If you ask an AI bot how Kurt Cobain and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic first met, you might get a very detailed and bizarre story about their time as art students at a school called the Grays Harbor Institute of Northwest Crafts.
Cobain, a young “sawblade painter specialising in wildlife and seascapes”, struck up a friendship with Novoselic, whose passion was “glueing seashells and driftwood on burlap”. If that sounds like a bonkers example of one of those artificial intelligence ‘hallucinations’, it’s actually representative of an even bigger problem with trying to learn about history from AI: it doesn’t understand satire.
Regardless, when Nirvana signed to the major label DGC before the release of their monstrous breakout album Nevermind, and the existence of AI, they found themselves confronted with very different promotional demands from what they’d known as small-time artists with the indie label Sub Pop.
DGC wanted to build an identity and image around the band, to craft a narrative that would help would-be fans better connect with Cobain, Novoselic, and drummer Dave Grohl, and unsurprisingly, the band, Cobain in particular, was not very enthusiastic about this part of the job. They didn’t even feel qualified to tell their own story, as Cobain freely admitted that he wasn’t an expert on his own work.
“I couldn’t even tell you shit like when Bleach was released,” he told Spin in 1992, referring to Nirvana’s 1989 debut album on Sub Pop, “I couldn’t even name the songs on the album”.
Despite this professed disinterest in Nirvana history, however, Cobain and his bandmates were eventually tasked with re-writing their own official origin story, a brief band biography that DGC wanted to send out with press releases ahead of Nevermind’s release in 1991. The original version of the bio, written by somebody at the label offices, was “really lame”, according to Kurt, who also said:
That bio, as you might have guessed, is the origin point for that nutty story about Kurt and Krist meeting each other in an arts and crafts class. It includes an amazing quote from Novoselic, explaining how he first bonded with his lead singer: “I liked what Kurt was doing. I asked him what his thoughts were on a macaroni mobile piece I was working on. He suggested I glue glitter on it. That really made it!” The bio goes on to explain that this macaroni incident “formed the basis of Nirvana’s musical magic.”
Fabricating one’s origin story is an appropriately cheeky and mischievous thing for a band like Nirvana to be doing in the early ’90s, but it was hardly an isolated incident. “We lead such boring lives,” Cobain explained to Spin in the midst of Nevermind-mania, “that we start to make up stuff”.
Famously, this could include things as trivial as the correct spellings of band members’ names (Cobain repeatedly misspelt his own name as ‘Kurdt’, ‘Curt’, and ‘Kobain’) or Grohl supposedly giving out Chris Cornell’s personal phone number in a live TV interview (it was actually the number of the Sub Pop offices).
And then there’s Grohl’s description, also from that infamous DGC bio, of how he first met his bandmates: “They wore berets, sunglasses, sandals and had goatees. Chris [Krist] walked around with these poetry books by Rod McKuen, and Kurt would do interpretive dances while Chris recited McKuen’s poetry. It didn’t take Grohl too long to fit in. Now they all enjoy collaborating on burl clocks and latch hook rugs in their off time.”
