Posted by Who says that children have always to follow parents’ footsteps? That they have to grow with same passions? In fact, often the exact opposite happens. A perfect example -and very famous- of this “divergence” from the parental model is Frances Bean Cobain, who had said some time ago, in an interview for Rolling Stone, that “she doesn’t really like Nirvana.”
Kurt Cobain’s daughters always had clear ideas about everything, about herself first and then also about her relationship with her mother (Courtney Love) and her life after the father’s death. In the interview published in 2015 (here in full version) some interesting stuff emerged: for example her memories of the father, what is the image she wants to send about him. Like when she asked to Brett Morgen – the director of the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck – to not mistify his figure: “The death is 99 percent of the romanticism and mythology. It’s time to put it in check.” Or when she declared that the death of his father, which occurred when she was 27, had consecrated him in the imagination of a “culture that is obsessed with the death of musicians”. Both things make sense: the death of a star is an event that erases completely his human side, and we often tend to forget this.
Besides this, the artistic perspective plays also an important role: at the time of the interview she said that the father had given everything to art, but he was also too ambitious, and that ambition costed his life. “He wanted his band to be famous, but he wasn’t ready to be the fucking voice of a generation.”
Then there is the real point of rupture with the paternal model: when the interviewer had asked her what he remembered about the approach of Nirvana’s first albums, she said in fact she didn’t really like Nirvana, although she believes that songs like Territorial Pissing and Dumb were great songs. “I’m more into Mercury Rev, Oasis, Brian Jonestown Massacre [laughs]. The grunge scene is not what I’m interested in.”
In short, besides those genetic similarities like appearance, attitude and voice, Frances has always had a very definite idea about her relationship with the father: she remembers the father with love, but she doesn’t share with him the same devotion to music.
