tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/nirvana-9680/articlesNirvana – The Conversation2022-05-12T20:04:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1821402022-05-12T20:04:36Z2022-05-12T20:04:36ZFriday essay: how the West discovered the Buddha<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460884/original/file-20220502-24-bg7hxv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=116%2C53%2C5874%2C3916&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Buddhism is the third largest (and fastest growing) religion in Australia with approximately <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0%7E2016%7EMain%20Features%7EReligion%20Data%20Summary%7E70">half a million adherents</a>.</p>
<p>The celebration of the Buddha’s birthday here (on or around May 15) has become a major cultural event and the Buddhist doctrine of “mindfulness” is now a part of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/show/mindfulness-goes-mainstream/">mainstream culture</a>. But how and when did the West discover the Buddha?</p>
<p>The facts about the Buddha’s life are opaque but we can assume he was born no earlier than 500 BCE and died no later than 400 BCE. He was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lalitavistara">said to be</a> the son of an Indian king, so distressed by the sight of suffering that he spent years searching for the answer to it, finally attaining enlightenment while sitting under a bodhi (sacred fig) tree.</p>
<p>The Buddha’s family name was Gotama (in the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali"> Pali</a> language) or Gautama (in Sanskrit). Although it does not appear in the earliest traditions, his personal name was later said to be Siddhartha, which means “one who has achieved his purpose”. (This name was retrofitted by later believers.)</p>
<p>According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha spent 45 years teaching the path to enlightenment, gathering followers, and creating the Buddhist monastic community. According to the legend, upon his death at the age of 80, he entered Nirvana. </p>
<p>In India during the 3rd century BCE, the emperor Ashoka first promoted Buddhism. From this time on, it spread south, flourishing in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, then moving through Central Asia including Tibet, and on to China, Korea, and Japan. Ironically, the appeal of Buddhism declined in India in succeeding centuries. It was virtually extinct there by the 13th century. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461166/original/file-20220504-12-1lonty.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Buddha preaches Abhidhamma to his Mother in Heaven, Chedi Traiphop Traimongkhon Temple, Hatyai. Thailand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In that same century, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo gave the West its first account of Buddha’s life. Between 1292 and 1295, journeying home from China, Marco Polo arrived in Sri Lanka. There he heard the story of the life of Sergamoni Borcan whom we now know as the Buddha.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461129/original/file-20220504-17-li3i3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1088&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Marco wrote about Sergamoni Borcan, a name he had heard at the court of Kublai Khan, in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Description-World-Marco-Polo/dp/1624664369">The Description of the World</a>. This was the Mongolian name for the Buddha: Sergamoni for Shakyamuni – the sage of the Shakya clan, and Borcan for Buddha – the “divine” one. (He was also known as Bhagavan – the Blessed One, or Lord.)</p>
<p>According to Marco, Sergamoni Borcan was the son of a great king who wished to renounce the world. The king moved Sergamoni into a palace, tempting him with the sensual delights of 30,000 maidens.</p>
<p>But Sergamoni was unmoved in his resolve. When his father allowed him to leave the palace for the first time, he encountered a dead man, and an infirm old man. He returned to the palace <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Description-World-Marco-Polo/dp/1624664369">frightened and astonished</a>, “saying to himself that he would not remain in this bad world but would go seeking the one who had made it and did not die.” </p>
<p>Sergamoni then left the palace permanently and lived the abstinent life of a celibate recluse. “Certainly,” <a href="https://www.amazon.in/Description-World-Marco-Polo/dp/1624664369">Marco declared</a>, “had he been Christian, he would have been a great saint with our Lord Jesus Christ”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-buddha-became-a-christian-saint-142285">How the Buddha became a Christian saint</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Jesuits and authors</h2>
<p>Little more was known about the Buddha for the next 300 years in the West. Nevertheless, from the mid-16th century, information accumulated, primarily as a result of the Jesuit missions to Japan and China.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461140/original/file-20220504-11-yc2dkd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=763&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Great Buddha of Kamakura, in Japan, located in the Buddhist temple of Kōtoku-in and dating from approximately 1252.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By 1700, it was increasingly assumed by those familiar with the Jesuit missions that the Buddha was the common link in an array of religious practitioners they were encountering. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_le_Comte">Louis le Comte</a> (1655-1728), writing his <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Nouveaux_m%C3%A9moires_sur_l_%C3%A9tat_pr%C3%A9sent.html?id=51sPAAAAQAAJ&redir_esc=y">memoir of his travels</a> through China on a mission inspired by the Sun King Louis XIV declared, “all the Indies have been poisoned with his pernicious Doctrine. Those of Siam call them Talapoins, the Tartars call them Lamas or Lama sem, the Japoners Bonzes, and the Chinese Hocham.”</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=556&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461142/original/file-20220504-16-lp1ch7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=699&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Daniel Defoe in the National Maritime Museum, London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The writings of the English author <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Defoe">Daniel Defoe </a>(c.1660-1731) show what the educated English reader might have known of the Buddha in the early 18th century. </p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/3216942">Dictionary of all Religions</a> (1704), Defoe tells us of an idol of Fe (the Buddha) on an island near the Red Sea, said to represent an atheistic philosopher who lived 500 years before Confucius, that is, around 1,000 BCE. </p>
<p>This idol was carried to China </p>
<blockquote>
<p>with Instructions concerning the Worship paid to it, and so introduced a Superstition, that in several things abolish’d the Maxims of Confucius, who always condemned Atheism and idolatry.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Confusion</h2>
<p>A quite different Buddha was to be encountered by the British in the later 1700s as they achieved economic, military, and political dominance in India. Initially, the British were reliant on their Hindu informants. They told them the Buddha was an incarnation of their god Vishnu who had come to lead the people astray with false teaching.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461162/original/file-20220504-11-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Face of Lord Buddha, head of curly hair, lips, almond shaped eyes, Pakistan or Afghanistan, Gandharan region, 1st–2nd century, stucco with traces of pigment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More confusion reigned. It was often argued in the West that there were two Buddhas – one whom Hindus believed to be the ninth incarnation of Vishnu (appearing around 1000 BCE), the other (Gautama) appearing around 1000 years later. </p>
<p>And yet more confusion. For there was a tradition in the West since the mid-17th century that the Buddha came from Africa.</p>
<p>Well into the 19th century, it was thought that representations of the Buddha, particularly in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, depicted with woolly hair and thick “Ethiopian lips” (as <a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ew5vgkp3">one writer put it</a>) were evidence of his African origins. </p>
<p>Such observers were mistaking traditional representations of the Buddha with his hair tightly coiled into tiny cones as a sign of his African origins. </p>
<h2>First use of the term ‘Buddhism’</h2>
<p>Two major turning points eventually sorted out these confusions. The first was the invention of the term “Buddhism”. </p>
<p>Its first use in English was in 1800 in a translation of a work entitled <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Lectures_on_History_Translated_from_the.html?id=rxZXAAAAcAAJ&redir_esc=y">Lectures on History by Count Constantine de Volney</a>. A politician and orientalist, de Volney coined the term “Buddhism” to identify the pan-Asian religion that he believed was based on a mythical figure called “Buddha”. </p>
<p>Only then did Buddhism begin to emerge from the array of “heathen idolatries” with which it had been identified, becoming identified as a religion, alongside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.</p>
<p>The second turning point was the arrival in the West of Buddhist texts. The decade from 1824 was decisive. For centuries, not a single original document of the Buddhist religion had been accessible to the scholars of Europe. </p>
<p>But in the space of ten years, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_texts">four complete Buddhist literatures</a> were discovered – in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Pāli. Collections from Japan and China were to follow. </p>
<p>With the Buddhist texts in front of them, Western scholars were able to determine Buddhism was a tradition that had arisen in India around 400-500 years BCE.</p>
<p>And among these texts was the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lalitavistara">Lalitavistara</a> (written around the 4th century CE), which contained a biography of the Buddha. For the first time Westerners came to read an account of his life. </p>
<p>The Lalitavistara and other biographies depicted a highly magical and enchanted world – of the Buddha’s heavenly life before his birth, of his conception via an elephant, of his mother’s transparent womb, of his miraculous powers at his birth, of the many miracles he performed, of gods, demons, and water spirits.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=493&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=620&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=620&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/461137/original/file-20220504-25-psa928.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=620&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 19th century painting of the birth of the Buddha: scene with Queen Maya.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But within these enchanted texts, there remained the story of the life of the Buddha with which we are familiar. Of the Indian King <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9Auddhodana">Shuddhodana</a> who, fearing Gautama would reject the world, keeps his son sheltered from any sights of suffering. When Gautama finally leaves the palace he encounters an old man, a diseased man, and a dead man. He then decides to search for the answer to suffering. </p>
<p>For the Buddha, the cause of suffering lies in attachment to the things of the world. The path to liberation from it thus lies in the rejection of attachment. </p>
<p>The Buddha’s way to the cessation of attachment was eventually summarised in the Holy Eightfold Path – right views, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation. The outcome of this path was the attainment of Nirvana when the self at the time of death escaped from rebirth and was extinguished like the flame of a candle. </p>
<p>This selfless Buddha, who was said to have died in the groves of trees near the Indian town of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushinagar">Kusinagara</a>, was the one the West soon came to admire. As the Unitarian minister Richard Armstrong, put it in 1870, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>his personality has endured for centuries, and is as fresh and beautiful as now when displayed to European eyes, as when Siddharta [sic] himself breathed his dying breath in the shades of (the forest of) Kusinagara.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>History versus legend</h2>
<p>But is the Buddha of the legend also the Buddha of history? That the tradition we call Buddhism was founded by an Indian sage named Gautama around the 5th century BCE is very likely. </p>
<p>That he preached a middle way to liberation between worldly indulgence and extreme asceticism is highly probable. That he cultivated practices of mindfulness and meditation, which led to peace and serenity, is almost certain. </p>
<p>That said, the earliest Buddhist traditions showed little interest in the details of the life of the Buddha. It was, after all, his teachings – the Dharma as Buddhists call it – rather than his person that mattered. </p>
<p>But we can discern a growing interest in the life of the Buddha from the first century BCE until the second or third centuries of the common era as the Buddha transitions within Buddhism from a teacher to a saviour, from human to divine.</p>
<p>It was from the first to the fifth centuries CE that there developed a number of Buddhist texts giving full accounts of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Buddha-founder-of-Buddhism">the life of the Buddha</a>, from his birth (and before) to his renunciation of the world, his enlightenment, his teachings, and finally to his death. </p>
<p>Thus, there is a long period of at least 500-900 years between the death of the Buddha and these biographies of him. Can we rely upon these very late lives of the Buddha for accurate information about the events of his life? Probably not. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the legend of his life and teachings still provide an answer to the meaning of human life for some 500 million followers in the modern world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182140/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip C. Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From talk of a ‘poisonous doctrine’ to mistaken beliefs that he hailed from Africa, Western thinkers got Buddhism wrong for a long time.Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1672492021-09-24T11:49:42Z2021-09-24T11:49:42ZNevermind at 30: why the Nirvana baby lawsuit is a warning for parents<p>Nirvana’s album Nevermind has reached its 30th anniversary and is under more scrutiny than ever as a result of a <a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/nirvana-lawsuit.pdf">lawsuit</a> recently filed by the former cover-star.</p>
<p>Spencer Elden, the underwater baby tempted by a dollar bill on a fishhook, is suing the band and Kurt Cobain’s estate for having “knowingly produced, possessed, and advertised commercial child pornography”. The claim states that the band benefited financially from their participation in his “sexual exploitation”. Elden now seeks a civil remedy of US$150,000 per defendant for the “lifelong damages” he claims to have suffered. </p>
<p>Originally inspired by <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Nirvana_FAQ/KCI1AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">Cobain’s fascination with waterbirths</a>, it has been said the cover <a href="https://theconversation.com/nirvanas-nevermind-an-album-artwork-expert-decodes-the-famous-underwater-baby-cover-166801">can be interpreted</a> as a comment on the values society imparts to the youth. The same picture is, however, interpreted differently in the lawsuit which attempts to weave in the idea that the image was designed to elicit a sexual response from viewers. </p>
<p>It goes so far as to suggest that Cobain “chose” the image depicting Elden “<a href="https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/nirvana-lawsuit.pdf">like a sex worker</a> – grabbing for a dollar bill that is positioned dangling from a fishhook in front of his nude body”.</p>
<h2>The legal argument</h2>
<p>Under <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256">US federal law</a>, a key factor in distinguishing between the artistic cover and illegal explicit content is whether the depiction of the minor constitutes a <a href="https://casetext.com/case/us-v-steen-2#1645427d-e189-4d07-857b-ec34c4cc9d51-fn30">“lascivious exhibition”</a> of their intimate parts – in other words, a depiction designed to excite sexual stimulation in the viewer. Also, any <a href="https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-dost/?PHONE_NUMBER_GROUP=P">determination of lasciviousness</a> must be based on the depiction taken as a whole, with its overall content and context in mind. </p>
<p>Elden is likely to face an uphill struggle in persuading a court that the cover is deliberately focused on the baby’s genitals and that the creators intended to elicit a sexual response – as the first thing most people probably notice is the underwater background. </p>
<p>But, even if he was successful on the child pornography ground, the difficult question would arise of whether fans who own or have downloaded the album with its cover art have copies of a child sex image and so have committed a crime.</p>
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<p>The lawsuit also suggests that Elden has suffered a “loss of enjoyment of life” and had his privacy violated. But it could be pointed out that Elden has previously acted in ways that continue to cement his connection with the band. He has <a href="https://nypost.com/2016/09/23/nirvana-baby-recreates-iconic-album-cover-25-years-later/">re-enacted</a> the cover to honour the album’s past anniversaries and <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/11/nirvana.baby/index.html">attended events</a> to sign album covers. </p>
<p>Although it’s not unusual for people to reconsider the impact of their experiences from early life, the fact that Elden leaned into the public sphere and seemingly relished his involvement with the album may dilute the strength of his claims. </p>
<h2>Couldn’t consent</h2>
<p>Elden’s parents were <a href="https://ew.com/article/2016/09/22/nirvana-nevermind-album-cover-behind-scenes/">reportedly</a> paid US$250 for the photo shoot. Presumably, this was a standard rate for an unknown model rather than taking into account what the image would be used for. </p>
<p>It is uncertain whether this money was passed down to Elden. He has <a href="https://time.com/4499648/nirvana-nevermind-25-baby-spencer-elden/">expressed</a> his bitterness about having never directly profited from his involvement in the Nevermind project. As his parents’ deal cannot now be renegotiated, some might dismiss his current lawsuit as an attempt to get compensation for the commercialisation of his image.</p>
<p>At the core of Elden’s lawsuit is the fact that the band’s team got his <a href="https://www.npr.org/2008/07/23/92833535/once-naked-for-nirvana-now-a-teen-spirit">parent’s consent</a> before photographing him. Though of course being a baby, Elden did not have any choice. And from this perspective, Elden’s case is a useful reminder for parents to think about the types of images they <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2711442">share</a> online. </p>
<h2>A warning to ‘sharents’</h2>
<p>A lot has changed since the release of Nevermind in September 1991. With the rise of social media sites and photo-sharing networks, the average parent today is <a href="https://parentzone.org.uk/article/average-parent-shares-almost-1500-images-their-child-online-their-5th-birthday">said</a> to share over 1,000 images of their child online before their fifth birthday. Compared to the Nirvana baby album cover, images shared online nowadays are even harder to control. </p>
<p>Indeed, a recent <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/10/09/teens-say-parents-share-too-much-about-them-online-microsoft-study/#_ftnref1">study</a> found that 42% of teenagers in 25 countries are troubled by what their parents post about them on social media. </p>
<p>Although some steps have been taken to protect children’s privacy online – such as the introduction of the <a href="http://merlin.obs.coe.int/article/8978">Children’s Code</a> which applies to digital services that target minors – the law is <a href="http://phrg.padovauniversitypress.it/2020/1/2">not clear</a> as to whether a child’s right to privacy is essentially lost when parents share their images online. </p>
<p>The legal avenues currently available <a href="https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/29792/">do not guarantee</a> protection against parental <a href="https://repository.law.uic.edu/jitpl/vol33/iss3/1/">“over-sharenting”</a> either, meaning that so-called <a href="https://infolawcentre.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2016/04/21/comment-the-not-so-secret-life-of-generation-tagged/">“generation tagged”</a> may have to live with the longevity of their digital footprint – often attached to them without their consent.</p>
<p>Elden has previously addressed the popularity of the iconic cover and he appears <a href="https://www.gq.com.au/entertainment/music/the-cover-star-baby-of-nirvanas-nevermind-album-25-years-on/news-story/091b16069b5f54dc0d27a86cf1ea3f6e">conflicted</a> about it. His ambivalence about the image may be valid. The public’s perception of the album and the visceral feelings attached to its success should not discourage a dispassionate and neutral legal assessment of whether the photograph is unlawful.</p>
<p>But the Nirvana baby lawsuit also serves as a timely reminder to parents to think carefully of the digital shadows they may create for their children. Indeed, parents cannot simply have a “nevermind” attitude to what they share online.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167249/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandros Antoniou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Nirvana baby lawsuit serves as a timely reminder to parents to be careful about what they are sharing about their children online.Alexandros Antoniou, Lecturer in Media Law, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1668012021-09-23T13:37:27Z2021-09-23T13:37:27ZNirvana’s Nevermind: an album artwork expert decodes the famous underwater baby cover<p>In the 30 years since it first appeared, Nirvana’s diamond-selling record Nevermind has seen several re-releases and anniversary special editions. As well as being hugely influential musically, the album <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/readers-poll-the-best-album-covers-of-all-time-10324/5-the-clash-london-calling-256618/">has become a visual landmark</a> of alternative popular culture. </p>
<p>But what exactly is the cover art, with its memorable image of a naked underwater baby apparently chasing a dollar on a fishing line, supposed to represent? As someone who studies 20th century record sleeves, I have some thoughts.</p>
<p>Inspired by <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Nirvana_FAQ/KCI1AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0">Kurt Cobain’s fascination</a> with underwater births, the record label’s art director, Robert Fisher, hired photographer Kirk Weddle to shoot a conceptually related image. </p>
<p>The first thing to note is that the naked child imagery itself doesn’t really speak to the themes of excess, debauchery and hypermasculinity that <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Sexing-the-Groove-Popular-Music-and-Gender/Whiteley/p/book/9780415146715">often appear</a> in rock stardom’s iconography. </p>
<p>Although baby imagery has been used before on the covers of major rock releases – <a href="https://www.albumartexchange.com/covers/119437-mcmlxxxiv-1984?fltr=ALL&sort=TITLE&q=van+halen+1984">Van Halen’s 1984</a> shows an angel child smoking a cigarette – the context is not the same. </p>
<p>There is an absurdist and shock-value element to Nirvana’s baby imagery, exposing the gap between realistic and socially sanctioned, or commercially acceptable, representations of nakedness. But what this implies is a degree of wit through an awareness of the record’s status as a marketable and palatable product. </p>
<h2>The bait</h2>
<p>In terms of the ensemble, it was Fisher’s idea to doctor the image to include a type of bait – the famous dollar bill hooked to the fishing line. This enigmatic and playful reworking of a fishing scene is clearly open to multiple readings. <a href="https://smabellakoppenaudio.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/semiotic-analysis-of-an-album-cover-nevermind-nirvana/">One popular interpretation</a> is that it’s a critique of corporate capitalist society and the principles of consumerism. </p>
<p>The way the infant and dollar bill motifs replace the fish and bait suggests there’s a deeper meaning at play. Is the child tempted by materialistic fulfilment like a fish is baited by sustenance?</p>
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<p>The trouble with this interpretation is that it overlooks Nirvana’s participation in the same system that the cover seems to deride. Nevermind came out on a major label, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/david-geffen/">David Geffen</a>. Which had also put out Aerosmith, Whitesnake and Guns n’ Roses. The logo is printed for all to see on the back of the outer sleeve or CD booklet. And musically speaking, the record incorporates several industry-standard production techniques and mainstream song-writing conventions that stand in stark contrast to the band’s DIY punk roots. </p>
<p>This is an important point of contradiction. The image of a baby swimming towards a dollar bill seems a blatant form of self-mockery while the band knowingly operate in the highly commercial context of the mainstream US music industry. </p>
<p>It’s the addition of the apathetic but sardonic title itself – Nevermind – that suggests some kind of awareness of the identity-based issues the band faced. And the combination of title, cover image and the commercial context implies a self-conscious critique of the contradictions between artistic authenticity and global success.</p>
<p>The significance of the artwork is likely to be scrutinised further given that the baby in the image, now grown up, has decided to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-58327844">sue Nirvana</a> and Kurt Cobain’s estate on grounds of alleged child exploitation and pornography. Nevermind’s artwork has long been considered iconic in terms of 20th and 21st-century popular imagery. But the latest development means its contemporary relevance has been revived with a new sense of irony.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Vezza does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The album cover was inspired by Kurt Cobain’s fascination with underwater births.Christopher Vezza, PhD Candidate in Text and Image Studies, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1671082021-09-16T20:07:26Z2021-09-16T20:07:26ZFriday essay: Nevermind 30 years on – how Nirvana’s second album tilted the world on its axis<p>For many of us back in 1991, it felt as if the planet tilted slightly further on its axis when Smells Like Teen Spirit — the lead single from Nirvana’s Nevermind album — began to dominate the airwaves. The song’s compelling fusion of blast furnace punk, whimsical melody and inscrutable lyrics was unlike anything else commercial radio had embraced up to that point.</p>
<p>Friday September 24 marks the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2021/bbc-music-mark-30-years-nirvana-nevermind">30th anniversary</a> of the release of Nevermind. Materialising apparently out of nowhere, within four months the album had shoved its way to the top of the US charts, dislodging Michael Jackson’s Dangerous in January of 1992. It did almost as well in Australia, reaching number two.</p>
<p>Nevermind has gone on to become a recording phenomenon, with over <a href="https://www.mtv.com/news/1671298/nevermind-nirvana-album/">30 million</a> copies sold. Nobody saw this coming, not least the band’s record company. John Rosenfeld, who worked for Nirvana’s label, Geffen, at the time of its release <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4229236/">has said</a> they originally projected sales of 50,000.</p>
<p>Nirvana formed in 1987 in the logging and fishing town of Aberdeen, Washington. Featuring guitarist, vocalist and principal songwriter Kurt Cobain, bass player Krist Novoselic, and new drummer Dave Grohl, Nevermind was Nirvana’s second album — the first for a major label.</p>
<p>Instantly identifiable by its cover image of an infant swimming toward a fish hook baited with a dollar note, it included three more frenetic-cum-fragile singles — Come As You Are, Lithium and In Bloom — as well as two haunted acoustic tracks — <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2019/07/how-kurt-cobain-confronted-violence-against-women-in-his-darkest-song.html">Polly</a>, a repudiation of sexual violence, and the cello-bathed <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVSjcS-N224">Something in the Way</a>, which alluded to homelessness.</p>
<p>A range of factors converged to draft Nirvana into the mainstream with Nevermind. Certainly, the quality of the songs helped.</p>
<p>So did Teen Spirit’s incendiary video, which conveyed generational antipathy through robotic cheerleaders, a swarm of convulsive teens and a wizened school janitor (Cobain having held down just such a job for a short time). Producer Butch Vig and mixer Andy Wallace were also vital, applying precisely the right amount of gleam to the band’s coarse-grained, jet engine roar.</p>
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<p>Significant, too, were the many post-punk musicians who in the 1980s shaped what Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad subsequently termed a “<a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Come_As_You_Are/qrSDPW6G5ZIC">shadow music industry</a>”. This underground faction of American bands — Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth and others — forged a crucial alternative, do-it-yourself aesthetic pathway through the ultra-conservative Reagan-Bush era.</p>
<p>Sometimes important art takes time to inject itself into the bloodstream of the culture. While the Velvet Underground are now acknowledged as a pivotal force in early rock music, at the time their records had limited critical cache and <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/the-velvet-underground-mn0000840402/biography">sold poorly</a>. With Nevermind, however, audiences caught on quickly, leaving cultural commentators scrabbling to hook on to a hurtling zeitgeist.</p>
<h2>Three stars from Rolling Stone</h2>
<p>Bass guitarist Novoselic has since spoken derisively of the many journalists who initially mocked Nevermind before later claiming “<a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Mojo_Collection/W5iXGwAACAAJ?hl=en">they loved it from the start</a>”.</p>
<p>In hindsight, this seems slightly exaggerated. Some publications did completely overlook the record at first. A few came in with fists flailing: the Boston Globe referred to it as “<a href="https://metro.co.uk/2016/09/24/20-things-you-may-not-know-about-nirvanas-nevermind-6143804/">moronic ramblings</a>”.</p>
<p>Others, though, were prescient in their praise. Melody Maker’s <a href="http://www.collapseboard.com/nirvanas-nevermind-20-years-ago/">Everett True</a> prophesied Nevermind would “blow every other contender away”. </p>
<p>Renowned author Greil Marcus expressed a <a href="https://www.artforum.com/print/199203/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-33602">surprising preference</a> for Nirvana’s murky debut album Bleach, while Chad Channing, the drummer replaced by Grohl to make Nevermind, complained the record’s major label sheen wasn’t true “grunge”.</p>
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<span class="caption">Now considered a classic, Nevermind divided opinions on its release.</span>
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<p>But the most revealing response came from Rolling Stone magazine, whose initial reviewer Ira Robbins was one of the smarter music writers of the time. He concluded that Nevermind found Nirvana “at the crossroads — scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants”. The magazine’s editors hedged even more bets by adding a <a href="https://observer.com/2016/09/howling-in-the-abyss-the-improbable-success-of-nirvanas-nevermind/">three-star rating</a>, the rock press equivalent of consigning a record to eternal mediocrity.</p>
<p>Rolling Stone eventually yielded to popular sentiment. In 1992 there was a revised four-star review. Then, in 2004, Nevermind’s standing was upgraded even further: a five-star ranking in that year’s <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_New_Rolling_Stone_Album_Guide.html?id=t9eocwUfoSoC">Rolling Stone Album Guide</a>. This followed on from 17th place in the magazine’s 2003 <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-156826/">500 Greatest Albums of All Time</a> list, putting it up there with Highway 61 Revisited, Are You Experienced? and Marquee Moon.</p>
<p>Robbins, too, seemed determined to set the record straight as soon as the opportunity arose. For the 1996 edition of his <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Trouser_Press_Guide_to_90s_Rock/Onjb9IowkbsC">Trouser Press Guide</a>, the review of Nevermind — one of the longest in the entire volume — deemed it “the Rosetta Stone of 90s punk-rock”.</p>
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<p>By the 1990s, music criticism was changing. A glut of available recordings — nowadays an overwhelming deluge — coincided with further fragmentation of the rock genre both in style and format. At the same time, publications like Rolling Stone were increasingly seen as tied up with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/853694?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">traditionalist, patriarchal</a> notions of popular music history.</p>
<p>Kurt Cobain voiced the alienation of a marginalised youth who couldn’t care less about the old rules. His group’s music was nowhere near as unorthodox as, say, that of close friend Dylan Carlson’s influential drone-metal project <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MamWooW3dLA">Earth</a>. But Nevermind was a subversive assault upon the rock elite from within: a big guitar sound without the big-dick attitude.</p>
<h2>Into the stratosphere</h2>
<p>We’ll never know exactly what sent Nirvana into the stratosphere while artists of comparable brilliance didn’t transcend their relatively minor standing. After all, in the 1980s quite a few of us in Australia were convinced each new <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/jun/08/the-go-betweens-10-of-the-best">Go-Betweens</a> record would be the one to spark global domination. </p>
<p>Similar could have been said for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrFOb_f7ubw">Public Enemy</a> circa 1991, or for <a href="https://greilmarcus.net/2015/08/24/sleater-kinney-americas-best-rock-band-070901/comment-page-1/">Sleater-Kinney</a> (like Nirvana, hailing from the Pacific Northwest) a few years after. </p>
<p>No doubt Cobain himself would have conceded being a white, all-male, US-based guitar-bass-drums outfit (albeit one from the seamier side of the tracks) gave them a leg-up on these and many other contenders.</p>
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<p>Cobain’s amalgam of influences was expansive, from the Raincoats, Iggy Pop, Ian MacKaye and REM to <a href="https://radicalreads.com/kurt-cobain-favorite-books/">Samuel Beckett and William S. Burroughs</a>. He wasn’t above raiding the classic rock fortress for ideas, but also excavated deep below in search of subterranean misfits to emulate. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, Boston’s Pixies were the main forebears of Nirvana’s trademark quiet-loud-quiet sound. As it happens, I recall The Happening, an extraordinary Pixies song from 1990, giving me the same kind of this-could-be-the-one jolt that Teen Spirit did a year later. Yet one is regarded as a historical turning point, the other an obscurity.</p>
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<p>Wherever the alternative banquet began, big business and media were always going to be quick to gatecrash. As Nevermind broke, the corporate vultures weren’t just circling: they’d already flown in to commence tearing the last morsels from the skeleton of post-Reagan America.</p>
<p>As journalist and political analyst Thomas Frank noted in his important 1995 essay <a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/alternative-to-what">Alternative to What?</a>, by the time of Cobain’s 1994 death by suicide, the commodification of rebellion was complete. For the ultimate proof, Frank pointed to a cynical MTV advertisement found in the business sections of certain newspapers and magazines. It featured an image of a grunge-styled youth along with the caption: “Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free”.</p>
<p>Corporate scavengers aside, Nevermind continues to stir fans and critics. Its history continues to be told, and many of the sharpest (and best written) recent takes are by Australian writers. </p>
<p><a href="https://overland.org.au/2021/04/kurt-cobain-martyr-of-authenticity/">Josh Bergamin’s</a> recent note-perfect analysis sets Nevermind’s success within contrasting milieus of generational disillusionment and executive greed, arguing Cobain and many of his fans engaged in radical acts of political resistance.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/nevermind-how-i-found-freedom-in-nirvana/">Cristian Strömblad</a> uses the context of growing up in suburban Brisbane to tell of how Nirvana helped open up new aesthetic worlds.</p>
<p><a href="https://overland.org.au/2016/09/one-baby-to-another-twenty-five-years-of-nevermind/">Tiarney Miekus</a> explores perennial death-of-rock narratives in light of “the big dumb accident” that was Nevermind.</p>
<p>Conversely, wardens of the conventional rock canon still emerge to disdain the achievements of alt-culture’s “anaemic royalty”. In one resentful, ridiculous critique of the album on the <a href="https://www.classicrockreview.com/2011/08/1991-nirvana-nevermind/">Classic Rock Review</a> website, J.D. Cook concluded Nirvana was “only popular because of Cobain’s suicide”, implausibly overlooking the two-and-a-half years of international acclaim preceding that grim epilogue.</p>
<h2>A beginning</h2>
<p>To me, Nevermind wasn’t a peak. It was a beginning. Nirvana was a stunning band and Cobain by all accounts a dedicated, intelligent, yet supremely troubled individual whose life always teetered on the chasm’s edge. Until his death partly stalled the show – the imperatives of consumerism ensuring the band’s ghost would continue to post a profit regardless – the music kept getting better.</p>
<p>Cobain’s craft evolved as success lured his social conscience further into the open. This is palpable on the In Utero album (1993), in songs such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-deMfnLtMI">Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TsqlT0rfJI">Rape Me</a> (the latter later distorted by those who hid behind a controversial title to evade its prescient, victim’s-eye view of sexual abuse).</p>
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<p>Once Nevermind raised Nirvana’s media profile, Cobain continued putting forward positions on different political issues (for instance, after they appeared in drag for the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbgKEjNBHqM">video to In Bloom</a>, he told an interviewer that “at least it brings the whole subject of homosexuality into debate”).</p>
<p>The band’s social justice stance was made abundantly clear in the liner notes for the 1992 compilation Incesticide, which warned sexists, racists and homophobes would not be welcome to sweat in their particular mosh pit. They also contributed a “leftover” of exceptional quality, a song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC2A4IQNHss">titled Sappy</a>, to the 1993 AIDS fundraiser album <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/album/no-alternative-mw0003427986">No Alternative</a>.</p>
<p>The group even did its best to subvert MTV’s rebellion-into-cash mentality at their November 1993 Unplugged in New York appearance. The show featured gut-wrenching versions of the best tracks from In Utero (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dcIPGzxsl8">Pennyroyal Tea</a> and All Apologies) and a touching three-song gambol with underground mentors Meat Puppets. Topping it off were surely two of the most remarkable cover versions ever performed: David Bowie’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fregObNcHC8">The Man Who Sold the World</a> and Lead Belly’s <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2019/04/in-the-pines-song-kurt-cobain.html">Where Did You Sleep Last Night</a>.</p>
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<p>Today, Nirvana’s iconic stature is only confirmed by it being caught up in two of America’s pet modern-day farces: the conspiracy theory (some still claim Cobain’s death <a href="https://www.nbcchicago.com/entertainment/entertainment-news/kurt-cobain-file-released-by-fbi-27-years-after-his-death/2506248/">was murder</a>) and a multi-million dollar lawsuit (the child depicted on Nevermind’s cover is <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-58327844">currently suing</a> the band and others for damages).</p>
<p>As for all that voice-of-a-generation stuff … well, Nirvana’s appeal was hardly universal: they meant something to plenty of people in places like New York and Sydney, probably a lot fewer in Addis Ababa or Tehran.</p>
<p>Nor is the ultimate cultural significance of Nevermind easily pinned down. In that context, it is worth remembering that two other major US events of 1991 — the videotaped beating of <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots">Rodney King</a> in Los Angeles and the Luby’s Cafeteria <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/twenty-three-diners-massacred-at-texas-restaurant">mass shooting</a> in Texas — didn’t exactly portend epochal change in racial equality or gun control.</p>
<p>Nevermind didn’t change the world. But for a while it helped some of us believe the world could change, and that is enough.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167108/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dean Biron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Nevermind was a cultural phenomenon, though many critics missed its significance at the time.Dean Biron, PhD in Cultural Studies; teaches in School of Justice, Queensland University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1627962021-06-24T12:10:36Z2021-06-24T12:10:36ZWhy choosing the next dalai lama will be a religious – as well as a political – issue<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408009/original/file-20210623-13-1r7t0j1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=36%2C24%2C3493%2C2655&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The current dalai lama was enthroned when he was about 4 years old.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ItalyDalaiLama/05ada4c0157246f185c2955b6d4f5151/photo?Query=Tenzin%20AND%20Gyatso&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=67&currentItemNo=37">AP Photo/Antonio Calanni</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>An updated version of this article was published on March 30, 2023. <a href="https://theconversation.com/dalai-lama-identifies-the-reincarnation-of-mongolias-spiritual-leader-a-preview-of-tensions-around-finding-his-own-replacement-202888">Read it here</a>.</em></p>
<p>The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual leader of Tibet, is <a href="https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/brief-biography">turning 86 on July 6, 2021</a>. With his advancing age, the question of who will succeed him has become more pressing. </p>
<p>One of the most recognizable faces of Buddhism, the dalai lama is an important figure bringing <a href="https://www.dalailama.com/books/p3">Buddhist teachings</a> to the international community. </p>
<p>The successor to the dalai lama is traditionally identified by senior monastic disciples, based on spiritual signs and visions. In 2011, however, the Chinese foreign ministry declared that only the <a href="https://boingboing.net/2014/10/24/the-dalai-lama-will-not-return.html">government in Beijing can appoint the next dalai lama</a>, and no recognition should be given to any other <a href="https://www.dalailama.com/the-dalai-lama/biography-and-daily-life/reincarnation">candidate</a>. </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://books.google.co.th/books?id=rBk1DQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=oxford+handbook+of+contemporary+buddhism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiFmtHR-pPjAhUg8HMBHa3gCSQQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=oxford%20handbook%20of%20contemporary%20buddhism&f=false">scholar of transnational Buddhism</a>, I have studied Buddhism and its refashioning in the context of globalization. The dalai lama is a highly influential figure, and choosing a successor is not just a religious issue, but a political one as well. </p>
<h2>The dalai lamas in Tibetan Buddhism</h2>
<p>All dalai lamas are thought to be <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=zmAnq9yiE6oC&dq=Secret+Lives+of+the+Dalai+Lama-+Alexander+Norman&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJs--Vm5viAhWJAHwKHYa1B0kQ6AEIKjAA">manifestations of the bodhisattva</a> of compassion, Avalokitesvara. Bodhisattvas are beings who <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Bodhicary%C4%81vat%C4%81ra/m-ifbE8kyGIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=bodhisattva">work solely for the benefit of others</a>. </p>
<p>For Buddhists, the ultimate goal is enlightenment, or “nirvana” – a liberation from the cycle of birth and death. East Asian and Tibetan Buddhists, as part of the Mahayana sect, believe bodhisattvas have reached this highest realization.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Mahayana Buddhists believe bodhisattvas choose to be reborn, to experience the pain and suffering of the world, to help other beings attain enlightenment.</p>
<p>Tibetan Buddhism has developed this idea of the bodhisattva further into identified lineages of rebirths called “tulkus.” Any person who is believed to be a reborn teacher, master or leader is <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=LnOmGAAACAAJ&dq=geoffrey+samuels+introducing+tibetan+buddhism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjp_qDciJviAhUQR6wKHfiNBRgQ6AEIKjAA">considered a tulku</a>. Tibetan Buddhism has hundreds if not thousands of such lineages, but the most respected and well-known is the dalai lama. The 14 generations of dalai lamas, spanning six centuries, are linked through their acts of compassion and their wish to benefit all living beings. </p>
<h2>Locating the 14th dalai lama</h2>
<p>The current Dalai Lama was enthroned when he was about 4 years old and was renamed Tenzin Gyatso.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The future Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism, Lhamo Dhondrub, who was later renamed Tenzin Gyatso." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=841&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1057&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1057&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408008/original/file-20210623-13-12l04ch.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1057&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">An undated photo of the future Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism, born Lhamo Dhondrub on July 6, 1935, in the small village of Takster in northeastern Tibet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/DALAILAMA/894bafdfdde6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/photo?Query=Tenzin%20AND%20Gyatso&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=67&currentItemNo=23">AP Photo</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>The search for him began soon after the 13th Dalai Lama died. Disciples <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=h3yHMz8v1OsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+land+and+my+people+the+original+autobiography&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOxfSNjZviAhUNDKwKHdXHAakQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20land%20and%20my%20people%20the%20original%20autobiography&f=false">closest to the Dalai Lama set about to identify signs</a> indicating the location of his rebirth. </p>
<p>There are usually predictions about where and when a dalai lama will be reborn, but further tests and signs are required to ensure the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=cy980CH84mEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=john+powers+introduction+to+tibetan+buddhism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidvqHnkpviAhXry1QKHX92B3IQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=john%20powers%20introduction%20to%20tibetan%20buddhism&f=false">proper child is found</a>. </p>
<p>In the case of the 13th Dalai Lama, after his death his <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=h3yHMz8v1OsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+land+and+my+people+the+original+autobiography&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOxfSNjZviAhUNDKwKHdXHAakQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20land%20and%20my%20people%20the%20original%20autobiography&f=false">body lay facing south</a>. However, after a few days his head had tilted to the east and a fungus, viewed as unusual, appeared on the northeastern side of the shrine, where his body was kept. This was interpreted to mean that the next dalai lama could have been born somewhere in the northeastern part of Tibet. </p>
<p>Disciples also checked Lhamoi Latso, a lake that is traditionally used to see visions of the location of the dalai lama’s rebirth.</p>
<p>The district of Dokham, which is in the northeast of Tibet, matched all of these signs. A 2-year-old boy named Lhamo Dhondup was just the right age for a reincarnation of the 13th dalai lama, based on the time of his death. </p>
<p>When the search party consisting of the 13th dalai lama’s closest monastic attendants arrived at his house, they believed they recognized signs that confirmed that they had reached the right place.</p>
<h2>Dalai lama memoirs</h2>
<p>The 14th Dalai Lama recounts in <a href="https://books.google.co.th/books?id=ZYgTHQAACAAJ&dq=Dalai+Lama+memoir&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwijsMGm0I3jAhXFsY8KHUSoD3IQ6AEIKjAA">his memoirs about his early life</a> that he remembered recognizing one of the monks in the search party, even though he was dressed as a servant. To prevent any manipulation of the process, members of the search party had not shown villagers who they were. </p>
<p>The Dalai Lama remembered as a little boy asking for the rosary beads that monk had worn around his neck. These beads were previously owned by the 13th Dalai Lama. After this meeting, the search party came back again to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=h3yHMz8v1OsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+land+and+my+people+the+original+autobiography&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOxfSNjZviAhUNDKwKHdXHAakQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20land%20and%20my%20people%20the%20original%20autobiography&f=false">test the young boy</a> with further objects of the previous Dalai Lama. He was able to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=h3yHMz8v1OsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+land+and+my+people+the+original+autobiography&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOxfSNjZviAhUNDKwKHdXHAakQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20land%20and%20my%20people%20the%20original%20autobiography&f=false">correctly choose all items</a>, including a drum used for rituals and a walking stick. </p>
<h2>China and dalai lama</h2>
<p>Today the selection process for the next dalai lama remains uncertain. In 1950 <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3024669?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">China’s communist government invaded Tibet</a>, which it insists <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/tibet-china-elections-cta-dalai-lama.html">has always belonged to China</a>. The Dalai Lama fled in 1959 and set up a government in exile. The <a href="https://freetibet.org/about/dalai-lama">Dalai Lama is revered by Tibetan people</a>, who have maintained their devotion over the past 70 years of Chinese rule. </p>
<p>In 1995 the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-32771242">Chinese government</a> detained the Dalai Lama’s choice for the successor of the 10th Panchen Lama, named Gendun Choeki Nyima, when he was 6 years old. Since then <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/15/25-years-after-disappearing-tibetan-panchen-lama-china-no-nearer-its-goal#">China has refused to give details of his whereabouts</a>. Panchen lama is the second most important tulku lineage in Tibetan Buddhism.</p>
<p>The Tibetan people revolted when the newly selected 11th Panchen Lama was detained. The Chinese government responded by <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2074674/china-appointed-panchen-lama-praises-nations-religious">appointing its own Panchen Lama</a>, the son of a Chinese security officer. The panchen lamas and dalai lamas have <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Spacious_Minds/ro6PDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=spacious+minds&printsec=frontcoverhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/Spacious_Minds/ro6PDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=spacious+minds&printsec=frontcover">historically played major roles</a> in recognizing each other’s next incarnations. </p>
<p>China also wants to appoint its own dalai lama. But it is important to Tibetan Buddhists that they are in charge of the selection process.</p>
<h2>Future options</h2>
<p>Because of the threat from China, the 14th Dalai Lama has made a number of statements that would make it difficult for a Chinese-appointed 15th dalai lama to be seen as legitimate. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Students interact with the Dalai Lama during a visit to Chandigarh University at Mohali, in northern India." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408011/original/file-20210623-19-1qd7bpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Dalai Lama with students in India.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-dalai-lama-interacts-with-people-at-chandigarh-news-photo/1176011239?adppopup=true">Keshav Singh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For example, he has stated that the institution of the dalai lama might not be needed anymore. However, he has also said it is up to the people if they want to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OLs7BjSGGTsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+spiritual+journey+the+dalai+lama&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw-b77lpviAhV4JzQIHcAnBYoQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20spiritual%20journey%20the%20dalai%20lama&f=false">preserve</a> this aspect of Tibetan Buddhism and continue the dalai lama lineage. The Dalai Lama <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/tibet-china-elections-cta-dalai-lama.html">has indicated</a> that he will decide, on turning 90 in four years’ time, whether he will be reborn.</p>
<p>Another option the Dalai Lama has proposed is announcing his next reincarnation before he dies. In this scenario, the Dalai Lama would <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OLs7BjSGGTsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+spiritual+journey+the+dalai+lama&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw-b77lpviAhV4JzQIHcAnBYoQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20spiritual%20journey%20the%20dalai%20lama&f=false">transfer his spiritual realization</a> to the successor. A third alternative Tenzin Gyatso has <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OLs7BjSGGTsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=my+spiritual+journey+the+dalai+lama&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw-b77lpviAhV4JzQIHcAnBYoQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=my%20spiritual%20journey%20the%20dalai%20lama&f=false">articulated</a> is that if he dies outside of Tibet, and the Panchen Lama remains missing, his reincarnation would be located abroad, most likely in India. Experts believe the Chinese government’s search, however, would take place in Tibet, led by the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/asia/dalai-lama-china-death-reincarnation-dst-intl-hnk/index.html">Chinese-appointed panchen lama</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, he has mentioned the possibility of being reborn as a woman – but he added in interviews in 2015 and 2019 that he would have to be a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/23/the-dalai-lama-thinks-a-female-dalai-lama-would-have-to-be-very-very-attractive/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f4af665f572a">very beautiful woman</a>. After this comment received widespread criticism in 2019, his office <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/world/dalai-lama-female-successor-scli/index.html">released a statement of apology</a> and regret for the hurt he had caused.</p>
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<p>The Dalai Lama is confident that <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/beijing-dalai-lamas-reincarnation-must-comply-with-chinese-laws/?allpages=yes&print=yes">no one would trust</a> the Chinese government’s choice. The Tibetan people, as he has said, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/asia/dalai-lama-china-death-reincarnation-dst-intl-hnk/index.html">would never accept</a> a Chinese-appointed dalai lama.</p>
<p>The U.S. government has expressed support for the Dalai Lama. In December 2020, the U.S. Senate passed the <a href="https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/risch-rubio-cardin-feinstein-welcome-passage-of-their-bipartisan-bill-in-support-of-tibet">Tibetan Policy and Support Act</a>, which recognizes the autonomy of the Tibetan people. The Biden administration reiterated in March 2021 that the Chinese government <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/chinese-govt-should-have-no-role-in-succession-process-of-dalai-lama-us-101615343510279.html">should have no role</a> in the Dalai Lama’s succession. </p>
<p>No matter the outcome, I believe the process of finding the 15th dalai lama will certainly be different. It will likely take place outside of Tibet and under the watch of international media and a global Tibetan diaspora – with much at stake.</p>
<p><em>This is an updated version of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/drafts/114351/edit">piece published on July 3, 2019</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162796/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brooke Schedneck does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>For Tibetan Buddhists it is important that they are in charge of the selection process for the next dalai lama, but China wants to appoint its own.Brooke Schedneck, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Rhodes CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1157842019-04-23T10:44:04Z2019-04-23T10:44:04ZFUCT gets day in court as SCOTUS considers dropping slippery moral standard when granting trademarks<p>When’s a brand too scandalous to <a href="https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-basics">trademark</a>? </p>
<p>That’s a question the Supreme Court <a href="http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/too-tasteless-to-trademark">will soon decide</a> in a case that tests the constitutional limits of free speech. </p>
<p>I attended the oral argument on April 15, when lawyers representing streetwear clothing label FUCT <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/he-wants-to-trademark-a-brand-name-that-sounds-like-the-f-word-the-supreme-court-is-listening/2019/04/12/17426e44-5d29-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html?utm_term=.b8767c55ecbb">argued the company has a right</a> to register its brand as a trademark, which helps protect against copycats. The United States Patent and Trademark Office had <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/04/16/713632552/supreme-court-dances-around-the-f-word-with-real-potential-financial-consequence">rejected it</a> on the grounds that FUCT is “immoral” and “scandalous.” </p>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=T_SiGdwAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=a">trademark attorney and scholar</a>, I believe it’s time the U.S. stopped enforcing an impossible-to-apply moral standard in trademark law – as it has in many other legal domains. Here’s why. </p>
<h2>An outlaw ethos</h2>
<p>It is perhaps appropriate that this case arose from a streetwear label famous for testing the limits. </p>
<p>While it’s commonplace today for clothing labels to adopt a provocative ethos and image, FUCT founder Erik Brunetti was a <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/fuct-erik-brunetti-supreme-court-case">trailblazer of edgy streetwear fashion</a> when <a href="https://www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/fuct-history">he started the company</a> in 1990. The name was meant to embody the company’s outlaw image – a corporate-looking logo with an anti-authoritarian pronunciation and subversive message. </p>
<p>A popular style involved prints of the brand name in the font style of the Ford logo, which can be found on <a href="http://www.defunkd.com/forum/what-worth-f20/vintage-fuct-ford-logo-shirt-t2930.html">T-shirts</a> and <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=fuct+ford+logo+hat+original&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS754US754&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD4szWwMvhAhVimuAKHfI1Av4Q_AUIDygC&biw=1412&bih=736">hats</a>. The brand quickly became a cultural icon, with its gear worn by skateboarders, punk rockers and even <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/555420566539029843">members of the band Nirvana</a>. </p>
<p>As the popularity of the label grew, it engendered fake FUCT merchandise. In order to protect his mark more effectively around the world, <a href="http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/too-tasteless-to-trademark">Brunetti applied to register</a> it with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2011.</p>
<p>Trademark registration <a href="https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-getting-started/trademark-basics">confers significant benefits</a>, including nationwide protection from confusingly similar products, enhanced monetary damages in litigation and priority for foreign filings. It also enables U.S. Customs agents to stop counterfeit goods from entering at the border. </p>
<p>In rejecting Brunetti’s application, examiners argued he ran afoul of a more than century-old provision in trademark law. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270302/original/file-20190422-28113-kup11q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Brunetti appealed the rejection of his trademark application all the way to the Supreme Court.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Supreme-Court-Scandalous-Trademarks/5437f1f6b0eb4fbe86cf00623b84c2a6/5/0">AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Offensive to the conscience’</h2>
<p>The prohibition on registration of immoral and scandalous trademarks has been in existence since Congress <a href="https://www.ipmall.info/sites/default/files/hosted_resources/lipa/trademarks/PreLanhamAct_086_Act_of_1905.htm">passed the Trademark Act of 1905</a>. It says any mark that “consists of or comprises immoral or scandalous matter” will be rejected. </p>
<p>Today, scandalous <a href="https://tmep.uspto.gov/RDMS/TMEP/Oct2012#/Oct2012/TMEP-1200d1e3054.html">is defined</a> as “shocking to the sense of propriety, offensive to the conscience or moral feelings or calling out for condemnation.” </p>
<p>I and other scholars <a href="https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/64637/OSLJ_V54N2_0331.pdf">have long questioned the wisdom</a> of having the trademark office as an arbiter of a collective and ever-evolving moral standard. That’s because trademarks <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/branlaj49&div=25&id=&page=">serve a valuable function</a> in the marketplace by identifying the source of a good or service, helping consumers trust where something they buy comes from and preventing deception. </p>
<p>What matters is source quality – not moral quality. </p>
<p>And because the prohibition affects registration but not use, I have found that <a href="https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1309&context=law_facpub">it is ineffective</a> at keeping offensive trademarks out of the marketplace. In addition, decisions based on this provision are wildly inconsistent. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/270303/original/file-20190422-191664-1mnb1xz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Patent and Trademark Office determines whether a mark is ‘scandalous’ or not.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Overhauling-Patent-System/ce5e838efc9e46d4a6efd0393c7580b1/88/0">AP Photo/Alex Brandon</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>If FCUK is fine, why not FUCT?</h2>
<p>While the U.S. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1339557?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">has moved away</a> from regulating morality in other areas such as broadcasting – and in other forms of intellectual property such as copyrights and patents – the government continues to do so when it comes to granting <a href="https://freibrun.com/trademarks-valuable-intellectual-property-assets/">valuable legal rights</a> through trademark registration. </p>
<p>The primary evidence used by examiners to determine whether to reject a mark on these grounds is the <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2715104">dictionary</a>. If a dictionary indicates that a term is “vulgar,” that is sufficient evidence to reject a mark. </p>
<p>Trademark examiners evaluate the meaning of a mark in the context of the current attitudes of the day. For example, in 1938, the <a href="https://casetext.com/case/in-re-riverbank-canning-co">trademark office rejected</a> a request to trademark Madonna as a wine brand on grounds that the word is religious in nature. A half century later, the office apparently no longer had a problem with granting such trademarks when <a href="http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:d6j8vq.2.29">it approved one</a> for Madonna rosé wine. </p>
<p>Since the perception of what is and isn’t scandalous is constantly changing, it’s difficult for the trademark office to keep up. And trademarks that are considered scandalous or immoral to one examiner may be acceptable to another. </p>
<p>As a result, the trademark office records <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2715104">are rife with inconsistencies</a>. In recent years, examiners <a href="https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademark-database">have approved trademarks</a> containing words such as “whore,” “bitch,” “penis” and “pothead” while rejecting others with the same terms. </p>
<p>And the office has even approved clothing trademarks remarkably similar to FUCT, including FCUK, the F word and Fvck Street Wear. </p>
<p>In the case of FUCT, the rejection was based on the idea that the homonym <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-302/95141/20190402150636686_18-302rbUnitedStates.pdf">would be perceived as equivalent</a> to the vulgar word it sounds like. </p>
<h2>A terrible message</h2>
<p>Two years ago, the Supreme Court cited the First Amendment <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/19/533514196/the-slants-win-supreme-court-battle-over-bands-name-in-trademark-dispute">in striking down</a> a prohibition against <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-slants-racist-court-ruling-on-band-name-could-upend-trademark-law-48413">trademark registration for marks that disparage</a> individuals or groups. I believe the justices should do the same in the FUCT case. </p>
<p>A concern some justices expressed during oral arguments is that allowing trademark registration of offensive terms could be perceived as some sort of government endorsement of that language. </p>
<p>I disagree, but more importantly trademark law shouldn’t police morality. It is terrible at doing so. </p>
<p>And now that the court has deemed registration of racist and sexist trademarks as permissible, to then draw the line at “scandalous” or “immoral” ones would be a terrible message to send to disadvantaged groups typically on the receiving end of those types of offensive marks.</p>
<p>Otherwise, we may well be FUCT.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/115784/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Megan M. Carpenter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A trademark law scholar explains why the impossible-to-apply standard, dating back to the early 20th century, is ineffective and needs to be abolished.Megan M. Carpenter, Dean, University of New HampshireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/999922018-07-17T10:58:03Z2018-07-17T10:58:03ZThe rescued Thai boys are considering becoming monks — here’s why<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227890/original/file-20180716-44073-lzrkun.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Thai monks pray during a cleansing ceremony and memorial service for Saman Gunan, the Thai SEAL diver who died while trying to rescue the boys trapped in the cave. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Vincent Thian</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>After their <a href="https://theconversation.com/inside-the-sacred-danger-of-thailands-caves-99638">dramatic rescue from Nang Non cave</a>, 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach are <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/15/asia/thai-boys-trapped-in-cave-mourn-navy-seal-intl/index.html">mourning the loss</a> of a Thai Navy SEAL, <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2018/07/06/thai-cave-diver-dies-rivers-vpx.cnn">Saman Gunan</a>, who died during the rescue efforts. The father of one of the boys said that in order to <a href="https://www.ozarksfirst.com/news/thai-cave-boys-and-coach-to-enter-monkhood-as-tribute-to-fallen-navy-seal/1301381427">pay tribute</a> to the Navy SEAL, many boys are considering temporarily becoming monks. </p>
<p>Ordaining as a full monk – known as “bhikkhu” in Pali, the religious language of the Theravada Buddhism – is only available to men over 20. The boys would instead be ordained as novices, or “nen,” who undergo fewer restrictions. Additionally, at least one of the boys is Christian, and would likely not be ordained as a monk. </p>
<p>But in the wake of the rescue efforts, the act of ordaining is not surprising. In Theravada Buddhist practice, ordaining to be a monk and donating the merit thus gained is one of the greatest honors that a person can give to another. </p>
<h2>Monasticism in Thai life</h2>
<p>Monks in Southeast Asia, with their saffron robes and shaven heads, are iconic. They can be seen on the roadside with alms bowls, accepting handfuls of rice from villagers in early morning processions, or gathered in the evenings chanting Pali scriptures in the Buddhist temples that lie at the heart of most Thai villages. In <a href="https://anthropology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/andrew-johnson">my own</a> <a href="https://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/ghosts-of-the-new-city-spirits-urbanity-and-the-ruins-of-progress-in-chiang-mai/">research</a>, I spent hours talking with monks – from abbots of major temples to those who had been ordained for a short period. </p>
<p>I also met monks engaged in “magical” activities such as healing, to those who saw their role as scholars. My first impression, like that of many travelers, was of a group of men seeking enlightenment through isolation from the world.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227891/original/file-20180716-44097-wasrou.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Meditating Buddhist monks in Thailand.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, this isolation is at the core of <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Theravada+Buddhism%3A+Continuity%2C+Diversity%2C+and+Identity-p-9781405189064">Buddhist teachings</a>. For Buddhists, worldly desires lead to suffering. Therefore, cessation of desires can lead to happiness and eventually enlightenment. </p>
<p>But monks are not a homogeneous group. Buddhists join the monkhood – the sangha - for many different reasons, only some of which are related to achieving transcendence and enlightenment. While some may choose to remain monks for their entire lives, most Buddhists ordain for a limited period. Thai Buddhists with whom I’ve worked have ordained for a few months during childhood, for the length of the rainy season, or even just for a day before undertaking a dangerous journey or following the death of a parent. </p>
<p>Buddhism, as it is practiced in Thailand, addresses many worldly needs. It takes into consideration the lives of people who are not necessarily ready to renounce the world quite yet. </p>
<h2>Monastic education</h2>
<p>Before the advent of government-run schools in the late 19th century, the Buddhist temple was the key institution for the education of young boys in Thailand. Boys as young as 5 <a href="http://admin.cambridge.org/ck/academic/subjects/anthropology/social-and-cultural-anthropology/buddhism-and-spirit-cults-north-east-thailand">entered the temple to learn to read and write</a>, and to study the basics of Buddhism.</p>
<p>When Theravada came to Southeast Asia from India in <a href="https://cseas.yale.edu/harry-jindrich-benda">the second millennium A.D.</a>, replacing local versions of Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, this religious focus on promoting education within the village was revolutionary, as it became a central part of village life.</p>
<p>Theravada was focused not on the trappings of kingship and rule, but on serving communities. The temple in the center of the village served as the school, fairgrounds, hostel and welfare office in addition to its role as a religious center. </p>
<p>Today, this role of educating Thai boys has largely been replaced by government-run schools. This transition has allowed for the education of girls. </p>
<p>But some Buddhist schools remain, especially in Thailand’s North, that keep a focus on mostly men’s religious education. They teach the local Northern Thai script (distinct from Central Thai and largely fallen out of use) in addition to the religious languages of Pali and Sanskrit. </p>
<h2>Karma and merit</h2>
<p>But education is not the only reason to seek to be ordained. </p>
<p>Most Thai men get ordained in order to make merit – known as “tham bun.” Devoting oneself to the study of the Buddha’s teachings, the dharma, is one of the most holy acts that one can do. Buddhists who get ordained are believed to acquire a great deal of bun, or merit.</p>
<p>For Buddhists, this life is but one in a cycle of deaths and rebirths, where the good deeds one does in the past determine where and in what form – human, animal, divine being – one is reborn. Eventually, over many lifetimes, enough knowledge and merit will allow for escape from this cycle and transcendence.</p>
<p>But as anthropologist <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40860364?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Lucien Hanks</a> described, in Thai religious system, <a href="http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/ehrafe/citation.do?method=citation&forward=browseAuthorsFullContext&id=ao07-028">practitioners can donate and receive merit from others</a>. Normally, the recipient of the merit are parents. It is a way to thank them for their sacrifices. </p>
<p>In the case of the 12 boys and their coach, however, they are offering the merit they will make to Officer Saman, in order to ensure a better rebirth in his next life. </p>
<h2>The obligation of a debt</h2>
<p>Like many languages, Thai has certain concepts that do not translate well into English. One of these, “<a href="http://www.thai-language.com/id/134305#def2">krengjai</a>,” refers to the feeling of obligation toward someone who has given a gift too great to repay. It is a heavy feeling. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227894/original/file-20180716-44100-1qp7lk3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thais at a cleansing ceremony and memorial service for Saman Gunan, the Navy SEAL officer, who lost his life during the rescue operation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Vincent Thian</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For observers, it is easy to imagine the gratitude that the boys must feel to Officer Saman, but it is just as easy to overlook the sense of responsibility that must weigh on the boys as well. As the classic anthropological theorist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcel-Mauss">Marcel Mauss</a> <a href="http://www.anthrobase.com/Dic/eng/pers/mauss_marcel.htm">pointed out</a>, gifts come with obligations, and the sacrifice of a life is no different. </p>
<p>In this way, the boys are likely becoming monks not to reflect upon their own fate or experience in the cave. Rather, they are doing this to repay Saman’s sacrifice with the greatest gift that they can offer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99992/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Alan Johnson receives funding from Princeton University. He is affiliated with the Association for Asian Studies, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Academy of Religion.</span></em></p>In Theravada Buddhism, ordaining to be a monk and donating the merit thus gained is one of the greatest honors that a person can give to another - in this case to the Navy SEAL officer, who died.Andrew Alan Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Princeton UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/952382018-04-18T15:10:36Z2018-04-18T15:10:36ZWestworld’s player piano is the great character that keeps getting overlooked<p>Westworld returns for its hotly anticipated second season on April 22/23, simulcast in both the US and UK. The first season was a huge success – the closing episode was HBO’s <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/westworld-season-1-concludes-as-hbo-record-breaker-a7458186.html">highest-rated</a> debut of all time. </p>
<p>Set in 2052, Westworld is a futuristic theme park populated by robotic hosts. Based on the 1973 movie by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000341/">Michael Crichton</a>, human customers pay to live out their most murderous and depraved fantasies, <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/intellect/jafp/2017/00000010/00000002/art00006?crawler=true&mimetype=application/pdf">blurring the boundaries</a> between performer and audience. The theme park imitates the American Old West of the second half of the 19th century – the age of steam and mechanisation that contained the seeds of modern robotics. </p>
<p>Much <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a19840303/best-westworld-season-2-theories/">has been written</a> about what will happen to Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) and the other robotic hosts now that they appear to be overcoming the control of the programmers. I want to pay tribute to a hugely important character that has received far less attention – the player piano. </p>
<p>Westworld’s opening credits initially show what looks like an ordinary piano being played by robot hands. But then the hands move away and the piano plays itself, revealing this invention of the late 19th century that made music accessible at home in the days before the phonograph. </p>
<p>The piano features in Westworld’s <a href="http://westworld.wikia.com/wiki/Mariposa_Saloon">Mariposa Saloon</a>, run as a bar and brothel by Maeve Millay (Thandie Newton). We know pianos were used in Old West saloons, so this is certainly plausible. We later learn that there is also one in the office of robot creator Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins). </p>
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<p>The player piano was essentially an early computer operating on a binary system. Westworld’s credits show the spool punched with holes that these pianos read, each of which indicated a note and its duration. Powered by the performer’s feet – and latterly by electricity – one could play famous, complex works without any musical competence. </p>
<p>This sense of vicarious performance fits neatly with the idea of rich thrillseekers shooting their way around a fake Wild West. Then there is the fact that player pianos always sounded mechanical, since they lacked the human interpretation and variation we expect in a live performance. </p>
<p>This symbol for humanity’s relationship to machinery is then expanded through Westworld’s soundtrack. Composed and arranged by Game of Thrones’ Ramin Djawadi, it includes various famous piano works that would have featured on player pianos around the turn of the century, such as Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Chopin’s Nocturne No. 14 in C Minor and Scott Joplin’s Weeping Willow Rag. </p>
<p>While fans have <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/westworld/comments/5ahtll/ford_and_debussy/">speculated heavily</a> on the links between Debussy, the plot and the Robert Ford character, the soundtrack also contains more recent tracks such as The Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black and Radiohead’s No Surprises. These <a href="https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/westworld-music-piano-radiohead-soundgarden-songs-interview">were transcribed</a> onto old binary spools especially for the show, both reinforcing the sense of mechanisation and representing the authenticity portrayed by the theme park’s set and characters to the paying clientele. </p>
<h2>Play it again</h2>
<p>Besides Westworld, the player piano has occupied a relatively prominent role in American fiction. Of particular relevance to the show is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9597.Player_Piano">Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano</a> (1952), which described a post-war dystopian world where machines had replaced workers in factories. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/215408/original/file-20180418-164001-1yf66p9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Vonnegut’s debut.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>In one key scene, a character named Ed Finnerty is depicted playing the player piano – effectively overriding its function and seizing back control from the mechanised world. Westworld co-producer Jonathan Nolan <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2016/10/westworld-player-piano-music.html">has credited</a> Vonnegut with inspiring the show’s player piano, referring to it as a touchstone image of the show’s first season. </p>
<p>Another writer, Richard Powers, refers to the player piano as a predecessor to the computer in several novels. Most notable is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23012.The_Gold_Bug_Variations">The Gold Bug Variations</a> (1992), since the piano itself is a descendent of the harpsichord for which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15ezpwCHtJs">Bach’s Goldberg Variations</a> were written. References to both instruments create a sense of legacy, touching on a parallel theme of two intertwined love affairs a generation apart.</p>
<p>The works of William Gaddis similarly revisit the player piano – in his case, owing to a personal obsession, he gathered thousands of notes on the subject, <a href="http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/mlc50/item/10173">intending</a> to publish a history of the instrument. When his proposals were rejected it crept into his novels instead – before his frustrations boiled over in his posthumous swan song, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28441.Agap_Agape">Agapē Agape</a> (2002). </p>
<p>The frail male narrator-protagonist repeatedly discusses player pianos, while the relentless style of the book is symbolic of the instrument – it starts and suddenly ends without space for breath, mimicking the way player pianos close a tune with no wind down, the spool still spinning blank paper. </p>
<p>Gaddis <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Rush_for_Second_Place.html?id=mYUljtX5yFAC&redir_esc=y">saw the</a> player piano as symbolic of the mechanisation of the arts, and the gradual unravelling of society:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I see [it] as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only do Westworld’s player pianos sit comfortably within this tradition – especially given the original film’s 1970’s roots – Gaddis’ opinion is eerily familiar with their use in the first season. They simultaneously hark back to a bygone era and nod to the digital world in which they reside. </p>
<p>Gaddis repeatedly likened player piano rolls to “phantom hands” reproducing the sounds of long-lost performers. Like the robotic hosts of Westworld – who it transpires have occupied the world for decades – a player piano’s mechanisation is almost timeless. Both repeat their scripts ad infinitum, continually preserving and recreating the past. </p>
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<p>The player piano is therefore more than just a metaphor for Westworld’s robots. It represents the repetition of play in which the audience interacts, straddling the divide between past and present. </p>
<p>As the robotic hosts become more sentient in season two, it will be interesting to see how the instrument is used. In the trailer, Dolores Abernathy says that a “reckoning is here”, as a mechanised piano rendition of Nirvana’s Heart-Shaped Box plays in the background. It speaks to all of today’s worries about where artificial intelligence is taking us, and what happens if the day comes when the robots learn to be free.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95238/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rachael Durkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It is time we talked about one of the most unsung motifs in American fiction.Rachael Durkin, Lecturer in Music, Edinburgh Napier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/749202017-03-30T01:28:30Z2017-03-30T01:28:30ZCan an album still define the times? Oh Well. Whatever. Nevermind.<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162808/original/image-20170328-21243-163vzqi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A cross stitch recreation of Nirvana's classic album cover by Mr X Stitch.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jamie Chalmers/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s 1991. In the basement nightclub Green on the bottom of the Land’s Office building in Brisbane city I’m late and most of my friends are already inside. I can’t see anyone I know in the smoky haze and the club looks different. Hundreds of posters hang from the ceiling – a baby swimming under water with a hundred dollar note floating in front of its face. Nevermind Nirvana. </p>
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<span class="caption">Cover of Nevermind.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Guille.17/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>I’ve heard of Nirvana – I’ve listened to Bleach – but I haven’t yet sat in lounge rooms passing around a six shooter with the lights out, the faded sepia wash of the Smells Like Teen Spirit film clip crashing over me, I haven’t yet taken to dance floors to head bang as if I just got awarded a weapon in an unofficial army. That sense of war and saturation will come later, in a matter of months. </p>
<p>I say hi to the DJ. He’s jumping around to the Pixies – high, expectant, weird. Not unusual. He hands me a copy of Nevermind on tape and shrugs. Free merch. Something he’s never done before. And that ambivalent gesture says something. In 1991 my friends and I think we’re caught up in a groundswell, an alternative moment, a grunge aesthetic that has spread organically, in a street way, from Seattle and landed like a hand scrawled message on the tide. In a way this is true. </p>
<p>We’re in bands (sort of), we know what Sub Pop is and we’re into rock and roll lineages thrashing around to the obscure before it’s ubiquitous. But here, in Green, something else is also going on. These posters and free tapes are a prelude. A message being sent around the world about one band – Nirvana – and what they represent by the same record companies that will in the end milk the guts out of alternative rock until it’s homogenised and pasteurised, until it’s not dead exactly but has become a watered down, less edgy version of itself.</p>
<p>Not because the music changes. The music doesn’t. But because the sense of otherness and ownership we’re experiencing gets appropriated to the point of no return and the alternative space has been de-territorialised. How do you tell a guy he can’t come into a club because he’s wearing a suit? How do you explain what happens when the jocks and cheerleaders you’re satirising in your Smells Like Teen Spirit film clip don’t punk out gradually as the frames roll on but stay the same and sing along, eyes wide open to all your songs not knowing what they mean? </p>
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<p>Two very different crowds in nightclubs and mosh pits wanting to spit on each other. The mood getting more aggressive than it was ever meant to. On the liner notes of Insecticide, a compilation album released by Nirvana in 1992, Kurt made this plea to fans: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a different color, or women, please do this one favor for us… Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It didn’t work.</p>
<p>Nevermind continued to rise long after its release. On the 11th January 1992 it pipped Michael Jackson’s Dangerous for the Number 1 spot in the US. With five charting tracks it still ranks <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1671298/nevermind-nirvana-album/">in the Top 10</a> of the Billboard Chart’s longest running albums of all time. </p>
<p>Six months after the album’s release, Colgate-Palmolive paid US$670 million to acquire Mennen, manufacturers of the Teen Spirit perfumes. At the height of the band’s fame, there were ten variations of Teen Spirit including Sweet Strawberry and Pink Crush. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/152444/8_reasons_nirvana's_'nevermind'_is_the_most_important_rock_album_of_all_time">a 2011 article for AlterNet</a>, Julianne Escobedo Shepard suggested Nevermind not only encapsulated the mood of the 90s but that the disaffection at its core was emblematic of the late capitalist future we were experiencing in the new millennium. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Other albums might have influenced the sound of music in certain ways … but none of them changed the culture at large so vastly, so roughly and so immediately … the strange epoch we’re stuck with now is both a reflection and a result of the way Nevermind affected us; we are living the chaotic meaninglessness the album prophesied, even more than the shitshow that was the 1990s. If Nevermind was an existential statement, we’ve been blasted into the apocalypse.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A seismic shift in the culture</h2>
<p>Cut to 2017. One year after the 25th anniversary of the release of Nevermind – when most media outlets run with stories about “what ever happened to that baby on the Nevermind album cover” and you can buy a Nirvana t-shirt on the Shein clothing app for three Australian dollars. These facts do not dilute Nevermind’s importance.</p>
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<span class="caption">The cross stitch recreation by Mr X Stitch in full.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jamie Chalmers/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
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<p>Popular culture is always in the process of recycling itself – Docs are back, Sonic Youth are back, Nirvana are back. Flannelette shirts are back. Tweaked for the times and in play until some other kind of retro symbolism replaces them. </p>
<p>The iconography that does travel is important however, on another level. It represents not just the things that might easily make money for faceless corporations. The reconfiguration is also about the signifiers that trigger desire for a new generation and nostalgia for those who think they may have been there before. Everything is here. Irony, connection, another version of a life. A life you half lived or might have wanted to in another time. The product might be a distillation but the source is still real. </p>
<p>Does seeing a 19-year-old in a Nirvana t-shirt walking the streets in the 21st century really obliterate the visceral experience of seeing Kurt Cobain vomiting over the side of the stage at Festival Hall in 1992 only to pull back at exactly the right moment to continue wailing into his microphone and attacking his guitar? These affects are and always were happening simultaneously and do not necessarily cancel each other out.</p>
<p>The dominant ideology might suppress the working class by manipulating their impulses but people vote with more than just their Visa cards, they vote with their feet and their memories and their hours. </p>
<p>Since publishing <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11365230-the-casuals">The Casuals</a>, a memoir which is in part a chronicle of the grunge era, I’ve had some critics suggest that my friends and I were caught up in nothing more than a marketing manoeuvre – a bunch of middle class, suburban rich kids caught slumming it in the grunge soup. There’s probably some truth in that – but the reason we wanted to identify as alternative is more convoluted and not something we woke up and decided because someone told us to. The iconography and symbolism of grunge was, as the closing refrain of Smells Like Teen Spirit implores – a denial.</p>
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<p>Post-eighties repudiation and anti-excess. Dirty out of necessity and working class. Most grunge kids I knew came from poor families but within each subset of goths, alternative rockers and techno heads there were some kids you might have considered rich. That didn’t matter – these were kids with whom we shared a kindred sense of rebellion and disaffection.</p>
<p>They’d had the blazers in high school we could never afford and the five cabbage patch kids but the difference was they’d wanted to burn them. The anti-establishment vibe was something you could glean in a glance and a few well timed phrases. As Nirvana so prophetically suggested, it was something you could smell. </p>
<p>The alternative movement was about rejection of an ideology that excluded us in the first place. An outsider culture not as aggressive as punk, not as drippy as hippy culture but something moodier, characterised by the drugs of choice, pot, acid and heroin and the way the music moved, something fast and something slow, all at once.</p>
<p>Curiously the same charge of blind commercialism is not often levelled at the UK punk movement of the 70s. This isn’t because aspects of punk never went mainstream or were never slung down the shiny lengths of haute couture catwalks. </p>
<p>The difference is, when the appropriation of Nirvana happened, the puff went right out of the music industry balloon. I was driving with my family when I heard about Kurt’s death on Triple J. I remember staring out at the suburban streets, numb, knowing this wasn’t just the end of him but the end of something else. I’d lost some friends too by that stage and the 90s was starting to reek. The thrill had gone and when it drained the fun went quickly. </p>
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<span class="caption">Nirvana graffiti, Melbourne.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kurt’s death inadvertently heralded not just the end of grunge as we knew it, it was also emblematic of a seismic shift in the culture. In 1991, <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/nevermind-19911128">Ira Robbins in Rolling Stone magazine</a> predicted the kind of sneering praise that would follow Nirvana’s unprecedented level of success for an alternative act. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>More often than not, ambitious left-of-the-dial bands gallantly cling to their principles as they plunge into the depths of commercial failure. Integrity is a heavy burden for those trying to scale the charts.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He went on to say that Nirvana were quite clearly “setting their sights on a land of giants” and we all know how that ended. By 1994, Cobain was dead and the music industry was head first inside the start of a dramatic collapse. The rise and fall of two emblematic giants – an unlikely symbiotic reaping Kurt no doubt would have revelled in. A year later Microsoft would ship Windows ’95 and the rest, as they say, is history.</p>
<h2>A slippery, post-truth era</h2>
<p>Today even the most cynical music critics agree that artistically, Nevermind stands the test of time, whether that assessment is based purely on sales or influence or aesthetics.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162797/original/image-20170327-21254-2xg0qf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kurt-shaped bling.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Erich Ferdinand/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Kurt’s face bounces back. Like the best crash test dummy, he keeps returning, a big hole in his head, sure, but still there, staring back at us from all kinds of screens not in play when he was, bobbing around in the back seat of a car you can barely remember driving looking sometimes like a girl, sometimes like a guy. When he erupts back into the frame you don’t necessarily want to switch him off. Kurt’s an old lover you’d still kiss. A teacher you don’t want to punch in the face. A trash-bag junkie you still don’t mind being associated with.</p>
<p>There are many reasons why Nevermind tracked the way it did. Mostly it was pre-mobile phone, pre-internet period where MTV and the subsequent power of the film clip still had big sway and the channels of dissemination were more tightly controlled; the medium was still the message.</p>
<p>The big, white, corporate rock structure was hanging on to control and Nirvana proceeded to mess with it. An end game personified by the dyed blonde hairs and dead skin in Kurt and Courtney’s greenhouse and plunging profits at Universal, EMI and others. In the 1990s, popular culture was more insular than it is now. </p>
<p>Ask anyone you know to name an album they think defines the first or even the second decade of the 21st century and getting an answer more than two people can agree on is extremely difficult – the work would have to be transcultural and global and gender fluid. </p>
<p>In this slippery era of post truth it would have to be defined by multiplicity, fluidity, trans-everything – the album would have to traverse all kinds of demographics, collapsing genres, hybridity and fusions.</p>
<p>The only thing we can really know for sure is that big, white, machine culture doesn’t grip quite as well as it used to and even in a Hollywood version of the world, the moments an album does hold sway and for whom are shorter, less pervasive, more fleeting. Something Kurt wouldn’t have minded, surely.</p>
<p><em>Sally Breen will lead an academic discussion on important issues at the intersection of music, writing and social commentary at the <a href="http://www.rockandrollwritersfestival.com/2017program/">Rock & Roll Writers Festival in Brisbane on April 1</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74920/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Breen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Nirvana’s Nevermind was emblematic of the 1990s. But in today’s fragmented digital age, can anyone nominate an album that defines the first or second decade of the 21st century?Sally Breen, Senior Lecturer in Writing and Publishing, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/400402015-05-04T20:55:33Z2015-05-04T20:55:33ZBefore watching Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, you need to understand the artist’s three sides<p>The new documentary Montage of Heck takes a fresh look at the life and career of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who, while only in the pop limelight for a shade over two years, remains one of the most iconic figures in rock-music history. </p>
<p>In an effort to correct some of the myths that surround Cobain, director Brett Morgen opens a window onto Kurt’s private world, providing at times intimate glimpses of the rock star’s personal life.</p>
<p>But to better understand Kurt Cobain and his songs, it’s important to realize that there are at least three Kurts to consider. </p>
<p>The first is Kurt the rock star, an image Cobain quite consciously crafted, the side of his persona that he sometimes called “Kurdt.” This is the one most listeners associate with him: the brooding poet, the artist filled with punk-rock anger and aggression who resisted and loathed fame. Kurdt would often make up fabulous stories in interviews, some loosely based on facts (he claimed to have once lived under a bridge), others fabricated in a spirit of playful absurdity (though sometimes journalists failed to recognize the joke). Kurdt was the defiant punk artist who flashed his middle finger at the status quo. It was a role Kurt loved to play.</p>
<p>The private Kurt, by contrast, seems to have been ambitious and driven. While Kurdt disdained fame, Kurt energetically pursued it. </p>
<p>Once Cobain became a star, he suffered under the new pressures and burdens that came with it. But when asked once in drug rehab why he didn’t just travel far away to escape the spotlight, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Payy47wH6XY&feature=youtu.be&t=14m3s">he responded</a> that he was afraid his fans would forget him. Cobain biographer Charles R Cross <a href="https://youtu.be/Payy47wH6XY?t=45m31s">observes</a> that at several points in Kurt’s career, he consistently chose the path to fame and wealth, when he could have chosen otherwise. (Of course, “Kurdt” would then complain bitterly.)</p>
<p>The third Kurt is Cobain the creative artist. Any objective survey of Kurt’s writing, songs and paintings reveals an enormously creative mind. In contrast to the career-driven Kurt and the mopey Kurdt, the creative Kurt was an unrelentingly playful personality that delighted in fanciful juxtaposition of images, poked fun at societal roles and stereotypes, and engaged in an almost constant game with language. This Kurt had a particular fascination with following seemingly sensible premises to absurd extremes. </p>
<p>The famous lyrics to Smells Like Teen Spirit are as good an example as any: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here we are now, entertain us</p>
<p>A mulatto</p>
<p>An albino</p>
<p>A mosquito</p>
<p>My libido</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Looking out onto the hormone-infused dancing at a teen party, Cobain follows “mulatto” with “albino,” playing on the number of syllables and ending vowel. If skin pigment is what linked those two words, whiteness suggests having one’s blood sucked out, which generates “mosquito.” But a mosquito penetrates the body (and sucks), and that leads to “libido.” The subsequent transformation of “hello” into “how low”“ continues the logic and the wordplay. </p>
<p>This kind of songwriter’s game with rhymes is reminiscent of the bridge to the Beatles’ Taxman, the verses of Leiber and Stoller’s Little Egypt and any number of songs by Cole Porter.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, many Cobain commentaries mistakenly confuse these distinct elements of Cobain’s personality. The most common error – and the basis for the myth Montage of Heck hopes to dispel – is conflating Kurdt and Kurt. </p>
<p>There is nothing necessarily inauthentic in a performer creating a mask as Cobain did; Bob Dylan and others have done this for decades. That the private Kurt contrasts with the public image he projected, then, does not mean that fans have somehow been duped or that Cobain has been dishonest. The public image is an extension of Cobain’s creativity – another dimension of his imagination that he based on himself, not unlike a character in a semi-biographical novel.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80335/original/image-20150504-8397-5z2dmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artists often project pubic images that clash with their private selves.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://orig02.deviantart.net/0061/f/2015/121/b/0/fancis_n_kurt_by_dnftt2014-d8rrnpb.jpg">DNFTT2014/deviant art</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The often unnoticed – but perhaps more serious mistake – is confusing either Kurt or Kurdt with the creative Cobain. It’s all too common to find Cobain’s personal biography breezily read into his lyrics, the attitudes projected by the brooding Kurdt blended into their meaning. </p>
<p>While it’s clear that Cobain’s sometimes sad and desperate personal life was the source of many of his songs, the songs themselves go far beyond personal anger, complaining, sorrow and confession. </p>
<p>Instead, his songs reach for something beyond his own experience: sometimes he’s simply enjoying the craft of songwriting, playfully engaging with the rich history of pop that he knew and loved.</p>
<p>It’s through viewing Cobain in the broader context of pop songwriting – which includes its techniques and history – that one discovers a fascinating artist of considerable breadth and depth. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4kUK-5mbuK0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40040/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Covach does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s important not to conflate and confuse Cobain’s varying personas.John Covach, Director, Institute for Popular Music, University of RochesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/252762014-04-04T06:52:19Z2014-04-04T06:52:19ZCould Nirvana really be about to replace Kurt Cobain?<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hTWKbfoikeg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Smells Like Teen Spirit.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Could Nirvana really be about to replace Kurt Cobain? This month marks the <a href="https://theconversation.com/two-decades-on-what-remains-of-kurt-cobain-24897">20th anniversary of his tragic death</a> and also the induction of Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (April 10). Since bands inducted into the Hall of Fame play at the ceremony itself, it is no surprise the internet is aflame with rumours since the recent tweet from the band’s former bassist, Krist Novoselic, that <a href="http://www.watoday.com.au/entertainment/music/hints-that-nirvana-may-perform-kurt-cobain-songs-during-hall-of-fame-induction-20140404-363bx.html">seemed to indicate he has been practising Nirvana songs</a>. </p>
<p>This seems to run contrary to the previous comments by former drummer (and now Foo Fighter) Dave Grohl that Nirvana songs were, “sacred ground”, but could the fact that the Hall of Fame induction is to be conducted by Cobain’s friend Michael Stipe suggest a change of heart?</p>
<p>Whether it happens is one issue – we’ll see on the night – but just as interesting is the question this raises about authenticity and reverence for musicians. Can Nirvana be Nirvana without Cobain? </p>
<p>Paul McCartney’s live shows have long featured Beatles songs, but with a noticeable skew towards those on which he was the primary composer: he avoids “John” songs. Other musicians are less reticent. Queen have played occasional live shows as “Queen + Paul Rodgers” (with the latter taking the unenviable task of filling Freddie’s shoes), and of course both Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones have continued despite losing original members. </p>
<p>According to music psychology theory, this lack of authenticity ought to reduce the audience’s enjoyment of the show. Research shows that people tend to instead prefer the prototypical version of any artistic object. </p>
<p>We find it easier to correctly classify prototypical versions of things (e.g., a chair with four legs, not three) because we recognise them more easily, and this makes it easier for us to operate within the day-to-day world. To put this in crass terms, it confers an adaptive advantage if you can correctly and quickly recognise the furry object running quickly towards you as a dangerous sabre-toothed tiger rather than your pet cat. </p>
<p>Similarly, we prefer the best-known version of a group’s line-up because it is easier to recognise and classify. You are hard-wired to like the “classic” line-up of a band because it rests on the same psychological trick that stopped your ancestors from being eaten by mammoths.</p>
<p>But even the notion of authenticity itself is subject to changes in fashion. The current popularity of “new folk” mirrors the Celtic pop movement of the 80s and the American folk movement of the 60s in suggesting that sometimes audiences demand the real thing, but will at other times accept the “diet” Hollywood version.</p>
<p>Kurt Cobain, John Lennon, or Freddie Mercury, though, are clearly special cases. The fact that Nirvana, The Beatles or Queen simply <em>can’t</em> ever reunite means we’re prepared to overlook the lack of authenticity and will happily settle for second best. </p>
<p>Tribute acts, such as The Bootleg Beatles, illustrate how even an impersonation of the real thing can be good enough simply because it reminds us of how great the original was. And that to me sounds like a great reason for Novoselic and Grohl to recruit a stand-in singer for the Hall of Fame induction. </p>
<p>It might not be the real thing, but it might also be close enough to remind us just what we are missing.</p>
<p><strong>See also:</strong><br>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/two-decades-on-what-remains-of-kurt-cobain-24897">Two decades on, what remains of Kurt Cobain?</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25276/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Could Nirvana really be about to replace Kurt Cobain? This month marks the 20th anniversary of his tragic death and also the induction of Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (April 10). Since bands…Adrian North, Head of School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/248972014-04-02T19:46:32Z2014-04-02T19:46:32ZTwo decades on, what remains of Kurt Cobain?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45368/original/vf3xy3xh-1396410308.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Even if he wasn't your bag, Cobain's afterlife will have caught your attention. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Erich Ferdinand</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A few years ago a student of mine turned up to class wearing a T-shirt that had Kurt Cobain’s <a href="http://www.datejesus.com/sermons/cobain/suicide.html">suicide note</a> printed on it. I recognised it straight away - I suspect many people around my age spent a period of their youth examining that document looking for answers that would never come. The student, on the other hand, didn’t actually know what it was she had on; she just thought it was a nice design.</p>
<p>Death is often thought of as our final destination but, in the case of dead celebrities, it can be the starting point of hundreds of new stories as the memory of the person and their image are fought over, given new meanings and put to new uses. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45357/original/bkwwy3nj-1396408805.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">CoolValley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That even something as intensely personal and important as a suicide note could be reduced to someone else’s fashion statement shows the strange places this process can take us, and also sometimes makes it difficult to not feel somewhat cynical about it.</p>
<p>In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of his death this week (April 5), it would be easy to bemoan the ways Cobain seems to have been gradually hollowed out and pressed further and further into a generic form, interchangeable with any number of other dead rock stars. </p>
<p>The way references to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club">27 Club</a> are thrown around in the media whenever another young musician dies (even if they aren’t exactly 27) and the way the similarities between the members of this group – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse among others – are emphasised, and their differences downplayed, shows one way in which this interchangeability happens.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44877/original/fk52p8hp-1395893123.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">hyoin min</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We can also see this occurring in some of the strange uses this cardboard cut-out version of Cobain is put to. He turned up recently in <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/kurt-cobain-john-lennon-and-tupac-shakur-star-in-dutch-beer-ad-20140325">an advertisement for beer</a> and has in the past also been [spotted in shoe commercials](http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20040249,00.html](http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20040249,00.html). </p>
<p>In both cases, Cobain is simply one example in a line-up of dead icons – the beer ad also features Elvis and John Lennon, and the shoe ads repurpose Sid Vicious and Joey Ramone to sell their wares. </p>
<p>In this way, Cobain’s name and image can be swapped out for a whole variety of other people in these sorts of contexts without the conveyed meaning changing at all.</p>
<p>It would also be easy to concentrate on how we have recently seen the final steps in the incorporation of Cobain’s band Nirvana into the conventional rock ‘n’ roll canon – and indeed the civic establishment – in a way that once would have been very difficult to imagine.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45367/original/bt9jccm3-1396410211.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nicolas Vadilonga</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On April 10, Nirvana will be officially inducted into the <a href="http://www.rockhall.com/inductees/">Rock and Roll Hall of Fame</a>, at the same time as acts such as Hall and Oates and Linda Ronstadt (and, to be fair, harder acts like Kiss as well). </p>
<p>This gesture sees the band completely embraced by the mainstream of rock they once declared themselves against. When Nevermind (1991) knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the US charts it was seen as the symbolic destruction of the old order of music by something new and exciting, but now both acts sit happily in the Hall together.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1000&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1000&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44874/original/k4r5qyst-1395892695.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1000&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A fan lights a candle a decade ago, on the 10th anniversary of Cobain’s death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Barry Sweet/EPA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More recently, we have also seen the towns of <a href="http://www.aberdeen-museum.org/kurt.htm">Aberdeen</a> (where Cobain was born and grew up – and which he was not complimentary towards) and nearby Hoquiam (where Cobain briefly lived before relocating to Seattle) competing to be the town to represent Nirvana. </p>
<p>On Cobain’s birthday in February this year, Aberdeen had its first <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/washingtons-aberdeen-marks-first-annual-kurt-cobain-day-9139515.html">Kurt Cobain Day</a>, while on April 10 Hoquiam will mark <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/nirvana-day-to-be-celebrated-in-hoquiam-washington-20131226">Nirvana Day</a>. That the anti-social, drug-addicted Cobain can now be used as a marker of civic pride is another example of the many meanings associated with him now that wouldn’t have been considered during his life.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44878/original/hqdctttw-1395893224.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kurt Cobain lunch box.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">James Song</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such events are, of course, not simply markers of pride but are based around the fact there’s money to be made from dead rock stars. Increasingly, entire tourism industries are being built up on the remains of the famous deceased. Aberdeen’s mayor recognised this <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/aberdeens-kurt-cobain-day-features-weird-crying-statue-20140221#ixzz2wr6VyqY4">when he said</a> of Kurt Cobain Day that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We hope this is just as big as Graceland eventually.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/44884/original/md35cmtr-1395893634.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Simmr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>None of this is to say Cobain’s image has been completely coopted by commercial forces. There are still plenty of voices that protest these representations, including fans, music journalists and people who knew Cobain. They point to the knowledge we have about the living, breathing man to argue for ways of remembering him that seem more true to who he was. </p>
<p>Many of the news reports of the events and ads discussed above are critical of the way these representations of Cobain just didn’t get it right.</p>
<p>But attempts like these to push back against “incorrect” representations of Cobain rely on a different set of well-used stories centred around “authenticity” in art. The notion of Cobain as a tortured soul ultimately destroyed by the same commercial forces that are now still using him to make money is in many ways an image as two-dimensional as the figure that is being used to sell beer. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45371/original/s2dkh9mh-1396410635.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrew Becraft</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To blithely assume “he wouldn’t have wanted it this way” ignores both the reality of a Cobain who during his life actively pursued his goal of making it in the music industry and the tendency for once anti-commercial artists to change their tune as they age (see <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/watch-bob-dylans-super-bowl-commercial-for-chrysler-20140203">Bob Dylan’s recent Super Bowl ad</a>. </p>
<p>Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, Cobain’s bandmates, are both turning up for Nirvana’s induction into the Hall of Fame, and given that they were all part of the anti-establishment ethos of grunge together it’s not crazy to suggest Cobain would have done the same.</p>
<p>The many Kurt Cobains that now circulate serve a purpose for the groups that use them, whether it be to make money, give people a sense of pride in their town, or to maintain an identity as a fan of rebellious music. </p>
<p>Twenty years after Cobain stopped being able to have a say himself there are more ways to think about him – and more arguments about these – than there ever were during his lifetime. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24897/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Strong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A few years ago a student of mine turned up to class wearing a T-shirt that had Kurt Cobain’s suicide note printed on it. I recognised it straight away - I suspect many people around my age spent a period…Catherine Strong, Lecturer in Sociology, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.