But certainly his death accelerated his devolution from human being to unit-shifter, and in 2005, Forbes.com recently reported, he had his best year yet, raking in $50 million to beat out Elvis Presley for the title of top-earning dead celebrity. For 12 years now, or four times longer than Kurt Cobain existed as a living, breathing pop-culture icon, he has existed primarily as product. What, one wonders, would the man who once embodied the populist immediacy of punk make of his current status as high-end fetish object? Would he laugh at his brazenly exhumed journal entries done up as tastefully austere museum-show catalogs? Sneer at the speculators who've bought and flipped everything from his childhood drawings to his old W-2 forms?
Oh, well, whatever, never mind —as long as there's an upside for certifiable relics and newly minted collectibles, no genuine Kurt Cobain Post-It Note will ever rest in peace. In general, the purveyors of such products treat Cobain with preposterous reverence—it's a necessary part of doing business when the price per vintage fax message starts at $15,000. But there's no mystery about the end results of such unrestricted wheeling and dealing. The person behind the artifacts recedes into the brand and the brand becomes more and more elastic, something you can slap on anything, and then it's only a matter of time before you end up with stuff like Rockabye Baby!: Lullaby Renditions of Nirvana.
Out this month, this CD reconfigures "Come as You Are," "Lithium" and eight other Cobain originals for unconscious infants. "Chimes, glockenspiels and other gentle instruments temper Nirvana's wild spirit for your little one ..." the album's promotional copy informs. "Smells like nap time." And just like that, some of the most despairing anthems to ever go multiplatinum are rendered as kitsch. And utilitarian child-rearing kitsch at that! But as long as the proper royalties are paid, well, where's the harm, right? Unless you've got some issue with naps ...
Nor is Cobain being singled out with special malice. The record is part of a series: Metallica, The Beach Boys and Tool, among others, are presented as $16.98 aural pacifiers, too. From a purely musical perspective, Nirvana makes the transition well enough. Stripped of Cobain's vocals and Dave Grohl's pace-setting percussion, with mellotrons and vibraphones body-doubling for the usual guitars and bass, the songs have a soothing, stately melancholy that probably works great for knocking out colicky tots. In addition, the idea of Nirvana as lullaby fodder is hardly a stretch—even when Cobain was screaming like a torture victim battling a migraine and 10 ingrown toenails, there was something intimate about his voice, something as warm and worn and familiar as an old blanket.
But even at his gentlest, on tracks like "Something in the Way" and "Dumb," Cobain was hardly a dispenser of hugs, uplift or even just keep-on-keepin'-on perseverance. Instead, he was a confirmed misanthrope. "I'm pissed off about everything in general," he says in Kurt Cobain: About a Son, a new documentary that is built around audiotape interviews he did with journalist Michael Azerrad in 1993 and which recently debuted at the Toronto Film Festival. "And so all these songs are pretty much about my battle with the things that piss me off. And that's just the theme of the whole album—of every album I do ..."
Rock 'n' roll is hardly about to run out of nihilism, but how many artists project it with the vitality and obsessiveness that Cobain did? Certainly he could posture with the best of them. Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!, a documentary of Nirvana performances and interviews that was originally released on video in 1994 and is making its DVD debut early next month, shows how petulant and mechanical he and his bandmates could be in the name of punk-rock subversion. He spits on the camera, he deliberately butchers his lyrics on fan favorites, and half the time the group smashes their instruments at the close of their concerts, they look as bored and listless as NBA superstars in the last quarter of the final game of a losing season.
But if Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! catches Cobain in some less-than-inspired moments, it also vividly documents the obliterating, anesthetizing force of his vocals and his unyielding commitment to his bleak vision. Consider, for example, its final haunting frames. At the end of a concert, as the audience cheers, when other rock stars would be pumping their fists in triumph or studiously ignoring the crowd, Cobain is on his hands and knees, clad in a dress that's falling off his skinny shoulders and scuttling around the margins of the stage like a pale, hairy, crab-spider. It's truly remarkable how ugly he was capable of making himself look, a magic trick almost, and in moments like that, it's clear he wasn't just acting: Here was a man who was on intimate terms with despair, self-loathing, pain, sickness, exhaustion, hopelessness.
Ultimately, he decided there was nothing that could sufficiently temper his misery or his boredom, or whatever it was that made him feel like life was no longer worth living. Cobain was perceptive and megalomaniacal enough to anticipate the deification his early exit would prompt, and he must have known his work and image would be appropriated in silly, greedy, depressing ways. If anything might have kept him going, one imagines, this (along with fatherhood) was it. In life, Cobain could maintain control over his vision, or at least curse out those who co-opted it. In death, he would open the door for all manner of exploitation and creative plunder. Alas, even the appalling specter of lullabies CDs could not prevent him from pulling the trigger. Or who knows? Maybe it was the grim inevitability of such stuff, no matter what he did, that finally pushed him over the edge.