Of course, there are the oversharers, like Game (“Take me away like a bullet from Kurt Cobain,” on “My Life”) or Tyler, the Creator (“Dead parents everywhere, smellin’ like teen spirit,” on “Window”). Several songs even equal R.E.M.’s “Let Me In,” which takes the form of a conversation with Cobain, and “Love Love Love” by the Mountain Goats, which features rap fan John Darnielle singing the couplet “And way out in Seattle, young Kurt Cobain / Snuck out to the greenhouse, put a bullet in his brain.” Cobain’s tormented life and death provides a way for rappers, who often feel obligated to mean-mug through their emotions, to get vulnerable.
But a number of rappers have truly wrestled with the meaning of Cobain’s passing. Plenty of knuckleheads have dropped Cobain’s name simply because it rhymes with “cocaine” or because his death (by shotgun to the face) offers colorful shorthand for generic gun talk. One of rap’s earliest lyrical references to Cobain appeared on Tha Dogg Pound’s “Reality,” from their 1995 album Dogg Food, on which Daz Dillinger asserts, “As complex as the situation gets / I remain, I maintain / Ain’t that much strain / To make me twist myself like Kurt Cobain.” The verse may not appear to be much, but at the time, Daz declaring that he won’t end up like Kurt felt like a moment of hope plucked out of the tragedy. 2,” Lil Wayne’s guest verse wanders into the third person as he rattles off his artistic inspirations: “You see the B.I.G., you see the Jay, the Tupac in him / The Kurt Cobain, the Andre Three Stacks…” And Nevermind was a damn near perfect album, like Bob Marley’s Talkin’ Blues or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.” Nevermind and ’90s rap brought new brands of rebellion into millions of homes, and kids responded to both. I think all that set the stage for Nirvana. “When Nirvana hit, you had black kids into hip-hop watching MTV for alternative videos, getting into Red Hot Chili Peppers,” says Talib Kweli of Nirvana’s hip-hop connection. White kids discovered rap by watching that same weird video-request channel.
But this type of ’90s genre crossing wasn’t odd it was the experience of an entire generation. “And you used to call the station and order a video, and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ used to always be on, and you had no choice but to get into it from there.”Īs Nevermind became an undeniable phenomenon and Cobain a reluctant grunge poster child, the rapper born Dwayne Carter was in elementary school, pondering Nirvana’s cryptic, mumbled songs and developing his own oblique, free-associative style. “When I was young, they had a television station called the Box,” Wayne recalled. In April, prankishCanadian video interviewer Nardwuar the Human Serviette handed Lil Wayne a copy of the book Taking Punk to the Masses: From Nowhere to Nevermind and asked about Nirvana’s influence on the rapper.