[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ecause nobody told them that we’re all sick of talking about Nirvana this year, Seattle police unveiled a 20-year-old poem found in the then newly-deceased Kurt Cobain’s wallet to the media last week. In the scribbling, the soon-to-be martyr Cobain rips his soon-to-be widow Courtney Love several new assholes. Even if they didn’t mean to, by reminding us that the grunge-era power couple did not share a constructive relationship, the SPD fed new ammunition to conspiracy theorists who figure Love arranged for her sainted husband’s grisly end.
Then it turned out Love probably wrote the stupid thing herself as bit of a bleak pre-nuptial lark.
But wait! If Courtney Love was wrong about the location of Flight 370, how can we be sure she knows what she’s talking about this time?! Maybe Cobain did pen the limerick, and “Promise to fuck her once a week” means stuff like, “Fuck her by never taking out the trash” or “Fuck her by forgetting to program the VCR to record her favorite monster truck rallies,” and not “fuck” in the nice way. Maybe, in an unsettling but nonetheless dazzling display of precociousness, baby Frances Bean wrote the poem as an anniversary gift to mum and dad. Maybe Dave Matthews wrote it for some reason.
It doesn’t matter. By many accounts, Cobain wouldn’t have had to stick around much longer to outlive his marriage, but that adds little-to-no credibility to the murder conspiracy, which is, like most conspiracy theories, bullshit.
But it’s a popular load of bullshit, and with good reason. Cobain was a crucial songwriter with a sympathetic media persona. Love is a hit-or-miss songwriter with a polarizing media persona. To some of us, imagining Love as a bloodless, fame-mongering sociopath is more reassuring than believing the leader of the most important band of our lifetimes could possibly take his own life.
Making Courtney Love responsible for Kurt Cobain’s death makes us feel better, and it gives Love way too much credit.
[pullquote align=”right”]Making Courtney Love responsible for Kurt Cobain’s death makes us feel better, and it gives Love way too much credit.[/pullquote]This is the same woman who sucker punched Kathleen Hanna at Lollapalooza ’95 probably because she forgot Hanna and Tobi Vail aren’t the same person. The same woman who, if we remember Hit So Hard correctly, might as well have kicked indomitable drummer Patty Schemel out of Hole. Who torched her goodwill with the record-buying public by suing and defaming mainstream rock’s most inexplicably beloved Cool Dad, Dave Grohl. Who released the solo album America’s Sweetheart. Who flashed David Letterman live on network TV. Who signed off — more-or-less by accident, if you believe her — on the sacrilegious Kurt Cobain avatar in Guitar Hero 5. Who forgot private messages and public tweets aren’t the same thing and, as a result, garnered a libel suit from her former lawyer. And who thinks a Nirvana-centric musical isn’t a stupid idea.
Judging from many verifiable events in her life and career, we can surmise that Courtney Love is not a methodical person. Not someone with the patience and foresight necessary to orchestrate an elaborate suicide hoax without getting busted pretty much instantly. Definitely not a criminal mastermind.
For that matter, the crime scene discrepancies most-often called fishy by Kurtruthers aren’t really hard to explain. It’s no stretch to assume Cobain possessed a Herculean tolerance to smack at the time he died. Even after shooting up what medical science considers a triple-lethal dose, it seems reasonable to think he could muster the strength to lift a shotgun a few feet off the ground.
Different graphologists have made different conclusions about whether one person could’ve written Cobain’s entire suicide note. Indeed, the author penned the final few lines — “Please keep going Courtney, For Frances,” ect. — in crudely-emphasized longhand that doesn’t match the bulk of the letter. But the same can be said for the header, “To Boddah,” which never gets mentioned in Cobain-conspiracy lore for some reason.
Had Cobain, at one point, regaled his wife with memories of “Boddah,” which she remembered, and exploited as an intimate detail to give her bogus suicide note extra authenticity? Maybe. But referencing, or addressing, an imaginary childhood friend sounds a lot like something an unhinged, desperate, suicidal person would totally do. On the other hand, I doubt assassins think about what their victims were like as toddlers unless they can possibly avoid it.
So yeah, sorry people, but Courtney didn’t kill Kurt. Also, Billy Corgan didn’t write Pretty On The Inside and Cobain didn’t write Live Through This, because when you’re making millions upon millions off the songs you write, you don’t just give them away to someone you’re fucking, even if it’s in the nice way.