"Having long ago equated failure with credibility, the world's embrace

"Having long ago equated failure with credibility, the world's embrace

carried its own kind of rebuke. ... (He leaves) a legacy of self-expression as

moving and true as his end was tragic." – music critic Jim Farber

The death of Seattle-based, so called “grunge rock” musician Kurt Cobain of a self inflicted gunshot wound on April 8^th 1994, while certainly not the first (or last) death of a contemporary pop-star or other young public figure, is important in that it was the first such death which occurred during the 24-hour, cable news driven modern news matrix. Further it was the first death of the generation of pop-stars, which emerged from the MTV watching, video-game obsessed, nostalgia infatuated “Star Wars” generation (or more commonly “generation x”). As such I believe it is of interest to explore how this generation dealt with the public, media mediated space of mourning and grief as they (his fans) both constructed that space and had it constructed for them. Using the theoretical filters of Muñoz, Butler and Greenhalgh I would like to look at how the modes of mourning which took place, where in their construction and actions ways of working to dislodge the hegemony, if not with traditional methods of political action, than with new modes, queer modes of creating relationality.

It can be said, and I will in fact argue, that manifestations of grief, as documented by the media but more specifically as performed by social actors, are in the case of the deaths of those whom may have worked outside or to some degree in opposition to the hegemony are inherently ephemeral. This indicates (as signified by the word choice above) that these acts can be seen as performative actions and are thus entail a sense of performativity. As such it will be useful for us to focus on this notion of performativity in these enactments of public grief (and their mediated reenactments in the press) and what those enactments do, not just on what they might mean on a representational level.

This is not to discount the representational mode of cultural and media analysis in regards to this subject, in fact what the idea, the construction, of Kurt Cobain as a popular media figure means is important, in so far as it can help indicate why various social actors (specifically fans) felt the need to enact public performances of grief and morning as well as why (and how) the press chose to cover the story of his death and these public performances. In actually looking at these performances of mourning, however, the question of what they do in the world provides more fruitful ends (or at least, the tantalizing beginnings of roots that may lead to such fruit bearing trees).

As José Muñoz outlines in his short work Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts; that which is ephemeral is often seen by the dominant powers as lacking in meaning or import do to the lack of necessary evidence and adherence to “rigorous” scholarly archives[i]. In the case of the public mourning of a “rock-star” one whom appealed to audiences which saw themselves as marginalized or otherwise discounted by the dominant, the only outlets the mourners had open to them for public grieving with each other were not the churches, temples and mosques traditionally set aside for such public displays of grief but instead ad hoc slices of the public sphere such as street corners, parks, record stores and music clubs. As such, and as I shall detail below these public acts of coming together in mourning, these performances could only materialize themselves in such ways that were ephemeral, lacking in the permanence of engraved monuments, instead living in the here and now of candles, photographs, handwritten notes and flowers. In accordance, following a synopsis of the coverage of Cobain’s death, the acts of public mourning which transpired following Cobain’s death and how they both fed off of each other, we shall return to the idea of the Ephemeral as enumerated by Dr. Muñoz and explore how this matrix of understanding can help us to understand what it was that the performance of mourning may have done.

The discovery of Cobain’s body by an electrician who had come to his house to do prescheduled work on the morning of April 8^th 1994 was reported early that afternoon on the Music Television Network (MTV) which then cut into its regularly scheduled broadcasts to report on the news and show a televised tribute (that had evidently been created previously in anticipation of his death)[ii]. At the same time, radio stations where also interrupting their schedule to report on the news, play the songs of Cobain’s band (Nirvana) and at least a handful also took calls from distraught fans[iii]. In this way, most of the fans, who would later enact public performances of grief first heard of their idols death through the media, in particular through media that is aimed at the culture of youth (rock and roll radio and MTV). While no transcripts of these various youth media outlets are currently available, it can be assumed that they mirror the UPI and AP wire stories that first broadcast the news as far as factual content and quotations, if not in regards to framing of such.

In both wire stories Cobain is depicted, in the words of the Associated Press, as “an overnight spokesman for a disaffected generation of young Americans” and then go on to explicate his discomfort with this role. His struggles with depression, drugs and fame were well documented and his predilection for self-destruction was widely suspected (as evidenced by MTV’s “ready to go” retrospective of his life and work). Of course wrapped up in this narrative, which was woven by the media, were his forbearers in rock and roll’s (short but powerful) history of self-destruction. In the UPI, AP, New York Times and USA Today various mentions were made of the premature deaths of The Door’s Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendricks and Janis Joplin. Cobain’s mother herself alluded to the meta-narrative of rock and roll which her son now joined reportedly saying “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club… I told him not to join that stupid club”[iv].

This, of course, not only placed Cobain’s death within the narrative of young dead rock and roll stars but in the larger narrative of young entertainers deaths (such as James Dean) and even more broadly into the, not uniquely but certainly perfected, American archetype of the young, dead, anti-hero. In this way Cobain’s death (as well as the others mentioned) was structured by the press accounts as the young idealist, thrust into fame like a wide eyed doe on a New Jersey back road caught in the oncoming lights of the speeding SUV of American popular culture and the industry which supports (and is supported by) it.

In this narrative, as best laid out by the authoritative New York Times obituary (written by Timothy Egan) which ran above-the-fold on page A1 the day following the discovery of Cobain’s body, we have the small town song writer and rebellious rock and roller who “Dressed in thrift-shop plaid shirts… [and] raged against the material and synthetic trappings of pop music” (ellipse and brackets added) and then goes on to credit him (and his group) with saving rock and roll from a commercialized, decadent death of it’s own[v]. The narrative continues (in the New York Times rendition, though it was mirrored in tone and premise by all the obituaries I examined) with the young man, railing against the comodification of culture becoming a commodity himself. The Times obituary goes on to quote him as saying “I think we look ridiculous already” and expressing a rejection of his fame “I do not want to have a long career if I have to put up with the same stuff I have been putting up with”. The article then litanizes the various drug addictions, suicide attempts and bouts of depression that came with Cobain’s inability to reconcile his humble, anti-corporate beginnings with his mega-stardom.

I outline the manner in which Cobain was constructed in death (by no less a national authority than The New York Times) not to belittle his existential pain, but instead to begin to suss out the narrative themes that the press made out of his story. I remember clearly, sitting on the couch after school one spring day, riveted to the television watching MTV’s voice of journalistic authority, Kurt Loder, detail much the same story (his vaguely British intonations becoming more pronounced than usual, at least in my memory, adding a certain gravitas to the channel which was more at home with the rambunctious cartoon antics of Beavis and Butthead). As such we have both the (normally dour) New York Times and the (usually rambunctious) MTV both constructing a similar narrative, of a young artist, sensitive and anti-corporate in his beliefs and actions being crushed by the machine that is American corporate music. The story is framed as a warning, a fable, which in its effect serves to remind the youthful (in the case of MTV and rock and roll radio stations) and (perhaps) not so youthful readers of The New York Times (as well as the other print stories which mirrored The Times tone and narrative) that while rock and roll may never die, trying to uphold its amorphous ideals of freedom and fun against the larger hegemony can be deadly.

Turning towards how the fans of Kurt Cobain (and by association the presumed audience for the narrative constructed above) mourned for their fallen hero we see varied instances of ad hoc ephemeral performances of grief. In the hours immediately following the first news reports of his death fans gathered on street corners in Boston, New York, London, Chicago, Seattle and many other cities, playing Cobain’s music on portable radio’s, placing handwritten notes besides candles, flowers and incense.[vi] An attendee at an ad hoc gathering outside a Tower Records in Seattle was quoted as saying she was “Just drawn to this place right now”[vii]. It is interesting to note the places that “drew” people were often outside commercial sites with a link to the commercialization of the music that Cobain made (and of which, according to the press narrative constructed, contributed to his demise), perhaps related to the minimization of spaces where The Other could exist in the margins, outside the normative commercial spaces of the rapidly gentrifying American city in the 1990’s[viii]. In any case, these spaces became occupied with the grieving fans of Cobain and then became filled with the pictures, poems, records, flowers and candles they left there. Such temporary (and as we shall see, ephemeral) “shrines” of mourning, littered with the items catalogued above are not un-common, but nor are they unimportant in what they may show in a matrix of mourning in regards to a public figure. The mourning of Cobain by the public as evidenced by these ad hoc, temporary memorial’s mirrors, in modes if not volume, those of a death his proceeded by four years; Diana Princess of Wales. In her examination of the public spaces of mourning (and in particular the use of flowers) Suzanne Greenhalgh points out that the various objects left, and the very fact that this private act (mourning) became public is in many ways a pastiche of the ways various cultures deal with tragic deaths, stating that such acts “suggest that a perceived sense of cultural difference from the accustomed way of marking death may be a significant part of the initial power of such assemblages…”[ix]. In this way these memorials to Cobain’s suicide had a power in that they were not accepted, they went beyond formalized memorials, funeral services or even the new but hegemonicly accepted MTV montage of his career and rock radio stations playing of his songs. The boundaries between this new form of public mourning and the more accepted forms, in particular the eulogies, songs and caller remembrances offered on the radio, is not one that is static and firm. Once can easily imagine the callers to the Seattle radio station KXRX who had “had lot(s) of emotion”[x] being those that were creating these make shift sites of mourning and remembrance. That same radio station (KXRX) in fact directed its listeners to that corner outside Capital Hill. (Seattle)’s Tower Records as a place where the public was congregating and constructing this public space of grief[xi]. In this way we can begin to see the manner in which the press account of Cobain’s death (and the narrative of his life the media inscribed on it) feed into and fed from these ephemeral spaces of mourning. This is not to say that the media had any ownership of the event(s) and spaces by their reportage, but instead it is meant to show the ways in which this narrative of celebrity death was not only fed, top down, to the consumers of culture but that it was (and is) a two way street where in both the media and audience act a coauthors of this cultural text[xii]. This public demarcation of space through mourning, if the later enactment of similar modes in the case of Princess Diana is any indication, act, as Greenhalgh paraphrases Monger, as “’Stranger shrines’…[which] act as a form of social purgation, expressing horror that such things can happen in our society. Equally an act of rememberance, they are also acts of solidarity, community and support for the bereaved.”[xiii] In our case, the fans of Cobian who gathered and created these spaces with candles and the like, are no doubt expressing solidarity and support for each other as Greenhalgh suggests, but also acting in horror at the manner in which, as the media narrative of Cobain’s life and death suggests, the hegemony in their view acted to pervert his ideals and in a sense lead him to his undoing.

In many ways the public performances of mourning following Cobain’s death, in reading with Greenhalgh’s analysis of the similar modes in the wake of Diana’s death, must “be read politically as well as psychologically”[xiv]. In that political vein it is hard not to read the performances, and with them their sense of performativity which inherently inscribes a mode of responsibility, with an eye to the actors rejection of the modes of production, which even in the media’s narrative, were co-conspirators in Cobain’s suicide. As a participant in one of the early perfromative memorials stated, speaking of his connection to Cobain “the bond is hard to describe, but he was a lyricist who could feel the way we do”[xv] as such we can assume that the participants in these memorials had the same ambivalence and hostility towards the comodification of music and subcultures that Cobain railed against and were implicit in his demise. As such these performative memorials, with their ephemeral constructions of candles, incense, pictures and notes, and the media narratives they fed and where fed by, can be seen, much like those dedicated Princess Diana, as providing a language “in which to articulate not only grief but the desire for fundamental social change. Its shrines and messages provided rich repertoires in which to speak of liberation as well as of authoritarianism, of hope and resolve as well as alienation”[xvi]. In these public performances of grief the participants are not only constructing places of grief and memorials to Cobain but also staking their claim against the hegemony that seeks to co-opt them and their hero’s ideologies. They are resisting the media (and as such the hegemonic) narrative, which sees premature death (or total co-option) as the only final act imaginable for the artist who seeks to subvert that hegemony. In a sense the creation of these spaces and the mourning, which they entail, are a manner of fighting off the process of internalizing social control modes which Butler identifies as part of the process of dealing with mourning and melancholia.

In Butler’s argument, as laid out in “Psychic Inceptions: Melancholy, Ambivalence, Rage” from her book The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, she finds that the process of meaning making, in relation to overcoming grief in the matrix of mourning and melancholy (of which she finds far more overlapping than in the analysis by Freud which she is reading against), acts as the process which inscribes the regulatory processes of the social world within the ego, thus internalizing social control. In the words of Butler;

In the absence of explicit regulation, the subject emerges as one for whom power has become voice, and voice, the regulatory instrument of the psyche. The speech acts of power- the declaration of guilt, the judgment of worthlessness, the verdicts of reality are topographically rendered as psychic instruments and institutions within a psychic landscape that depends on its metaphoricty for its plausibility.[xvii]

However while not refusing to mourn (and thus being subject to the process of melancholy), but refusing to mourn in the culturally construed ‘proper way’, by enacting a public performance of grief as opposed to keeping it private, Cobain’s mourners seek to reject the voice of the subject, as it is construed by the media narrative, and thus deflate the power and social control which that voice seeks to impart.

As I have argued these ephemeral actions, the congregation in public spaces, lighting of candles, leaving of poems and notes, are transitory yet an effective means for a subculture (the fans of Cobain’s who share parts or the whole of his anti-corporate ideology) to fight back against a hegemony that seeks to create a narrative which can only envision death as the outcome of that ideology. Yet, because these actions are so temporary, existing for a short time and then disappearing into the cultural ether, they are not seen as properly rigorous in their meaning and effect. I would like to offer the possibility, after the work of Muñoz, that these acts, existing outside of traditional critical and political discourse, are meaningful in so much as they exist as acts of queerness and that queerness can be a possibility of “self-knowing, a mode of sociality and relationality”[xviii]. These acts of performative mourning are an alternative mode of textuality and narrativity offering, once again in Muñoz’s words, “Traces, glimmers, residues and specks of things”. While these forms of performance do not act in the world in the manner of traditional political organization, as shown through the critical filter of Greenhalgh and Butler, they are in effect political and they do things in the world. While Greenhalgh finds political meaning in making the traditionally private space of grief public, I find that this process does something; it is creating site and situation specific performative speech acts which act in opposition to the narrative of Cobain’s death that has been constructed. These queer (outside the traditional discourse) ephemeral (lasting only in their traces) acts which create a space of relationality which allow the participants to act as witness and offer testimony, thus allowing for counter hegemonic narratives to begin to form which act to envision a society where the artist can exist outside the corporate structure which seeks to co-opt his (or her) ideals without having their life end in an early death.

Notes: