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Kurt Cobain Filmography
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Kurt Cobain: Early life
Cobain was born in Hoquiam, Washington, USA and spent his early years in Aberdeen, Washington and Montesano, Washington, after his parents, Wendy and Donald, divorced. He moved to the Seattle area in 1985.
As a teenager with a chaotic home life growing up in small town Washington, Cobain took part in the thriving Pacific Northwest alternative culture, going to punk rock shows in Seattle and forming a lifelong friendship with fellow Montesano musicians The Melvins, whose music heavily influenced Nirvana's sound. He had a small "K" tattooed on his forearm, the insignia of Olympia, Washington, label K Records, largely chosen for the coincidental ellipsis of his name.
At school Cobain didn't take much interest in academics or sports, mostly focusing on his art courses. He was an outspoken supporter of gay students at his school, sometimes suffering physically at the hands of homophobic students for his beliefs. (Although he once claimed in an interview with
The Advocate that he was arrested for spray-painting a pro-gay slogan on a bank, Aberdeen police records show the phrase he was arrested for in 1985 was actually "Ain't got no how watchamacallit.")
It has been rumored that Cobain was gay or bisexual; however, Cobain himself said numerous times that he was heterosexual. In a February, 1992, interview with gay magazine The Advocate, Cobain admitted that he thought he was gay while in high school and stated, "I could be bisexual... If I wouldn't have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle." In his journals he wrote that he was heterosexual, but wished he was gay just "to piss off homophobes". Riding on the success of the recently released video to "Teen Spirit" Nirvana appeared on Saturday Night Live in February 1992. At the end of the show when actors and guests thank the crowd and close the show, Cobain and bassist Krist Novoselic french kissed as the credits rolled. The video was cut from the show in syndication and never aired again.
In his youth, Cobain spent a lot of time reading in the local library, discovering such literary figures as William S. Burroughs, whose cut-up technique Cobain later utilised to write lyrics for some of Nirvana's songs. Cobain also later recorded with Burroughs a spoken word/guitar improvisation piece called
The Priest They Called Him, whose words were originally one of Burroughs' short stories out of The Exterminator. Other literary works which provide illumination on Cobain's philosophy also include Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, and the SCUM Manifesto, by
Valerie Solanas.
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