fusing post-hardcore dissonance with classic-rock conventions (epitomized here by Butthole Surfers' "Graveyard" and Scratch Acid's "Owner's Lament", the latter of which Cobain describes as "like an Aerosmith song, but really fucked up.") Mixed with excerpted conversations from the film, the overall effect is essentially that of a Cobain-curated edition of Late Night Tales or Back to Mine-- and makes for a handy crash course in 1980s underground rock for new Nirvana fans who've never filled out a Touch & Go mail-order form.
But as the storyline progresses toward Nirvana's major-label courtship and post-Nevermind success, the song selection becomes more symbolic than biographical, and the relationship between the film and soundtrack album becomes more muddled, due to a lack of explanatory commentary. Though the soundtrack features various Cobain quotes about fame and media scrutiny, it skips over key, candid conversations about falling in love with Courtney (perfectly soundtracked in the film by Teenage Fanclub's "Star Sign", which isn't featured here), his heroin use and disillusionment with Nirvana.
The inclusion of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" and Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues" speak for themselves as narrative devices, but the appearance of Iggy Pop's outsider anthem "The Passenger" feels random when heard without Cobain's accompanying story about an awkward meeting with Capitol Records. And while Mark Lanegan's 1990 ballad "Museum" makes for a fitting credit-roll hymn, the album is appended with a campfire singalong from Gibbard, a cover of Beat Happening's "Indian Summer". Its appearance here seems almost incongruous given its unabashedly sentimental presentation, and the fact that other, more representative songs from the film (Queen's "It's Late", the Breeders' "Iris") didn't make the album cut. It's not always a soundtrack's job to tell the exact same story of its film, but with a more considered use of contextual quotes and a slightly more expanded song selection, About a Son could've achieved that ultimate ideal of a soundtrack that makes those who haven't seen the film feel like they have.
没有评论:
发表评论