Music

Frances Bean Cobain admits she doesn't really like Nirvana

by Tyler Munro

April 8, 2015

In a rare interview, the daughter of Kurt Cobain says she just never got into grunge.

Because she’s at least partly in charge of her father’s estate, and because the much talked about Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck documentary is finally airing later this month, Frances Bean Cobain is about to be in the news a lot.

Mostly, it will be the kind of PR fluff you’d expect before a big premiere. Anecdotes about her dad, maybe some updates on what she’s doing now, and some insight on the documentary itself. But in an interview with Rolling Stone, Frances Bean, now 22, dishes on Nirvana themselves. And to put it plainly: She’s not that into them.

Worse, she prefers Oasis. And weirder still? She refers to her father as Kurt, which is weird even considering she was not yet 2 when he died.

I don’t really like Nirvana that much.

She says she’s not interested in grunge, which is fair, because it had long turned irrelevant before she could talk, but Frances does admit to liking “Territorial Pissings,” calling it a “fucking great song,” and that “Dumb,” off In Utero, brings her to tears every time she hears it.

“I cry every time I hear that song,” she explained. “It’s a stripped-down version of Kurt’s perception of himself — of himself on drugs, off drugs, feeling inadequate to be titled the voice of a generation.”

On her relationship with her father’s music, she says it would be awkward if she was a fan.

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. He’s larger than life, and our culture is obsessed with dead musicians. We love to put them on a pedestal. If Kurt had just been another guy who abandoned his family in the most awful way possible… But he wasn’t. He inspired people to put him on a pedestal, to become St. Kurt. He became even bigger after he died than he was when he was alive. You don’t think it could have gotten any bigger. But it did.