Kurt Cobain In Guitar Hero 5.

I don't view the widespread use of Kurt Cobain's likeness in Guitar Hero 5 as a bad thing. I don't know if this is a strange thing to say. I'm not attached to Nirvana. They ushered in grunge, which I view as infinitely preferable to 80's faux-metal and their larger than life presentations. Playing Heart Shaped Box on Guitar Hero 2 was fun until I realized that you played the entire thing twice, in which case I quickly became annoyed with it.

I don't have a horse in the race of Courtney Love v. Nirvana's surviving members, in short.

Dave Grohl and Kurt Novoselic objected as soon as they found out that Cobain could be unlocked as a playable character and not just for Nirvana songs only. They're personally offended, since they spent most of their growing up with Kurt and to see his image used without a care as to which song is being played or like any other character in the game is insensitive to them and their perspective on Cobain's life, given his tortured history with his own celebrity, being grounded heavily in hardcore punk. (He met his wife at an L7/Butthole Surfers show, for Heaven's sake.)

And they're right. The problem is, that particular violence to Cobain's memory has already been done. His image is used to peddle lunchboxes, shirts at Hot Topic and an entire line of sneakers. One of my best friends has an iconic poser of Cobain clutching his guitar on his wall back at home. Shit, I own a copy of his personal journals that were published as a hardcover book.

That battle got lost years ago.

It bears repeating that Courtney Love was the person that signed all the deals on behalf of her late husband. That said, I don't assume her intentions were entirely profit driven all the time. One can make a reasonable argument that there's enough speculation and wild ass guessing about "what Kurt was like as a kid" that a pretty good way to answer it definitively would be to read his journals. Suffice to say that her stewardship of his legacy is spotty at best. Then again, if I was a drug addict who'se husband publicly suffered from anxiety and was conflicted with his fame (who knows how much more he was conflicted or hopeful in private), I'm not sure I'd do much better with figuring out his ultimate intent.

But. We already know Cobain to be chronically depressed, a tragic figure who "self-medicated" with heroin and prescription pharmaceuticals to numb his pain both real and imagined. This image of Cobain will live on through careful marketing and preservation of his now-profitable career. We know he listened a lot of Pixies, Melvins and Black Flag, wore a lot of sweaters and had faraway looks in his eyes. Like Nick Drake before him, the archiving/marketing of Cobain's life borders on depression pornography, another in a long line of tortured artists, whose battles with demons spell a sustainable revenue stream for whomever owns the copyrights. This institutional memory of Cobain will endure.

Here's my sticking point, occasionally, though it doesn't make the labels and estate as much money, he was known to smile. Case in point: Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Wait, you say. That song is about anger and confusion, part of Cobain's desire to make "the perfect" pop song, whose lyrics are contradictory and frustrating. There's something else there, however. The now-ingrained guitar riff. Cobain acknowledges the riff has similarities to Louie, Louie and More Than A Feeling. Yeah. Boston. One of my favorite songs to sing in a bar drunk in or out of the company of Eleven Names friends and associates. It may be physically impossible not to feel good when you hear that song.

This leads me to my point: Yes, Cobain jumping around or playing guitar like anyone else in Guitar Hero is poor stewardship. That deal's been signed. Genie's out of the bottle. Etc. (I don't think the people negotiating on behalf of the Guitar Hero 5 team would let something that big slip under the radar, so I'm not assuming they're nefarious or sinister in their dealings.)

But. (You were expecting that but, weren't you?) It presents a different image of Cobain, one that's energetic and positive. It lends a different dimension to Cobain, one that's not true or accurate, but truthful. Once in a while, in his life he smiled and had fun. It goes against the tested perception of Cobain's legacy.

Even if Guitar Hero isn't the right venue for it, even if it's unflattering, even if it goes against everything that Cobain stood for, it presents another side to Cobain, one that is touched by the depression but not wholly enveloped by it. This side humanizes him from a one-dimensional sad-sack drug-addled genius and into something more corporeal.

Yeah, it's a game called Guitar Hero and yes, it's done by a gigantic corporation to siphon money from kids. It's contradictory to what Cobain stood for as a product and corporation, but, it somehow feels cyclical that a product Cobain wouldn't have wanted, a product that exploits and amplifies the rock star fantasies of those playing it (a fantasy Cobain's hardcore punk background taught him to reject), does damage to the market-approved myth around his life.

It's strange that in the exploitation, something profoundly less marketable is revealed. Cobain's likeness in Guitar Hero 5 is confusing, ultimately contradictory and the intent is unclear, with ample evidence to draw upon that can be read many different ways reasonably. That sounds like a lot of Nirvana songs to me...