by Rob Gallagher
Maybe you’ve read Courtney Love’s characteristically agrammatical twitterings on the Kurt Cobain/Guitar Hero 5 furore. If not, here’s a sample tweet: “ucking nmegafraud and youve got to show for it Kurt LUNCHBOXES< CONVERESE SNEAKERS AND ACTIVISION SMUGLY BOASTING OF RAPE.” Basically, Activision – currently the biggest videogames publisher in the industry – included a Kurt avatar in the latest iteration of their enormously successful music game. While some might find this tasteless enough, what really seems to have gotten people’s goats is that digiCobain can made to sing Bon Jovi and Billy Idol songs and goof around like Flavour Flav and play air guitar alongside a CG skeleton and Shirley Manson out of Garbage and (he’s in there too) Johnny Cash. Never having been a Nirvana fan I can’t say it especially bothers me, although the effect really is pretty creepy. Love – despite the fact that no one seems to know who else would have been able to authorise the use of Cobain’s likeness – has been avidly and incoherently attempting to distance herself from the controversy, affirming the view of fans who’ve argued Kurt would not have been cool with this.
That so many fans can feel so secure in asserting what a notional 2k9 Cobain would feel says something about his status, his being arguably one of the last pop stars you could call ‘heroic’ without it seeming totally ridiculous. Not to say that there’s anything heroic about addiction or suicide (or writing gristly quiet/loud post hardcore songs, for that matter), merely that Cobain came to embody a fairly coherent set of values/attitudes/aesthetic approaches for a lot of people. He became meaning-loaded, representative. Mostly, he came to represent refusal – up to and including, of course, the refusal to live; the third most frequent Cobain-related Google search is ‘Kurt Cobain suicide.’
That’s according, incidentally, to Google Insights – a tool which allows you to ‘compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties,’ seeing how many people are searching for what, where and when. If, as a producer of online ‘content,’ you want to accrue more hits and move further up search engine listings, you have to pack either end of a post with words and phrases that rank highly – Kurt Cobain + Nirvana gets more returns than Kurt Cobain + Courtney Love, for instance. An obvious consequence is that a self-perpetuating cycle gets established, whereby certain associations, tags, terms or descriptors become welded to certain people, events, objects. I’ve already suggested that a hero might be described as someone who embodies valued qualities/principles especially directly and coherently. Dead heroes are best, because it’s less easy to impose consensus-building narratives and meanings on a moving target.
The internet ought to create opportunities for marginal viewpoints and sidelined data to find an audience, for consensus to be nagged at and unravelled a bit. To an extent it does, but too often it reneges on this promise, affording a thousand rearrangements or regurgitations of the same old information rather than anything new. Insights suggests how and why this happens. In part, it’s to do with the market; a good consumer should have catholic tastes, should be ready to sample and appreciate a bit of everything, ranging widely but not probing too deeply – not so deeply that they miss out on other neat experiences/products. Check out Hounds of Love or Gatsby but don’t worry about the rest of KB’s or Fitzgerald’s back catalogue; too knotty and time-consuming. Liberalism of taste. There’s a current British Airways ad that suggests you pop over to South America and partake of the rillyrilly rich and authentic cultural spectacle that is the Boca Juniors vs. River Plate classico – a kind of horribly sad and patronising idea if you think about it. In this sort of climate, one where we’re taught to skim and cherry pick and only vicariously invest in stuff, refusal can be heroic – after all, a deep engagement with any one thing equates to a refusal of other things. Its weird how anachronistic the ‘NO TO PORN’ scrawled on the wall outside Charing Cross seemed when I saw it the other day. It’s much more ‘now’ to give Deleuzian readings of porn’s affective charge and debate its emancipatory potential and curate Sexploitation seasons at the British Film Institute. To a large extent I agree with (and am a product of) this sort of speulative, agnostic, anti-hierarchical, omnivorous attitude, but I do worry that prioritising, letting go and saying no are things that our culture’s become really bad at, that we have to find ways to decide and exclude that aren’t just expressions of philistinism or prejudice or snobbery.
Interestingly, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoslevic have requested that Activision patch out the ability to make Kurt perform others songs. The reason ‘patch out’ is such a weird phrase is because patches normally –as the name suggests – mend or add to titles. Its common practice for companies to release downloadable bug fixes and supplementary content to games post release, but normally it’s with the intention of opening up new possibilities. Taking content out of a title is a fascinatingly aberrant gesture, a rare instance of thinking about it and deciding to say no.
POST SCRIPT
1. Just to slip in a quick plug for an artspace, I played Guitar Hero for the first time at 176 the other week. David Blandy’s Fortress of Solitude – which is all about teenage self-definition via pop-cultural heroes and talismanic texts – is on show there till next summer and contains a bunch of playable computer games. I didn’t really figure out if Blandy had anything interesting to say about avatars and heroes and subcultural style though because I was too busy getting the figurative shit virtually dragon punched out of me on the Street Fighter Zero 2’ cabinet.
2. Long-time Murdofleur fans might remember us chatting about the Buddha machine and Throbbing Gristle. Well, freakishly enough, TG have teamed up with the Buddha machine’s inventor to launch their own version of the music player, which’ll come packed not with soothing mantras but with fragments of TG classics like ‘Maggot Death,’ ‘Wimpy Bar’ and the horrifying ‘Persuasion.’ Who’d've guessed?
