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Frances Bean Cobain -— daughter of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and now the executive producer behind HBO’s upcoming doc chronicling his life, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck — spoke out about life after her father’s death in a rare interview with Rolling Stone.
“I was around 15 when I realized he was inescapable. Even if I was in a car and had the radio on, there’s my dad,” Cobain said. “He’s larger than life, and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal.”
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Though Kurt Cobain has remained popular for decades, his 22-year-old daughter admitted that she didn’t have much interest in her father’s music as a teenager, adding that it would have been “awkward” to have been a fan of his. “I don’t really like Nirvana that much [grins]. Sorry, promotional people, Universal,” she told Rolling Stone. “I’m more into Mercury Rev, Oasis, Brian Jonestown Massacre [laughs]. The grunge scene is not what I’m interested in.”
One thing Cobain made clear to Brett Morgen, director of Montage of Heck, while bringing the doc together was that she didn’t want her father’s story to be romanticized. “When Brett and I first met, I was very specific about what I wanted to see, how I wanted Kurt to be represented. I told him, ‘I don’t want the mythology of Kurt or the romanticism,’ ” she explained. “Even though Kurt died in the most horrific way possible, there is this mythology and romanticism that surrounds him, because he’s 27 forever. Kurt has gotten to icon status because he will never age. He will always be that relevant in that time and always be beautiful.”
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The documentary will be released in select countries later this month before it airs on HBO on May 4. Cobain promises that it will paint “a portrait of a man attempting to cope with being a human … It’s the closest thing to having Kurt tell his own story in his own words — by his own aesthetic, his own perception of the world,” She added, “He wanted his band to be successful. But he didn’t want to be the fucking voice of a generation.
Twenty-one years following the death of Nirvana frontman, Cobain revealed that her striking resemblance to her father still gives ex-members Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic and Pat Smear what she refers to as the “K.C. Jeebies.” “They look at me, and you can see they’re looking at a ghost. They were all getting the K. C. Jeebies hardcore. Dave said, ‘She is so much like Kurt, ‘ ” she fondly recalled. “I was sitting in a chair, chain-smoking, looking down like this [affects total boredom]. And they went, ‘You are doing exactly what your father would have done.’ “
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