Munchkin voices, yodeling, a meditation on sea monkeys and Paula Abdul, distracted guitar playing, a phone call for his girlfriend that interrupts a “recording session” — if that sounds compelling, Kurt Cobain’s “Montage of Heck — The Home Recordings” (Universal) is for you.
“The Home Recordings” is a companion to director Brett Morgen’s authorized Cobain documentary, “Montage of Heck.” Morgen was given access to Cobain’s massive archive, which contained about 200 hours of tape. Now they’ve been condensed into a 13-track CD, a double vinyl album and a 31-track box set.
Those fascinated by the prospect of playing fly-on-the-wall voyeur to Cobain’s creative process may be mildly intrigued at first. By presenting Cobain in this vulnerable setting — alone, unedited and unscrutinized, his mind wandering where it will — “The Home Recordings” aims to illuminate process, the missing link between inspiration and finished recording. Cobain, Nirvana’s singer and guitarist, killed himself in 1994 at age 27, leaving behind a small but influential body of work that decades later continues to fascinate, influence and sell.
And selling seems to be the sole reason for this collection of scraps to exist. It quickly becomes apparent that most of these low-fi recordings are just Cobain goofing and daydreaming, distractedly playing his guitar and breaking into strange voices for his own amusement while sitting on the couch and watching TV (his preferred work method, as he stated in several interviews). He veers in and out of focus, his fingers wandering across the fret board.
There are moments of clarity: a cover of the Beatles’ “And I Love Her” that hovers like a gray cloud; a delicate early version of “Sappy” the bones of a previously unreleased song, “She Only Lies,” with a distinctive bass line; an autobiographical monologue, “Aberdeen,” brimming with teenage bile that was first heard in Morgen’s documentary. “I hated everyone because they were so phony,” Cobain says in a deadpan voice that conveys humor and steely conviction. The singer’s depression has been well-documented but little understood, and it’s moments like this that underline his haunted complexity.
Most of the rest portrays an artist in search of something, but who knows what. He sounds bored, so he resorts to amusing himself any which he can, whether it’s the noisy tape collage of “Montage of Kurt” or the Stooges riff in “Scoff.” Boredom itself is the subject of “Rehash,” a pseudo-metal rant against pop formula.
Most of it might fascinate for a listen or two, but presenting this as new work at top-end retail prices is the type of barrel-scraping exploitation that would’ve made the ever-wary Cobain wretch. Of course, plenty of dead rock stars have had their legacies desecrated posthumously. The keepers of their “legacies,” whether they be record companies, executors, family members or some combination of the above, usually convince themselves that there continues to be serious interest in the deceased artist’s work, and so they dutifully flood the market with leftover recordings. In Cobain’s case, he never signed even a simple will declaring how his hundreds of millions of dollars in assets should be handled after his death, so it’s up to his family to decide.
One expects this sort of exploitive behavior from major record companies (Universal Records, in this case), where making a buck usually has little to do with “what the artist would’ve wanted the world to hear.” But this detritus was released with the blessing of Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, and only child, Frances Bean, which makes it all the more distressing.
At a certain point, questions of taste need to be raised in the way the legacies of dead artists become revenue streams for their survivors. Did the world really need several hundred posthumous Jimi Hendrix recordings (versus the four albums he released in his lifetime)? Multiple repackagings of Elvis Presley’s increasingly desperate output? A total of 14 documentary movies and a half-dozen albums released with the Tupac Shakur “brand” after the rapper’s shooting death in 1996?
The laws of capitalism tell us it’s all fair game. There are hard-core fans of these artists who will buy anything bearing their image, whether it’s Jerry Garcia underwear or Selena prayer candles. And now there’s a recording of Kurt Cobain talking about sea monkeys and Paula Abdul, and it can be yours for $16.99.
“Montage of Heck”
Kurt Cobain
1 star (out of 4)
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