K.Cobain - W.S.Burroughs
The "Priest" They Called Him

LA RECENSIONE

1992. The year of Kurt Donald Cobain, not of Nirvana. Nevermind was starting to take hold in all the post-yuppie living rooms of Europe to the point of frenzy, teenagers around the world were wondering who was the hairdresser (or hairstylist) of that mini-version giant with the 'archangelic' blonde hair, and all the most trivial fanzines (Vanity Fair foremost) were nonchalantly publishing articles about the alleged HIV positivity of the little chosen one, she who would uplift the fortunes of a decaying story, Frances Bean Cobain. Interviews, pressures, strict routine: this was what they wanted from Cobain, to impart existential ordinariness to him, like a mediocre actor chosen to save the image of a business class. A white-collar worker to be commanded with asbestos wands.

Now, if solace did not have names like Courtney Love or Billy Corgan, who was "working on it" while Kurt, allow me, was clocking in, things were quite moving in the opposite direction, as well as incongruous. And here's the idea, as one would expect from the eclectic, as one would expect from the damned. An idea conceived in an endless death row, with no light exits, in which he was knowingly imprisoned awaiting execution. But as in every respectable green mile, every condemned person has the right to be absolved by a servant of God, and for Kurt Cobain, this servant was William Burroughs. Dressed in mourning, Burroughs pronounced his parable of inter-existentialism at the ripe age of about eighty. A parable made of rhythms so slow and constrictive as to be shamelessly squalid in their composure. A parable assimilated to such an extent by Cobain, to the point that it was like his last "meal." Of the track that lasts about nine minutes and fifteen seconds, I can tell you little because what it conveyed to me with its rational acidity of abused and mistreated pedals by a prose similar to a curse is simply too intimate, personal.

Fucking damned. No comment could influence your ideas about the recording in question because it must be listened to in order to engage in exchanges of emotional nuances. A rare example of how sound, the impure one, the non-virgin one, can be the perfect bonding agent with the words of a wise and irrational master. That Christ Novoselic posed in priest attire for the cover of the said track, well, that explains everything, don't you think?