Kim Gordon, Kurt Cobain, and the Mythology of Punk

Photograph by Larry BusaccaGetty
Photograph by Larry Busacca/Getty

Some time last spring, not for the first time, I thanked God for Kim Gordon. Along with Lorde, St. Vincent, and Joan Jett, Gordon, a founding member of the band Sonic Youth, had agreed to perform with the surviving members of Nirvana (Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Pat Smear) as part of the ceremony for that band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The choice to have only women stand in for Kurt Cobain felt in keeping with a band defined by inversion—a vigorous, kinetic kind of inversion, where the movement between one thing and its opposite is so dogged, and occurs at such speed, that a third, separate thing emerges from the blur.

The performances with Lorde, St. Vincent, and Jett had an odd, denatured quality that left both song and singer exposed, missing the viscera of the thing and, in effect, the point. For her number, though, Gordon chose “Aneurysm,” not a hit but a B-side, released on the 1992 compilation “Incesticide.” Wearing a black-and-white striped minidress of the sort she favored in the early nineties, Gordon seemed to pull the song from her guts and trap it in her throat, her body switching, bouncing, and lurching to get it free. “Love you so much it makes me sick,” she spat, “Uhhhhhh-huhhhh.” Not a singer, exactly, Gordon was perhaps the only hope for a song like “Aneurysm,” which in the absence of its author requires less a vocalist than a medium for translation.

In the final pages of “Girl in a Band,” Gordon’s sober, ruminative new memoir, she recalls that night. One of her first appearances following her split from her husband and former bandmate, Thurston Moore, for Gordon the performance became “a four-minute-long explosion of grief,” a purge involving both “the furious sadness” of Cobain’s death, twenty years earlier, and the recent end of her nearly thirty-year marriage, her band, and whomever she was inside of both. Afterward, Gordon reports with some pride, Michael Stipe told her that her singing was “the most punk-rock thing to ever happen, or that probably ever will happen, at this event.”

Stipe’s compliment doesn’t work without the dig—“at this event,” that is to say, as part of the institutionalization of an art form designed to tear down institutions, or at least send a steady stream of guitar and cigarette butts their way. (Stipe’s former band, REM, was inducted in 2007.) Cobain “would have hated being a part of” the Hall of Fame business, Gordon reminds us, and yet there they all were, and there we all were, and there I was, feeling saved, but from what?

“Girl in a Band” is in some ways a curious title for Gordon’s memoir. For a kid discovering Sonic Youth in the nineties, a big part of the point of Kim Gordon was that she was a grown woman, a bellwether, it seemed, of the first rock movement within which women would claim an essential place. An artist who saw music as a way to join and perhaps even direct a larger cultural conversation, Gordon sees now that her sense of a secret, mutually reinforcing world of men influenced her creative decisions, that she joined a band in order to “be inside that male dynamic, not staring in through a closed window but looking out.”

Through the smudgy glass that separates musicians from music journalists, Gordon was nevertheless treated as a novelty. “What’s it like to be a girl in a band?” they all asked. How should she know? “Girl in a Band” can be read as a prolonged consideration of that question, the book’s lamentations for lost or never fully known relationships, decades, movements, and identities keenly of a piece with the era it documents in the greatest depth.

“Did the 1990s ever exist?” Experimental music is now a genre, she writes, and one finds songs from the eighties and nineties bundled indiscriminately and sold as a product called The Past. What about the struggle, “hard-won and unself-conscious … through the obstacles of drugs and greed, past clubs of overly burnished bodies and buff teeth,” to do something separate, disheveled, and true? Did it really happen that way? Does it matter? Gordon’s question, part of a late chapter on “where music has gone, where it’s been, how it’s evolved,” seems at odds with her gimlet distrust of rock mythologizing. Which makes it a fitting lament for an era whose conflicted relationship to popular mythology formed the basis of a late—if not rock music’s final—mass cult.

Gordon describes feeling an immediate kinship with Kurt Cobain, “one of those mutual I-can-tell-you-are-a-super-sensitive-and-emotional-person-too sorts of connections.” It was also something of a maternal bond, and she writes tenderly of it and of Kurt himself. Their shared self-consciousness about adopting a public persona, and their sensitivity to rock-and-roll clichés, puts a unique pressure on the attempt to tell their stories.

“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” (airing on May 4th on HBO), the first authorized documentary portrait of its subject, offers a study of how the anti-mythology mythology surrounding Gordon and Cobain took shape, and found its patron saint. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film makes abundant and often striking use of private footage, writing, and recordings—primary materials that, together with animation, kitsch-heavy montage, raw and imaginatively reworked versions of Cobain’s songs, and interviews with family and friends, form a kind of bio-collage of a man whose life and art, so perilously fused, seemed always at the point of flying apart.

Both Gordon and Cobain emerged from their childhoods with a morbid fear of embarrassment. Gordon describes the ridicule and humiliation she suffered under the spell of her charismatic, mentally ill older brother, Keller; Cobain’s mother, Wendy, claims that his father, Don, belittled and shamed him. His parents’ split mortified seven-year-old Kurt, so fervent was his attachment to the image, the fantasy, of the perfect family. To be embarrassed was to suffer a betrayal, and to betray one’s self. Multiple interviewees point out that Cobain experienced shame as the ultimate threat.

As a songwriter, he returned often to this formative breach, as in “Sliver” and “School,” songs of childhood innocence giving way to rage; lyrics of primal tenderness and disgust set to what Cobain calls “a very powerful, high-energy rock and roll.” He was a perfectionist, his mother says: he had to sing the best, play the best, and be loved the most. Embarrassing qualities, all, for an aspiring punk rocker. “Learn not to play the guitar,” Cobain wrote, in a list of self-admonishments. No chance of unlearning his generation’s tormented relationship to ambition, fame, success, authenticity, influence, performance—a self-consciousness so pervasive that its transcendence occurred against crushing odds, in moments that felt holy as a result.

One such moment: a Christmas scene, shot on home video, from the late eighties, of a family milling about a tree-decked room, genial, cups in hand. The camera pans to catch an entrance, and suddenly there, amid the shoulder pads and squared-off hairstyles, stands Kurt Cobain, a vision of smiling, deeply shocking beauty.

Cobain was appearing in actual documentaries even before true fame arrived. “1991: The Year Punk Broke” documents Nirvana’s stint opening for Sonic Youth on a brief European tour, a month before the release of “Nevermind,” which went on to top the Billboard charts and sell upward of thirty million copies.

In her memoir, Gordon calls the film, released in 1992, “basically a spoof of rockumentaries.” Thurston Moore spends a lot of time wandering the streets with a microphone, the source of much tiresome blather. At one point, he questions a fan about the future of music. “The sixties were real rock and roll,” the fan shrugs. “Now all we can do is copy it.” The rest of the film alternates between concert footage and exaggerated backstage antics, performance and meta-performance, or vice versa, or who knows. The bands complain about their riders; Grohl trashes a table full of food; at one point, Gordon reënacts a campy scene from “Madonna: Truth or Dare,” another concert documentary, released that spring.

“Ninety-one is the year that punk finally breaks … through,” Moore observes, “to the mass consciousness of global society. Modern punk, as featured in Elle magazine. Mötley Crüe singing ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ in a European arena, in front of one hundred thousand screaming people. One of the most sickeningly candy-ass versions you’ll ever hear of it, but it is the song itself.”

The title of the film, then, cuts both ways. By 1991, what we might think of as punk-rock music (Gordon makes very funny reference to a lifetime of watching men argue its pedigree) had been fractured and remade many times over. “Punk rock” became a more general-use term, as slippery as it was sought after. For musicians like Gordon and Cobain, it was the label that proved the rule against labels. “Grunge” and plain old “alternative” were embarrassing, even dangerous; in as far as their music comprised part of a larger movement, described and upheld an ideal, a system of belief and disbelief, much was deferred to punk.

For some—for me, certainly—the deferral proved confusing. Despite itself, punk had acquired its own clichés and mythologies; conspicuous among its freedoms is the freedom to self-destruct. “Punk rock changed everything,” Gordon writes, “including the whole idea of what it meant to be a ‘rock star.’ ” It also created a market for someone like Courtney Love, who has described working as “a punk-rock extra” in eighties films, including “Sid & Nancy,” before she formed her own band, Hole, and married Cobain.

Love and Moore both receive one of Gordon’s highest compliments, together with her harshest scrutiny. Love, “clearly so punk rock,” even despite having once dated Billy Corgan, of the Smashing Pumpkins (“in no way punk rock”), is also a sociopath, someone to avoid, “the kind of person who spent a lot of time growing up staring in the mirror practicing their look for the camera.” Moore, “the true rock and roller, the punkologist,” is also a narcissist, a cheat, and a cliché monger, whose calculated rock-star postures Gordon describes more than once. Elsewhere, Gordon wonders if she had imposed on her husband “a dream, a fantasy,” and “whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It’s made me question my whole life.” There is something reflexive but also, perhaps, an element of genuine disillusionment in Gordon’s description of her book as “the anti-rock memoir.”

Did the nineties ever exist? Immediately following the news of Cobain’s suicide, for the first and last time I contemplated getting a tattoo—some slash against impermanence, the kind sent as a message, to one’s future self, of affinity, of allegiance, or maybe of embarrassment. Nothing less, it seemed, would honor properly the anger and bewilderment of that moment. I saw a question mark, plain and black. I saw it engraved into the inside of my left arm, where I might keep seeing it.

Brett Morgen has described “Montage of Heck” as an attempt to detach Cobain’s life from the legend of his death. But a new myth inevitably takes its place, involving Cobain’s longing for a family and his despair when life with Love and their daughter, Frances, seemed untenable. A scene of Kurt high and nodding off, baby daughter in his lap, reeks of that despair. Heroin, the punk-rock drug. “I feel like people want you to die, because it would be the classic rock-and-roll story,” Cobain says in “Montage of Heck,” as conscious of and embarrassed by the expectations attached to rock stardom as a person has ever been. Morgen does not describe Cobain’s suicide, the note that cites Freddy Mercury, quotes Neil Young, and makes reference to his study of “punk-rock 101.”

Last summer, I spent part of a Sunday afternoon at Linda’s Tavern, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, supposedly the last place Cobain was seen alive. I hadn’t made pilgrimages on previous visits, and wasn’t sure why I’d thought of it this time. Because twenty years is a long time, I suppose, though how long still felt hard to say. The most moving moment of “Montage of Heck,” for me, is during a clip I’ve seen countless times before, of Cobain singing “All Apologies.” The song’s power, undiminished, requires no explanation, as pure now as it was to a teen-age girl with a question mark she would carry for many years—but who wasn’t wrong, at least, about that.