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Thu 14 May 2026 16:30, UK
The journey that Kurt Cobain took within the span of a few months in the early 1990s is absolutely insane.
No one could have imagined a kid from Seattle was suddenly going to turn into one of the biggest names in rock and roll, and while Cobain had the success that most people only dream of, it wasn’t clear whether he actually liked the position that he was in. He didn’t want to be the voice of the people, but while he had everyone’s attention, he was going to at least throw a few curveballs their way when they asked him about some of his favourite music during interviews.
If nothing else, the fact that some indie band that had just signed to a major label could become the biggest band in the world was a step in the right direction. Cobain figured that they had time to knock down everyone’s perceptions of what a hit was supposed to be, and even if he didn’t like all the cameras being in his face all the time, you could tell that he was leaning into his own celebrity a little bit when he began making some of those first appearances.
His appearance on Headbangers Ball was clearly intentional, with him showing up in a yellow dress, and a lot of his other projects for MTV were more about spitting in the face of what rock and roll had become. There was no way in hell he was going to be another Axl Rose, and he felt that some of the best moments of his career came when he was giving his favourite artists a platform to be themselves.
Looking through Cobain’s record collection, there was a lot more to it than your traditional classic rock bands. He still loved the riffs of Aerosmith and idolised John Lennon when he was younger, but a band like Flipper was what he was striving to make more popular when he got everyone’s attention. They weren’t the most tuneful band in the world, but if Cobain thought they deserved a shot, it was well worth everyone taking a chance on them if they wanted to.
The business mindset is always about following the money, and Cobain felt that getting bands like Flipper in the limelight would at least bring something new to the charts, saying, “I would love to see [my fans] appreciate the noisier side of our music and then hopefully they will look into some of the other punk rock bands like Flipper and stuff like that. Hopefully, there will be other bands [like that].” But even by the standards of MTV, Flipper was never going to be the next Nirvana.
Every single band Cobain namedropped was practically a license for labels to print money, but Flipper was always an acquired taste. A lot of the punk rock approach to vocals was meant to be a little bit tuneless, but even by the standards of punk, a lot of the smarmy sounds of Flipper do end up coming off as a little bit grating if you’re forced to listen to it over the course of an entire album.
Further reading: From The Vault
They weren’t the best case for what underground punk had to offer, but it’s strange to think that they weren’t one of the bands that ended up taking off. I mean, we live in a timeline where a band like Butthole Surfers were able to get on the charts and actually have a song that became a hit, so the idea of Flipper getting at least a fluke indie hit would have at least been a small step forward.
But what the audience tended to go for was out of Cobain’s hands, and when he passed away, it didn’t take long for most people to start moving on to something that was a bit more chipper than what everyone else was going for back in the early 1990s. Life had become too morose after Cobain passed away, but that didn’t mean that everyone needed to forget where the biggest names in the underground came from.
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