Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and The Post-Punk Death Wish

Issues in Modern Culture MA
Contexts Essay #2
Candidate David Jones
Module Contexts
Title Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and the Post-Punk Death Wish
Thesis An assessment of changes in rock ‘n roll heroism that have led to

suicide supplanting previous images of ‘living fast and dying
young’. Focusing on Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, I argue that rock
suicides have become a major new archetype within popular
culture. This archetype is based upon anxieties about the
impossibility of authenticity and the inevitable ascendancy of
consumer capitalism.
MHRA Citation
6114 Words
Declaration
Monday, 31st May 2004
I certify that this essay, Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and the Post-Punk Death
Wish, is my own work.
(David Jones)
issues in modern culture contexts essay rock suicides: curtis, cobain and the
post-punk death wish
issues in modern culture
Course Issues in Modern Culture MA
Module Contexts
Title Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and the Post-Punk

Death Wish
Thesis An assessment of changes in rock ‘n roll heroism

that have led to suicide supplanting previous
images of ‘living fast and dying young’. Focusing on
Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, I argue that rock suicides
have become a major new archetype within popular
culture. This archetype is based upon anxieties
about the impossibility of authenticity and the
inevitable ascendancy of consumer capitalism.
MHRA Citation
2
_____________________________________________________________________
CD: Tracklisting
1. Nirvana – Serve The Servants (from In Utero, 1993)

2. Joy Division – Transmission (from Substance 1977-1980, 1988)
3. Nirvana – Polly (from MTV Unplugged in New York, 1994)
4. Joy Division – She’s Lost Control (from Unknown Pleasures, 1978)
5. Nirvana – Heart Shaped Box (from In Utero, 1993)
6. Joy Division – Day of the Lords (from Unknown Pleasures, 1978)
7. Nirvana – Breed (from Nirvana@Reading 1992: The Last UK Show bootleg,
1994)
8. Nirvana – Pennyroyal Tea (from In Utero, 1993)
9. Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart (from Substance 1977-1980, 1988)
10. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (from Nevermind, 1991)
11. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit (from Nirvana@Reading 1992: The Last
UK Show bootleg, 1994)
12. Nirvana – Rape Me (from In Utero, 1993)
13. Joy Division – Disorder (from Unknown Pleasures, 1978)
14. Nirvana – [New Wave] Polly (from Incesticide, 1992)
15. Joy Division – Atmosphere (from Substance 1977-1980, 1988)
16. Dsico – Love Will Freak Us (bootleg)
17. Soulwax – Teen Spirit Vs. Bootylicious (bootleg)
18. Hole – Dole Parts (from Live Through This, 1994)
_____________________________________________________________________
3
January - May 2004
Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and the Post-Punk

Death Wish
‘Suicide has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out’
(Al Alvarez 1971, The Savage God)
‘There’s a dead man in the cable car and the chicken’s still dancing’
(Werner Herzog 1977, Stroszek1)
Since its inception rock ‘n roll has been enamoured with an ideal of premature death.
This is demonstrated by the posthumous reverence ascribed to what Kurt Cobain’s
mother called ‘that stupid club’ of stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim
Morrison (NME 16/04/1994, 3). Rock mythology has long utilised premature death as
its most dramatic device to instil closure upon a star’s career. It is also one of the
music industry’s most saleable tools. Witness, for instance, the headline of a recent
NME front cover: ‘Live Fast Die Young! Dead Rock Stars Glossy Pull-Out’
(17/01/04). The same cover’s main image, a posturing Sid Vicious, is accompanied by
a rather disconcerting tagline: ‘Hotter than Julian2, More F***ed Up Than Liam3,
Deader Than Kurt’. The three rock star ideals are identified as sex appeal, debauchery
and death. Eros and Thanatos thinly separated by a few smashed-up hotel rooms.
This essay considers a particular trend in rock deaths since the advent of punk:
a clear shift of media focus away from a stereotype of hedonistic accidents, of ‘living
fast and dying young’, to one of deliberate suicides. An exploratory analysis rather
than comprehensive thesis on what has proven to be a huge topic, the essay follows
Emile Durkheim’s identification of an interconnectedness between suicide and social
phenomena. It locates the aetiology of rock suicide within the ideals of punk,
considering Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain4 and arguing that their deaths embody
anxieties about the impossibility of authenticity and the inevitable ascendancy of
consumer capitalism. The essay will first situate rock deaths within the subject of
suicide as a whole. It will proceed by identifying the conventional rock ‘n roll values
against which my two post-punk protagonists rebelled, which are conveniently
distilled in the movie Vanishing Point. Turning to Curtis and Cobain themselves, the
essay will discuss Joy Division’s pioneeringly bleak aesthetic and the depiction of
Kurt Cobain as a new breed of self-loathing anti-hero. It will close by pointing out the
4
impossibility of preaching punk ideology within any mass-market mode of

production.
Outside rock music and the arts in general, suicide is normally regarded as a
social problem. According to the World Health organisation there is on average one
suicide every forty seconds with an unsuccessful attempt being made once every three
(WHO 2004). Curtis and Cobain’s deaths seem to follow a new trend in America and
the UK, whereby suicides no longer predominate among the elderly but among 15-34
year olds, as one of the three leading causes of death in this age group 5. The subject
has been tackled by academic disciplines from philosophy and anthropology to
neurology. The act itself has historically engendered a huge variety of responses, from
anger and perplexity to sympathy and even exaltation. It often leads to moral or
religious condemnation: the practice of burying suicides in unmarked graves dates
back to Plato’s Laws (Zalta 1994). Exceptions, however, are sometimes made in the
case of socially-minded suicides such as seppuku in the samurai code of bushido or
the Hindu fasting practice of prayopavesha (see anon 2004). Most recently, a minority
of Muslim scholars have taken the view that suicide can be tolerated in the course of
jihad, in the practice of suicide-bombing.
Though libertarian theories also suggest that suicide can be morally justified
under certain circumstances, it is generally seen as an affront to deontological
arguments for the sanctity of life. The near-worship of rock suicides, the act of a star
destroying himself and becoming an icon in the process, is therefore deeply strange.
This essay effectively addresses a question posited in Nick Hornby’s novel About A
Boy: why is the suicide of a young single mother living on a council estate regarded as
a tragedy, while the suicide of a young artist is regarded as a statement, an artistic
achievement? And, more precisely, why has suicide come to eclipse earlier
stereotypes of rock death?
Analysis of Richard D. Sarafian’s 1971 road movie Vanishing Point serves as
an excellent starting point to determine the ideals from which my two post-punk
protagonists deviate. It is effectively a narrativisation of seventies rock ideals,
structured around the hero Kowalski encountering a catalogue of counterculture
figures on the open road: his dealer, bikers, faith healers etc. Kowalski’s premature
death is an assertion of the authenticity of the rock music that guides him on his way,
a transcendental and spiritually potent force. Kowalski is defined as a hero in terms of
his opposition to the institutional authority of ‘official’ culture: he chooses to die
5
young rather than accept orthodox values of sobriety and speed limits. A binary
opposition is established between the open road, the hero and rock music on one hand
and the institutional authority of the police upon the other. Kowalski listens to pirate
radio, which plays records that aid his quest. The rhetoric of its blind black DJ
Supersoul explains the hero’s appeal:
And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies 6 on
wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American
hero, the electric Shinta, the demigod, the super-driver of the Golden West. Two
nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver, the police numbers are
getting closer, closer, closer to our soul hero in his soul-mobile. Yeah, baby.
They’re about to strike. They’re gonna get him, snatch him, rape the last
beautiful free soul on this planet
Super Soul’s speech bleeds into a scene in which a cop abuses a young pot smoker in
the back of his car, giving the rhetoric a literal dimension. The apocalyptic image of
the ‘last American hero’ connects to a messianic suggestion of counterculture
reclaiming a corrupt society. The statement that, for Kowalski ‘speed means freedom
of the soul’ is ironically double-edged. It refers firstly to the hero tearing across the
freeway, but also to his reliance upon amphetamines to keep going. Narcotics are
depicted as an unambiguous tool for rock ‘n roll excess. They are the ultimate act of
free will, taking them an emancipatory action that turns the user into a superhero.
Kowalski is not predominantly a focaliser but the focalised in the movie. Point
of view shots are surprisingly orientated from the bonnet of his car rather than from
behind the wheel, because too much psychological insight would undermine his
importance as the object of the audience’s gaze. We need to look at him rather than
with him. Sharing the experience of other characters in the film, our gaze at Kowalski
is inescapably sexual. His virility is asserted both explicitly, in the appearance of a
naked woman on a motorcycle who offers herself to him, and in a Freudian
unconscious which runs surprisingly close to the film’s surface7. Focus upon ‘the
incomplete’ parts of Kowalski’s body, especially his eyes and hands, situate the
viewer’s gaze under Barthes’s corps figure of devotion. The body becomes detached
from the subject, a series of mechanisms from which we can read the cause of our
desire without ever understanding it. We are therefore ultimately ‘fetishizing a corpse’
(1977, 71). This sense of distance is the point of a classic rock ‘n roll hero: the
enigmatic nature of his intensity, the intangibility of his cause, his emotional
detachment from the mere mortals with whom he associates.
6
Kowalski’s death is the ultimate expression of his excessive lifestyle. By

undertaking his mission to drive from Denver to San Fransisco in fifteen hours he
fails to fulfil Camille Paglia’s definition of early rock ‘n roll as a form of Dionysian
self-determination (1992, 18). However, while Kowalski is interested in something
grander than mere hedonism, his mission is Dionysian in the sense that it is ultimately
self-indulgent. Kowalski is that greatest of all rock clichés, the rebel without a cause.
His death is technically suicide – bursting into a ball of flame when he drives straight
into a police road block, but the excessive nature of his project and his performing it
under heavy narcotic influence lends the act itself more to the classic rock figure of
death through misadventure.
Much of this imagery relates back to the Romantics, who felt that young
deaths – such as Keats’s at 25 – enshrine a subject who could only have been
tarnished by age and decline. The extremity of the young poet’s genius equates to an
equally extreme lifestyle that destroys the body (Alvarez 1971, 171-2). It is a short
line of development between Shelley and Neil Young’s images of annihilated
illumination, from ‘the cold atom glows/A moment, then is quenched in a most cold
repose’ to ‘It’s better to burn out / than to Fade Away’ (‘Adonais’ 1821, l.180 and
‘Hey Hey My My’ 1979). Though Hendrix et al may not have realised that their drink
and drug excesses would constitute the backbone of their legacies, these excesses did
ensure that they could never grow old, lose their looks or ‘sell out’ (except, ironically,
through the never-ending cycle of compilations and back catalogue reissues).
One of the most fascinating aspects of Vanishing Point’s ideological
framework is its trenchant phonocentricism, the way in which it establishes a
hierarchy of primacy for different signifying systems: music, speech and writing.
Derrida famously accused Western metaphysics of logocentricism, of viewing ideas as
pre-eminent, which are then expressed (outered) in the copy of speech, then again in
writing, the copy of a copy (Derrida 1967). Vanishing Point reflects this hierarchy, but
places rock music at the upper end of the scale, between speech (the signifying system
used in its lyrics) and the primal nature of the actual sound, a liberating beat which is
associated with the roar of an engine (the pre-eminent aspect, equivalent to the idea).
The supremacy of audible signifiers above visual ones can thus be diagrammatised:
Fig 1. Primacy of Signifying Systems in Vanishing Point
7
Authentic (free, liberated, natural)
Silence
(empty landscape:
no signification)
Counterculture Discourse
Engine Noise
Rock Music
(abstract sound,
spoken language)
Jive Talk
(rhythmic
spoken language over
radio)
Visual Signification
Audible Signification
Official Discourse Police Radio

(none of the music or
rhythm of pirate radio – just Typewriter report Road Signs
people reading out written (Kowalski condemned by (visual signs impose
speech) visual signification) restrictions upon open
Police Siren landscape)
Inauthentic (bound, constrained, socially imposed)
Kowalski is incompatible with the written forms of official discourse: when his case is
typed up at a police station they cannot even spell his name.
8
Supersoul best embodies the ascendancy of audible signification. On the radio,

he acts as a kind of audio deus ex machina to guide Kowalski. His blindness detaches
him from the visual and serves as the basis of his transcendental power. His energetic
jive talk, a powerful form of counterculture rhetoric occupies a discursive space
between normal speech and music due to its expressively rhythmic qualities. This
sound is contrasted with the static signifiers of official discourse in the form of written
road signs, especially in the following composition:
(14:58
)
Road signs are depicted as a regimentation of physical space, a typical symbol of

post-Enlightenment disciplinarian authority along the lines of Foucault’s critique of
the panopticon: the subject is under the gaze of the authorities in the form of road
blocks, radio or helicopter surveillance to ensure that he or she travels at a certain
speed (1975, 175). Kowalski, being a counterculture hero, simply ignores the official
demarcation of space and goes off-road whenever it is more convenient.
In Vanishing Point rock music is one of the most inspiring, visceral forms of
audible communication. It is associated with motion and the free American landscape,
with the possibility of truly maverick human endeavour such as Kowalski’s mission.
During an elysiastic montage past towering mountains and glittering lakes, heroism is
soundtracked by the least Kurt Cobain style lyrics imaginable:
Hooray for the men of vision

who are never satisfied
Who believe the way to move forward
is to give it a better try
[...]
9
Takin’ a look through the history book

it’s amazing how far we’ve come
Now some folks say there’s no more to learn
Others just keep on going
(Brian Obine, ‘Where Do We Go From Here Baby?’)
When Kowalski dies young he is able to do so with complete confidence in the value
of rock ‘n roll discourses, a value inferred by the film’s rigid phonocentric hierarchy.
It is phonocentric certainty, a system which will become less stable in the punk era,
that presents the possibility of dying for a cause. Kowalski’s death is an almost
religious act: an appeal to the transcendental forms of audible meaning which are far
more ‘authentic’ than anything which can be verbally signified. To use one of
Durkheim’s three categories of suicide, Kowalski’s death is altruistic: his
individuality is strongly governed by social custom. He takes his own life through his
political allegiance to the higher commandments of rock ‘n roll (see Spaulding 2002,
xviii).
There are clear contradictions and shortcomings to Vanishing Point’s ideological
framework, if not the entire ethos of living fast and dying young. The idea that rock ‘n
roll is transcendental, an unclassified space that defies boundaries is illusory. Firstly,
Kowalski’s counterculture credibility relies upon (b)latently capitalistic material
fetishism. A good deal of his status derives from his driving a ‘supercharged white
Dodge Challenger’ (the brand is repeatedly mentioned) that can outrun anything on
the road. Moreover, despite Vanishing Point’s indictment of racism, by utilising the
generic conventions of the road movie (effectively a cinematic land-grab that derives
from the Western) the film depicts rock ‘n roll excess not as something revolutionary
but simply as an extension of the most basic frontier mentality. Its counterculture hero
is effectively a colonialist, a cowboy in a car, in full control of the landscape he
traverses. Everett True, Cobain confidante and Nirvana on-the-road chronicler,
condemns this form of rock ideology as being ‘exclusively male, created for and by
men with a compulsive need to strut their masculinity . . . a redundant patriarchal
language that ceased to be relevant’ (2001, 7). It is rock’s reliance upon artificial
romance, primitive masculine codes and capitalistic modes of production that the
more enlightened branches of punk music came into existence to oppose. They are
certainly central themes in the music of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain.
Ian Curtis hanged himself in his Macclesfield home on 18th May 1980, aged
23. He was lead singer and lyricist of Joy Division, a gloomy collective formed in
10
Manchester in 1976 in the spirit of punk, though they quickly transcended the stylistic
constraints of their chosen genre. During Curtis’s lifetime the band achieved
considerable critical success and a cult following who adopted their unconventional
attire of long coats and short hair. His death preceded by a matter of weeks the release
of their sophomore album and strongest single, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (CD track
9). Chart success and a potent mythology drawing upon the bleak imagery in their
music followed over the next two decades.
Curtis was a polar opposite to the heroic mode embodied by Kowalski in
Vanishing Point. He could hardly have been further from the tradition of Kerouac
style itinerants who embrace the open road. In fact, his suicide has often been blamed
on his anxiety about Joy Division’s impending first American tour (see especially the
movie 24 Hour Party People and Curtis 1995, 130). Curtis also contrasts Kowalski’s
insouciance, as demonstrated in the intensity of his delivery; a powerful drone that is
not so much sung as intoned. Where previous rock deaths vindicated counter-culture
against ‘official’ society, Ian Curtis’ suicide creates a new binary, between the isolated
individual and tyrannous humanity as a whole. Take a characteristic set of lyrics,
abstract impressionism set to a relentlessly steady 4/4 beat:
I guess you were right,

when we talked in the heat.
There’s no room for the weak
no room for the weak
Where will it end?
(Day of the Lords, CD track 6)
Curtis searches for a site at which persecution and anxiety are terminated. He was the
first frontman to cultivate a persona based upon a dialogue with his own inadequacies.
Writing Curtis’s obituary in the NME in 1980, Paul Morley decided
That a myth will develop is inevitable, if only because of the ‘type’ of group Joy
Division seem to be, the passion they arouse. Ian Curtis’ words are vivid and
dramatic. They omit links and open up perspective, they are set deep in
untamed, unfenced darkness. He confronted himself with ultimate realities
(26/04/80, 38).
Morley’s statement is mildly disingenuous, since his own previous writings are
directly responsible for defining Joy Division as this certain ‘type’ of group. As a
synchronous strand in their music and in press reportage of this music, a narrative was
established for Joy Division’s career in which the only ‘authentic’ form of closure
11
could be Curtis’s suicide. As Paul Ramballi put it, ‘It’s impossible to suppress the
legend that will come to enfold this group like the magnified gothic shrouds of their
music’ (NME 28/06/80, 19). Death is the logical working out of their pioneering
aesthetic: Joy Division’s intense seriousness was almost unprecedented in a rock
milieu8. The band’s lyrical outlook focuses upon a lack of agency, the inability of an
individual to translate feeling into any kind of successful external action, from social
relationships to controlling one’s own body. In ‘Disorder’ (CD track 13) the fearful
external world is depicted in a chaotic barrage of images: ‘Lights are flashing, / cars
are crashing,/getting frequent now’. The subject can only take on a voyeuristic rather
than participatory role: ‘I’m watching you, I watch it all’. Watching the band live,
Morley identified Joy Division’s appeal in terms of catharsis, claustrophobia and
dejection:
Joy Division’s music is physical and lucid, music about uncontrollable

emotions, impulses, prejudices, fears. The group have tied inarticulacy and
vagueness into concrete, distancing impressions of the most degenerate, deepest
desires . . . It’s simple music but not simple-minded; cryptic but not
impenetrable (NME 16/02/80, 55)
So where Kowalski is confident in following the dictates of the id, Joy Division’s
music suggests that desire can only lead to inarticulate terror, into impressionistic
glimpses at the unbearable.
A lack of self control is symbolised by imagery of brain seizures in many of Joy
Division’s songs. The theme is strongly connected to narcotics. Where Kowalski takes
amphetamines (uppers), Curtis was chronically addicted to the barbiturates (downers)
Phenytoin Sodium and Phenobarbitone (1995, 71), not as a means to a hedonistic end
but as a prescription to combat epilepsy. Drugs no longer equate emancipatory free
will as in Vanishing Point, but are imposed by society (prescribed by Doctors) to curb
depression. They are an ineffectual and soul-destroying medicine. Consider the lyrics
to the supposedly autobiographical but gender-reversed (feminisation being a notable
feature of post-punk anxiety) ‘She’s Lost Control’:
And she turned to me

and took me by the hand
and said ‘I've lost control again’
and how I'll never know just why
or understand
She said ‘I've lost control again’
12
And she screamed out, kicking on her side

And seized up on the floor -
I thought she’d died
She said ‘I've lost control again’
She’s lost control again -
She’s lost control
The theme of alienation is combined with the inability of an individual to control

oneself. An attempt at empathy, ‘she . . . took me by the hand’, is thwarted because the
other will ‘never know just why/or understand’. Illness became a crucial part of
Curtis’s stage persona. He sometimes suffered seizures or breakdowns onstage, but
these were far from dissimilar to his usual onstage jerkiness. This intensity attracted
fans and drew reviewer’s attention, as in one eerily insightful Sounds piece (Curtis’s
epilepsy was not public knowledge at this point):
During the set’s many ‘peaks’ Ian Curtis often loses control. He’ll suddenly jerk
sideways and, head in hands, he’ll transform into a twitching, epileptic-type
mass of flesh and bone. The guitars will fade away, leaving the lonely drummer
to finish the song on his own. Then, with no introduction, the whole feeling will
begin again. Another song, another climax’
(Mick Middles 1979 in Curtis 1995, 82)
The division between Ian Curtis’s anger and his illness was also blurred, as
demonstrated during an early show in which he smashed a beer glass and lacerated his
leg (Curtis 1995, 115). As his wife reflects in her biography, his self-destructive
behaviour ‘was allowed to become part of Joy Division’s act and the more sick he
became, the more the band’s popularity grew’ (1995, 114).
For Joy Division the entire external world is one of captivity, impotence and
unremitting despair: a reflection of the absolute tyranny of mankind. This tyranny is
most strongly, and controversially, reflected in their repeated use of Nazi imagery. The
band’s first release opens with Curtis bellowing ‘you all forgot Rudolph Hess!’ This is
obviously connected to punk’s imperative to shock by any means necessary 9. Joy
Division’s usage, however, goes beyond mere shock tactics, and bears more in
common with the linguistic strategies of Sylvia Plath (who both Curtis and Cobain
had read and admired) or nineties dramatist Sarah Kane. When Plath refers to her
father as ‘a man in black with a Meinkampf look’ (‘Daddy’, l.65), or when Kane
erupts with the self-loathing declaration
13
‘I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the Arabs, I fucked small
children while they begged for mercy, the killing fields are mine’ (2000, 25)
they do so not in order to trivialise the darkest chapters of human history, or as a

careless trope for superlative atrocity, but to assert that the strongest feelings or
relationships unconsciously incorporate the darkest of desires10.
Joy Division’s visual aesthetic echoes the tone of their recorded music. Aided
by the murky production values of the ‘inkie’ British music press, the band rarely
appeared in colour but in monochrome shots against backgrounds of bleak
Manchester industrial scenes (a stereotype of the manufacturing North drawing as far
back as Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class or Lowry’s paintings).
The photograph by Anton Corbijn that accompanied Paul Morley’s obituary
(Appendix I) is typical – Ian Curtis mournfully hunched in a simple chair with his
head in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his failure to notice the camera
suggesting an air of documentary realism. These images are evocative of arthouse
cinema. They strongly contrast photos of rock bands from the previous two decades –
photos which tend to picture the subject as an Adonis to be worshipped. More
significantly however, photographs of Joy Division also deviate from typical British
punk photography. The band shared punk’s love of grainy black and white pictures,
epitomised by the work of Penny Smith, but by posing motionless and contemplative
they defy that staple of punk imagery, the action shot.
Joy Division were enamoured with an ‘artistic’ aesthetic of death11, so it is
ironic that Curtis’s life actually followed the biography of other artists who had died
prematurely. Like Keats and Plath, he died following what Alvarez defines as a
‘marvelous year’ (1979, 18) of production. Most of Joy Division’s output derives from
the twelve month period preceding Curtis’s death, not only in the form of the second
album but also in a string of singles and other new music that was assembled in
posthumous releases. The same is true of Kurt Cobain, but responses to his suicide are
conditioned to a greater extent than any other artists’ death in history by the extent of
his fame.
Kurt Cobain was, of course, ‘the face of the nineties’ (Lamacq 2004). The
Nirvana star famously took an enormous heroin overdose and shot himself in the head
in a greenhouse above the garage of his Seattle home circa. April 5 th 1994. As Jon
Savage notes, Joy Division ended just as the modern youth media began: they missed
out on exposure from style magazines such as The Face or i-D which started during
14
their last six months (in Curtis 1995, xi). In 1994, however, the accelerating media
conditions of 24 hour satellite TV news, MTV and coverage of pop music for the first
time in the broadsheet press resulted in Cobain’s being the first rock star death to be
reported as a major ‘cultural event’. Cobain had been a considerable success in his
lifetime. He had knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard Top 100 with
Nirvana’s sophomore album Nevermind and became identified as the voice of what
Douglas Coupland dubbed ‘Generation X’. It was his death, however, that escalated
him to the upper echelons of the cult of celebrity alongside James Dean and Elvis
Presley. John Robinson identified the dominant viewpoint in coverage of the recent
ten year anniversary of his death as being, firstly, that Nirvana’s music has enduring
power but, secondly, that Cobain’s death was for fans in their late twenties or early
thirties an event analagous to the assassination of John F. Kennedy (2004, 23). His
suicide is a kernel of post-punk culture, and of the contradictory discourses of stardom
and punk credibility surrounding Nirvana.
Kurt Cobain was a new breed of anti-hero, ‘a complicated, contradictory
misanthrope’ (Cross 2001, 2) whose self-disgust belied his conventional good-looks.
His music expresses self-awareness of the contradictions and hypocrisy that lie behind
the conventional rock ‘n roll hero he feared becoming. Counting aside the ironic
working title for final album In Utero (‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’), constant and
obsessive self-loathing is a major theme of Nirvana’s music. ‘Milk It’, for instance,
presents a stream of images relating to suicide. Cobain reflects Alvarez’s conviction
that suicide ‘colours the imaginative world of creative people’ (1971, 13). When he
came to write his suicide note, Charles R. Cross speculates that Cobain had ‘imagined
these words for weeks, months, years, decades’ (2001, 337). His assertions of self-
loathing were a staple of his chosen genre of grunge12, but by establishing a broad and
rich pattern of imagery across his career he transcends the reductive definition of his
peer’s music as mere ‘complaint rock’. This imagery is based around five interlinked
themes: infantilism, infirmity, abortion, rape and disease. Each points to death as a
solution to its associated pain, but Cobain’s self-awareness also insinuates that death
as an escape route may be just another manifestation of worldly corruption.
In Nirvana’s music the infantile and the infirm highlight states in which the
subject can abnegate all responsibility for his or her own actions or for what befalls
them. This is characteristic of the ‘apathetic’ grunge generation, a shift from
Vanishing Point-era agency to an interest in the nature of the done-to elements of
15
society. The hero no longer imposes himself upon the tyrannous world but lets the
world impose itself upon him. More importantly, both the young and old exist at the
edges of life, closer to the escape provided by death or blissful foetal consciousness.
To grow into sensation is to appreciate the failings of the world, especially the adult
world which can only ever betray its professed ideals:
As my bones grew they did hurt

They hurt real bad
I tried hard to have a father
But instead I had a dad
(Serve the Servants, CD track 1)
The terrible burst into sensation (perhaps a delayed version of Freudian birth fear) is a
recurrent theme on In Utero. At the opposite end of the scale Cobain declares, on
‘Breed’, ‘I don’t care if I’m old / I don’t mind if I don’t have a mind’. The loss of
control is a loss of tortured perception. The song similarly attacks the traditional rock
value of virility: to breed, to procreate, is a repulsive act of corruption as it brings
others into the unbearable world. ‘Heart Shaped Box’ (CD track 5) conflates ideas of
birth and death into ‘the umbilical noose’ of a nightmare vision13:
Cut myself on angel’s hair and baby’s breath

Broken hymen of your highness I’m left black
Throw down your umbilical noose so I can
Climb right back
The subject’s only appeal for agency is one based-upon the Freudian death drive, to
return to the tranquillity of the womb, free from the decay that must affect any kind of
‘purity’, ranging from virginity to royalty. The grandiose spectrum of human
existence, from babies to angels, is reduced to a setting for adolescent-style self-
harm14. Nirvana lyrics are often psychobabble, they deliberately read as a catalogue of
images from the unconscious, the free expression of the id: ‘A mulatoto / An albino /
A mosquito / My Libido / Yay, a denial’ (Smells Like Teen Spirit). However, as the
terms from psychology ‘libido’ and ‘denial’ indicate here, Cobain writes in an
incredibly Freud-literate environment. As such the imagery in his music cannot be
seen as expressions of a repressed unconscious but an active engagement with it, his
participation in the game of Freudian symbolism.
Furthering this aesthetic of rock heroism as a form of victimhood, Cobain’s
lyrics are especially interested in the kind of forced infantilisation encountered during
16
sexual or domestic abuse15. The way in which Cobain repeatedly casts subjects being
violated by ridiculous but sinister males is a strong rebuttal of rock ideology,
embodied by Kowalski, where women are ever-willing sexual objects. The strongest
embodiment of Nirvana’s interest in subjugation, however, is ‘Polly’ (CD track 3).
Representing, for Charles R. Cross ‘a huge leap forward in Kurt’s development as a
songwriter’ (2001, 136) the song is based on the horrific 1987 kidnapping, rape and
torture of a 14-year-old-girl outside a punk gig in Tacoma (see Brannigan et al 2004,
92). Its lyrics consist of an internal monologue by Gerald Friend, the abductor, which
are remarkable for conveying the revolting nature of his acts whilst contradictorily
allowing the listener to sympathise with him:
Polly wants a cracker

Think I should get off her first
I think she wants some water
To put out the blow torch
Isn’t me
Haven’t seen (have a seed)
Let me clip
Your dirty wings
Let me take a ride
Cut yourself (don’t hurt yourself)
Want some help
Please myself
I’ve got some rope
You have been told
I promise you I have been true
Let me take a ride
Don’t hurt yourself
I want some help
Help myself
Polly wants a cracker

Maybe she would like more food
She asked me to untie her
A chase would be nice for a few
Polly says her back hurts

And she’s just as bored as me
She caught me off my guard
Amazes me, the will of instinct
For once Cobain adopts the voice of the perpetrator, and demonstrates in a manner
similar to Joy Division the level of violence and sadism that can lie behind human
17
desire. The abductor feels a strong level of protectiveness towards his victim, telling
her ‘don’t hurt yourself’ but contradictorily begs her to participate in the type of self-
harm (‘cut yourself’) that often has a central role in adolescent feelings of liberation.
The reference to angels (‘Let me clip / your dirty wings’), evokes ‘Heart Shaped Box’
and is one of Cobain’s strongest images of contemporary society’s tarnishing of
ideals. Unlike Vanishing Point, these negative realities are not externalised in an
attack upon the super-ego of the state, but are realised within, as an expression of
humanity’s darkest nature.
Nirvana’s lyrics also extend the imagery of sickness found in Joy Division’s
music. Mental illness features prominently, even in the relatively untroubled days of
the Bleach era, when Cobain decides that normal domestic existence cannot be borne
out on normal mental grounds: ‘Hand out lobotomies / to save little families’
(‘Downer’). Romantic love is mainly expressed through images of disease, as some
kind of perverted cleansing process. In ‘Drain You’ a baby Kurt bellows ‘It is now my
duty to completely drain you, / travel through a tube / and end up in your infection’.
The theme reaches its climax in ‘Heart Shape Box’, with its adoring promise to
incorporate whatever is destroying the loved being and thus save it: ‘I wish I could eat
your cancer when you turn black’ (‘Heart Shaped Box’). Cobain, who like Curtis used
narcotics to self-medicate (for stomach cramps and colossi of the spine) as well as for
recreational purposes, never glamorised drug use. Instead his condition serves as a
strand of bathos throughout his lyrics, entirely debasing his status as an icon. Most
notable are the closing words to ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ (CD track 8) in which Cobain
declares, with a starkness that almost obscures the line’s poetic assonance: ‘I’m on
warm milk and laxatives / cherry coloured antacids’.
Highly ironically, Kurt Cobain became obsessed with collecting versions of
The Visible Man, the plastic anatomical models of the type which subsequently
adorned the cover of In Utero:
18
Fig 3. Front Sleeve:

Nirvana, In Utero (Geffen) 1993
Presumably unbeknown to Cobain these models were historically - up until 1870 - the
bodies of unclaimed and destitute suicides (Alvarez 1971, 64). Such a fascination with
anatomical models is an insight into Cobain’s overwhelming self-awareness of the
nature of conventional rock stardom. This may be attributable to a fixation with the
Lacanian ideal ego (see Fink 1997, 62) a self-image derived from the stance of being
looked at. Anatomical models compartmentalise the body in the same manner as the
fetishising gaze directed towards the rock ‘n roll hero, as mentioned earlier in relation
to Kowalski and Barthes’s corps figure. The rock star is effectively a doll, an object
into which the audience can pour their own fantasies. Fascinatingly, the most vivid
musical expression disregarding this sexual, compartmentalising gaze comes not in a
Nirvana song but one by Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love:
I am
Doll parts
Doll face
Doll heart
(Hole, ‘Doll Parts’ 1994, CD track 11 )
Charles R. Cross identifies the origins of these lyrics to a fax written by Love to
Cobain during their early courtship: they seem to demonstrate a shared condition.
Love had actually endured the patriarchal tyrannies of the previous rock order to a far
greater extent than Cobain, who had covertly contributed to it, in his clandestine love
of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. In her near-oxymoronic position as ‘female rock
star’ Love experienced a fetishising gaze on two levels, as female sex object and
19
celebrity fetish object combined (albeit that she courted both roles). Despite the
barrage of often misogynist criticism that described her as the influence that dragged
Cobain away from punk towards the mainstream (an inverse ‘Yoko Factor’), she may
actually have had as strong a feminising influence as his former association with
Tracy Marander, member of Bikini Kill and figurehead of the Riot Grrrl feminist
movement.
By the nineties rock music had come to view the forms of ‘free love’ intimated
in Vanishing Point with strong suspicion. If grunge was as Dionysian as preceding
forms of rock music in terms of destroying onstage equipment or smashing hotel
rooms, in terms of sexuality the movement was veritably stoic (which partly explains
the vilification of the voluptuous Courtney Love). Everett True tells an anecdote in
which the Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan throws a half naked woman out of his
hotel room in the middle of the night when she asked him to sign her breasts (2001,
4). With Eros sidelined, rock music can only focus upon Thanatos, upon violent acts
derived from repetition-compulsion leading ultimately to self-destruction.
Anxieties over the impossibility of authenticity and the inevitable ascendancy
of consumer capitalism appear most strongly when considering Curtis and Cobain in
relation to punk values. Punk is, as O’ Hagan points out, ‘the most energetic and yet
the most nihilistic form of rock; a subculture where the loser assumes the heroic role,
and disaffection is not so much an excuse as an ideal’ (OMM 01/2004, 41). The
movement was particularly vocal about refusing to sully its art for the sake of
commercial imperatives, but punk records are still economic products that are bought
and sold. Preaching punk ideology within any mass market mode of production
therefore poses a contradiction that becomes more apparent the greater the
commercial success an artist achieves.
Joy Division had classic punk origins, though they rapidly progressed from
conventional short, spiky songs. Their inauguration into the tradition was based upon
a lineage that Kurt Cobain could only have dreamed about. The group formed after
the inspirational Sex Pistols gig at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1976.
Demonstrating the condition of early punk as a close-knit but incredibly revelatory
scene, Ian Curtis was actually quoted in the Sounds (11/06 1976) review of the gig as
an aspiring punk who intended to form a band. Following punk doctrine, none of Joy
Division had any prior musical experience when they first chose their instruments.
The band’s first gig came supporting the Buzzcocks at Manchester’s Electric Circus
20
on May 25 1977. As if to assert that punk values were close to the very core of his
being, Curtis put on an Iggy Pop record immediately before he hung himself (Curtis
1995, 128)
Paul Morley comments favourably on the band for refusing to ‘sell out’ by
pandering to the needs of the consumer. Live, he notes that the band played mainly
unfamiliar material, eschewing favourites such as ‘Transmission’ (CD track 2): ‘the
group didn’t lay out for selfish delectation their eloquent standards’ (55). In Curtis’s
obituary, he continues to describe Joy Division’s success in terms of their refusal to
accept rock ‘n roll commodified standards. They produce
rock music that is above and past the status quo and narcissism of the enduring
rock tradition that reaches us through business channels, that doesn’t set as its
restraining barrier the cynical elements of Good Time and consolidation
(NME 14/06 1980, 38)
In this vein, Curtis’s death could be interpreted under Durkheim’s egoistic category of
suicide (2002, xviii): it was a direct result of Curtis’s lack of integration into the music
business and its values, his individuality became overdeveloped through
underdeveloped social integration.
If Kurt Cobain’s music often reveals a fixation upon his ideal ego then his ego
ideal - the symbolic point from which he feels he is viewed (semi-analogous to the
super ego, see Fink 1997, 46) - is the stance of the punk rock values with which he
grew up. Cobain did not view his peers as the pop megastars alongside whom he was
played on MTV, but his art-rock contemporaries such as Sonic Youth or The Melvins,
a punk band who had formed in Cobain’s own high school. This was a grass-roots
scene, based around local bands playing in venues such as parking lots, where Cobain
saw his first punk gig. The scene also came into being in rigid defiance of official
‘jock’ culture and often championed quasi-intellectual groups like Riot Grrl or the
‘punk rock librarians’.
Journalism about Nirvana rarely lauds them in terms of their commercial
success, but in terms of their achieving it without compromising punk values. As
Keith Cameron argued in his obituary, Nirvana achieved success ‘not by scam or via
the pre-ordained schemes of a corporate media empire, but by making the most
brilliant rock music’ (NME 16/04 1992, 3). Nirvana’s own rhetoric also emphasised
their defiance of commercial pressures, most memorably on the cover of Nevermind,
where a newborn baby swims after a dollar on a fishhook:
21

Nirvana, Nevermind (Geffen) 1992
The trope extends the theme of infantile corruption discussed earlier, identifying
consumerism as the primary corrupting influence upon entering the world. Continuing
this disgust of music as product is the song ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’. Its title
parodies the record company jargon for successful promotional campaigns and high
sales. The song itself is as deliberately ‘uncommercial’ as possible, opening with
supposedly ‘unlistenable’ reams of piercing effects pedals and other white noise. It
also reveals a sense of Cobain’s guilt for participating in the industry’s schemes: ‘I
love you for what I am not’. Such sneering self loathing is also aroused in self-
reflexive comments about the way in which he has used his personal trauma for
commercial gain: ‘Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old’ (Serve
The Servants).
Kurt Cobain, in both interviews and in his music, self-consciously wrote a
genealogy for Nirvana that highlighted their progressive punk influences whilst
simultaneously ellipting the testosterone-fuelled heavy metal that clearly also
manifested itself in their sound. Charles R. Cross is particularly illuminating on the
way in which Cobain rewrote history. In interviews throughout Nirvana’s career he
claimed that his first concert was the ideologically sound punk band Black Flag, when
in fact it had been an arena performance by flamboyant hair metallers Sammy Hagar
and Quarterflash (2001, 44). Musically, Cobain charted a pristine set of influences in
his choice of cover versions for the famous MTV Unplugged performance, of songs
22
by David Bowie, The Vaselines and The Meat Puppets. His choice of Steve Albini to
produce final album In Utero is also notable. Albini, leader of influential punks Big
Black, presents himself as a militant scourge of the mainstream record industry (see
his online critique, ‘Major Labels: Some of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked’).
Albini’s stark, feedback-heavy mixes inevitably caused tension with Nirvana’s record
company (the major affiliated Geffen, for whom they had jumped ship from the more
credible Sub Pop), asserting their ‘difficult’ punk status within the major label system.
Everett True claims that ‘the mentions of cancer, infirmity and hospitalisation in
Kurt’s lyrics served as wider metaphors for the corporate rock industry he despised’
(2001, 9). To tie Cobain’s self-loathing in its entirety to a Marxist statement is to over-
generalise, but it is true that the record industry, the very mode of production through
which Nirvana’s music is heard, came to replace the position that the institutional
authority of the police held in Vanishing Point. It becomes the object in a binary
opposition between rock ‘n roll spirit and its mortal enemy. One of the rare coherent
couplets in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ describes Cobain’s hatred of fulfilling consumer
imperatives, utilising disease imagery: ‘Here we are now, entertain us / I feel stupid
and contagious’. The idea is more fully developed in ‘Rape Me’ (CD track 12). The
song deliberately pastiches the opening bars of Teen Spirit, which was by far
Nirvana’s biggest hit and which Cobain had come to resent playing live (as
demonstrated by his subversive atonal version of the song on CD track 10). Letting
the melody disintegrate into feedback and bellowing, Cobain articulates his sense of
violation at having his pain used to profit a multinational corporation: ‘Rape me, my
friend / rape me again’. This sense of violation also extends to accuse the listener,
however, as though part of Cobain’s spirit is taken away every time his photograph
appears in a magazine or a fan examines him through his lyrics:
Hate me
Do it and do it again
Waste me, my friend
Cobain’s punk ideals have led him to despise his fans, who have become dehumanised
into consumers.
Kurt Cobain’s problem, however, which created an irresolvable dialectic, was
that he was enamoured with the glamour of mainstream pop fame at the same time as
he condemned it. As Cross summarises:
23
There had never quite been a rock star like Kurt Cobain. He was more an anti-
star than a celebrity, refusing to take a limo to NBC and bringing a thrift store
sensibility to everything he did . . . He professed in many interviews to detest
the exposure he’d gotten on MTV, yet he repeatedly called his managers to
complain that the network didn’t play his videos nearly enough16 (2001, 3)
Nirvana achieved an unprecedented level of crossover success because they were

willing to reach out to a large fanbase. These fans spread beyond the confines of the
punk scene to incorporate the Guns ‘N Roses and Metallica devotees that Cobain had
formed a band in order to oppose in the first place. As Cameron reminisced,
Kurt’s political instincts were violently anti-establishment, yet he was not afraid
to proclaim the virtues of a good tune. He once said that no matter how correct
your politics were, a good tune was the only way to touch people’s heart’
(NME 16/04 1994, 3).
This is apparent from Teen Spirit’s obviously commercial hook, but the juxtaposition
is starkest on Polly. Here the afformemtioned horrific tale of one person’s loving urge
to atrocity is conveyed in one of Cobain’s most unashamedly melodic ballads. The
extremely catchy four-note riff, passed between solo acoustic guitar and bass, is
accompanied by Cobain crooning in his most affectionate manner. Nirvana also
assented to having the Albini mixes of In Utero redone by Scott Litt in order to make
them more ‘radio friendly’. As Cross points out, ‘when challenged by a problem that
might affect the success of his record, Kurt acquiesced to the path of least resistance
and greatest sales’ (2001, 273).
The impossible conflict between pop and punk values eventually led Cobain to
rebel against his ego ideal, satirising punk values as hard as he railed against the
mainstream. Nirvana could not live up to punk’s puritan doctrines. As Courtney Love
told Everett True: ‘Nirvana were exposed to what the Olympian [punk rock scene]
did, and none of that is talent-based . . . It’s about purity. It’s about having a manifesto
and it’s bullshit’ (True 2001, 70). On ‘School’ Cobain compares the strict hierarchy of
respected artists on Sub Pop to the tyrannous order found more often in adolsescence:
‘you’re in High School again’. The song also deftly satirises the rather trivial,
melodramatic nature of adolescent complaint which leads to punk puritanism. The
line ‘Don’t you believe it’s just my luck, don’t you believe it’s just my luck’ precedes
a bellowed chorus over a characteristic wall of distortion ‘No recess! No re-ce-ess!’
The theme continues in ‘Heart Shaped Box’:
24
Hey
Wait
I’ve got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice
Cobain comes to realise that punk is, like the conventional rock it succeeded, caught
up with mores of artificial protest and a hierarchy whereby the elders of the scene are
revered. The line in ‘Very Ape’, ‘I am buried up to my neck in contradictory flies’
demonstrates the impossibility of fulfilling each tiny facet of punk idealism, and the
song goes on to debase the values themselves as a form of jaded posturing: ‘I’m too
busy acting like I’m not naïve / I’ve seen it all / I was here first’.
Perhaps Cobain’s frustration is part of an unconscious realisation that,
sonically, punk and pop music were far from the irrevocable forces that his
contemporaries supposed. Condescending modernist Theodor Adorno identified the
fundamental characteristic of popular music in the forties as being standardisation
(1992, 2001). For Adorno, the most distinctive state that a popular song can achieve is
a kind of ‘pseudo-individuation’ within an ‘external, superimposed, commercial’
structure. He feels that ‘complications’ such as Nirvana’s abstract solos or white noise
have no consequence. The inexorable commercial structure guarantees that
‘regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar
experience’ (1992, 198). Adorno’s point appears to be vindicated by the
‘bootleg/mashup’ craze of recent years, whereby the complete vocal section of one
piece of pop music is superimposed on top of the instrumental track of a different
song of an ironically different style. Track 16 of my accompanying CD places the
vocals of über-commercial pop trio Destiny’s Child over the instrumental track of
‘Teen Spirit’, while track 16 merges Joy Division’s instrumental with the mainstream
hip hop of Missy Elliot. The ideological gulf between pop and punk music is revealed
to be, at least in stylistic terms, merely a ‘veneer of individual effects’. So perhaps
Cobain’s death can be classified using Durkheim’s final category of anomic suicide
(2002, xviii). By combining pop and punk Cobain pushed beyond the accepted
horizons that regulate counterculture individuation, and was unable to function.
Aristotle argued that suicide was an offence because it weakened the state
economically by destroying a good citizen (Alvarez 1971, 77). Ironically, the absolute
opposite is true in the case of Curtis and Cobain’s suicides: by killing themselves they
have done a great commercial service to the record industry. If their music imparts the
25
message that suicide is the only authentic route along which an alienated subject can
express anxiety in a manner that is detached from rock’s centrality of commerce, their
deaths have proven the opposite. As the NME reported,
‘within 24 hours [of Cobain’s death] the racks at record stores were groaning
with hastily restocked Nirvana ‘product’ as the music industry set out its stall to
cash-in on Nirvana’s death’
(NME 16/04 1992, 4).
Curtis and Cobain have secured their place in rock’s pantheon of sure-fire back
catalogue sellers. Both have sold more records posthumously than during their
lifetimes. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ charted three separate times in the three years
following Curtis’s death, forcing the rest of the band to make uncomfortable jokes
about the suicide being a brilliant publicity stunt. As Billy Corgan bitterly observes in
‘Heavy Metal Machine’, ‘If I was dead, would my record sell?’ Rock suicides
demonstrate the way in which major label economics inevitably win out. Ironically,
Joy Division had turned down an offer to join Warner (one of the five major labels) in
1979. Their principles came to nothing, however, as their indie label Factory suffered
a calamitous commercial decline (as chronicled in 24 Hour Party People) and was
eventually forced to sell Joy Division’s entire back catalogue to Warner anyway,
netting the major the lion’s share of the band’s total earnings. Another notable feature
of the commercial implications of rock suicide is the enormous success that the
surviving members go on to achieve. Nirvana’s drummer became frontman of the
multi-million selling Foo Fighters, who remain a staple of America’s stadium rock
scene. Joy Division’s surviving members continued as New Order. Whilst they lacked
the emotional intensity of their previous identity, the group’s equally pioneering
electro pop gained them the highest selling 12” single in history in the shape of Blue
Monday, and more oddly placed them in a position to record the official 1992
England World Cup Song, World in Motion.
To sum up, then, the prevalence of suicide in rock aesthetics is symptomatic of
rock’s increasing self-awareness over the last two decades, especially an awareness of
its own inadequacies and contradictions. For Ian Curtis suicide was the most apt form
of closure to a series of punk rock performances of crescendoing intensity. Later, the
irresolvable dialectic Kurt Cobain encountered between stardom and punk values
offered no possible synthesis, no way of transcending inertia, other than oblivion.
26
27
Appendix One
Ian Curtis by Anton Corbijn in NME, 1980
28
Appendix 2
Kurt Cobain Suicide Note, 1994
29
30
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33
1
Notes
Stroszek was the televised film, by Warner Herzog, that Ian Curtis supposedly watched alone before putting on an Iggy Pop
LP and hanging himself. The movie, in which a European living in America kills himself rather than choosing between two
women, had eerie parallels with Curtis’s own predicament.
2
Casablancas, of the Strokes

3
Gallagher, of Oasis
4
This essay considers the two musicians as what Roland Barthes would term énoncés (the subject of the utterance) within
the music press and their own lyrics, rather than as the subject of the énonciation (the ‘I’ who speaks who is ultimately
unknowable). This is a vital distinction. Curtis and Cobain were extratextual human beings whose motivations we are in no
position to derive: the temptation to psychoanalyse them through their music must be resisted. The essay is instead
interested in the way in which texts (writing and photographs) about these musicians enact ideological conflicts centring
around the act of their suicides.
5
The WHO figures for the distribution of suicide cases from 1950 to 1998, though they contain several self-admitted
shortcomings, describe a shift from 40% of reported cases being aged 5-44 years in 1950 to 55% in 1999 (WHO 2004)
6
‘Blue Meanies’: a reference to the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine
7
Take the scene in which Kowalski sits in his car and points a beautiful blonde garage attendant to a petrol pump, making a
request to ‘fill her up’. His heterosexuality is also asserted in a strange comic incident involving queer-bashing. Two
hitchers with ridiculously camp voices (‘you think we’re queers’) attempt to rob him using a tiny gun (again, the Freud).
There is a rapid cut to the men, bruised, on the side of the road, having been shown exactly where ‘true’ masculinity lies.
8
Gothicism was nothing new in rock circles. Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut album of 1970 set macabre tales of black
magic to a straightforward blues-derived template and inadvertantly created heavy metal. However, the Sabbath’s patterns
of imagery and performance style were intentionally pantomimic, derived from horror movies and the occult novel by
Dennis Whetley from which they took their name. Joy Division, by contrast, were committed to a more serious message.
Paul Morley described their music as containing ‘no cheap shocks, rocky horror, no tricks with mirrors and clumsy guilt, but
catastrophic imagery of compulsion, contradiction, wonder, fear’ (1980, 38).
9
The imagery has a precedent in David Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ period . Joy Division’s original name, Warsaw, was taken from the
track ‘Warsawza’ on Bowie’s Low
10
The same can be said for Joy Division’s adoption of their name. The term ‘Joy Division’ was taken from Karol Celtinsky’s
S&M novel House of Dolls and refers to the Jewish women who were prostitutes in concentration camps. As far as naming
strategies go this is undeniably crass, but does tie in extremely effectively with the themes in their music. The name carries
layered associations of atrocity, of the basest human behaviour conceivable. The idea of prostitution (not to mention general
sexual abuse) taking place in concentration camps adds another layer of shame to one of humanity’s most shameful acts.
That the image was found in an S&M novel, however, is the most sinister indictment of human nature of all. Holocaust
victims are not only physically violated but must posthumously endure a detached audience of non-Nazis taking sexual
pleasure from their suffering. This combination of atrocity and sadism, a condition that Freud defined as a neurotic
substitute for sexual satisfaction (1915-17, 349), is an indictment of the prevalence of the Freudian ‘Death Drive’ over the
course of the Twentieth Century. As Plath sardonically reflects, ‘Every woman adores a Fascist,/The boot in the face, the
brute/Brute heart of a brute like you’ (ll. 52-55). Ironically, Plath, Curtis and Kane’s critiques of superlatively dark human
instincts are born out by their respective suicides, and their concurrent posthumous success.
11
An interest in ‘highbrow’ art extended to the band’s visual aesthetic. The cover of their second and last studio album,
Closer, consists of an image of a crypt in a northern Italian graveyard by French photographer Bernard Pierre Wolff,
discovered in Zoom magazine:
Joy Division, Closer (Facory) 1980

The accompanying title is presented in a typeface used for Roman stone-cut inscription, the most elegant of gravestone
fonts, evoking an impression of mortality in its most grandiose cultural sphere.
12
Grunge: ‘basically metal played by punk rockers’, Cameron NME 16/04 1992, 3
13
This invasion of death into infantilism is established in the biographical reports surrounding Nirvana. Cobain’s amateur art
projects involved gluing human hair onto dolls, so that they looked like child corpses (Cross 2001, 181). The first gift he
ever received from his wife Courtney Love was a tiny porcelain doll entombed in a heart-shaped box.
14
The video to the song, ironically directed by the same Anton Corbijn who took the Ian Curtis obituary photograph
discussed earlier, extended the infant-death imagery. Here a foetus (another prevalent Cobain image) is fed down an I.V.
tube into the arm of a hospitalised Jesus, who appears to be recovering from a heroin overdose.
15
Many of the subjects of his songs from debut album Bleach onwards are victims of rape, murder and - most distinctly -
several variants upon domestic imprisonment. Their experiences are often relayed in childish language, in order to enhance
the impression of vulnerability, not to mention for the sake of shock-value sick humour: ‘Floyd breathes hard, I hear a zip /
Pee-pee pressed against my lips’ (Floyd the Barber).
16
Intruigingly, Ian Curtis was also obsessed with getting Joy Division on TV, hounding Tony Wilson and putting pressure on
bandmate Bernard Sumner to talk to ITV executives at the small TV company where he worked (Curtis 1995, 52-3)

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Issues in Modern Culture MA

Candidate David Jones

Thesis An assessment of changes in rock ‘n roll heroism that have led to

Monday, 31st May 2004

issues in modern culture

Course Issues in Modern Culture MA

Title Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and the Post-Punk

Thesis An assessment of changes in rock ‘n roll heroism

1. Nirvana – Serve The Servants (from In Utero, 1993)

January - May 2004

Rock Suicides: Curtis, Cobain and the Post-Punk

impossibility of preaching punk ideology within any mass-market mode of

Kowalski’s death is the ultimate expression of his excessive lifestyle. By

Fig 1. Primacy of Signifying Systems in Vanishing Point

Authentic (free, liberated, natural)

Official Discourse Police Radio

Inauthentic (bound, constrained, socially imposed)

Supersoul best embodies the ascendancy of audible signification. On the radio,

Road signs are depicted as a regimentation of physical space, a typical symbol of

Hooray for the men of vision

Takin’ a look through the history book

I guess you were right,

Joy Division’s music is physical and lucid, music about uncontrollable

And she turned to me

And she screamed out, kicking on her side

The theme of alienation is combined with the inability of an individual to control

they do so not in order to trivialise the darkest chapters of human history, or as a

As my bones grew they did hurt

Cut myself on angel’s hair and baby’s breath

Polly wants a cracker

Polly wants a cracker

Polly says her back hurts

Fig 3. Front Sleeve:

Fig 4. Front Sleeve:

Nirvana achieved an unprecedented level of crossover success because they were

Anon 2004 ‘suicide’ in Wikipedia htttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide

Barthes, Roland trans. Lavers, Anette 1973 Mythologies Granada: London

Derrida, Jacques trans. Chakravorty, Gayatri 1998 (1967) Of Grammatology USA:

Fink, Bruce 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and

Hornby, Nick 1998 About a Boy London: Gollancz

Kane, Sarah 2000 4.48 Psychosis London: Methuen

Rocco. John M. 1998 The Nirvana Companion: two decades of commentary. A

World Health Organisation 2004. ‘Suicide Prevention’

Zalta, Edward N. ed. 2004 ‘Suicide’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Casablancas, of the Strokes

Joy Division, Closer (Facory) 1980

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