Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Rock star is among the most over(mis)used phrases in our language. Even rock music hasn’t produced many figures worthy of that description this century. Arguably, the last rock star was Kurt Cobain—and he wasn’t sure he wanted the job!
That ambivalence is often present in the conversations collected in Kurt Coban: The Last Interview. “Alternative music is no longer alternative once it’s in the mainstream,” he said in 1990. He was determinatively alternative—until Nevermind went gold, then platinum. He was already unhappy with many of his new fans in that 1990 interview and wished they would go away.
In a February 1994 interview, only two months before his suicide, Cobain walked that back. “It used to upset me that we were attracting and entertaining the very people that a lot of my music was a reaction against.” There was no sign of what was to come. As shown in The Last Interview, Cobain was an articulate spokesman for Nirvana and the underground ethos of punk through the end.
