About a Son: Kurt Cobain
in His Own Words

April 26, 2008

Emily presses me about how I can admire Kurt Cobain.. a guy who seemed to radiate negativity. I was asking myself that question as I watched Kurt Cobain: About a Son.. and I have no great answer. I can't say that the interviews, recorded on audio tape between December 1992 and March 1993, do a lot to get Cobain into focus. The topics stay close to the basic outline of Cobain's life.. and while Cobain gets plenty of time to rant about reporters or stupid people, we never really encounter a surprising illumination. At the end of the documentary we read that these interviews were done mostly late at night "between midnight and dawn".. implying perhaps that these were full of late night, guard-down insights. But I generally had the feeling that these were topics Cobain had been over many times. The evasions with respect to his drug use could be maddening and I knew from the Cobain biography by Charles Cross that many of his stories were questionable (such as the one about living under the bridge).

The filmmakers thus had an odd cultural artifact on their hands. They had the eerie voice of Kurt Cobain describing his life, but at times with suspect truthfulness and at all times with a certain flatness. They made the interesting choice of allowing the words to float in our ears, accompanied by beautiful images taken from the various places Cobain lived, principally Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle. The words themselves were broken up by snatches of music that meant something to Cobain, from Queen to punk to Leadbelly. The documentary thus adds rich specificity and detail to an audio interview that sorely lacks that. The bareness of Cobain's responses to the world contrast oddly with the images of diverse people going about their lives. If we were meant to think that Cobain's voice can give insight into all this stuff, and that this world would somehow look small in comparison with the truthfulness of Cobain's barbs and pain.. they were wrong. It is Cobain's barbs and pain.. even the mysterious stomach ailment.. that start to seem small in comparison to the ordinary life of this world.