The many comparisons between John Lennon and Kurt Cobain generally tend to focus on the celebrity aspect of their lives and their controversial marriages to Yoko Ono and Courtney Love, respectively. But very seldom does the media bother to analyze the many similarities in their music. It is the music, after all, that mattered most to both men, and it was through their music they allowed the public to see what really made them tick.
The Beatles were undoubtedly one of Kurt Cobain’s earliest musical influences. His aunt Mari told rock journalist Charles R. Cross (Cobain Unseen, page 9) that she remembered Kurt singing “Hey Jude” at the tender age of two. In a 1993 interview with Guitar World magazine’s Jon Savage, Kurt spoke of studying the Beatles during his childhood. “My aunts would give me Beatles records, so for the most part I listened to the Beatles.”
Spending so much of his youth wrapped up in Beatles albums, it seemed inevitable that Kurt would absorb some of the group’s approach to songwriting. As Cobain later told Charles R. Cross, he wrote the song “About a Girl” after spending hours on end listening to “Meet the Beatles.” (Cobain Unseen, page 121.) Melodically, the song owes more to McCartney than Lennon, and perhaps in fact was more directly influenced by George Harrison’s “Don’t Bother Me,” which also appears on that album.
Still, it was John Lennon who Kurt said had been his “idol” all his life, and his songs clearly reflected this. Kurt’s abstract lyrics often echoed Lennon’s reliance on metaphor, word-play and sometimes pure nonsense for the sake of it. Cobain’s lyrics were always under the music critics’ microscope, a constant source of annoyance to Kurt. “Why in the hell do journalists insist on coming up with a second rate Freudian evaluation on my lyrics when 90% of the time they’ve transcribed the lyrics incorrectly?” (From Cobain’s posthumously published Journals, page 190.)
Lennon certainly had to put up with over-analysis of his own lyrics. Esteemed music critics of the 1960s weren’t the only ones baffled by Lennon’s way with words; even schoolchildren were given class assignments to dissect Beatle John’s lyrics. Lennon was besieged by fan letters asking him what songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” were really all about. His reply to all these lyrical detectives was 1967’s “I Am the Walrus,” a bizarre lyrical jigsaw puzzle containing made-up words such as crabalocker and Semolina Pilchards.
Like Lennon, Cobain seemed to enjoy confounding his critics and fans with increasingly bizarre lyrics. On Nirvana’s final album, 1993’s “In Utero,” Kurt sings “I am up to my neck in contradictionary flies” and proclaims himself “the king of illiterature” in “Very Ape.”
As with Cobain, Lennon’s songs were his own therapy, a method of dealing with his pain. Lennon’s confessional “Mother” from his primal scream period calls not only Cobain’s gut-wrenching vocal wails to mind, it also informed Nirvana songs like “Sliver,” “Endless Nameless,” and “In Bloom.” (Even the video for “In Bloom” was an irreverent nod to the Beatles legendary 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
But perhaps what reminds us most of Lennon when we hear Kurt Cobain’s music is the cry for help. Both artists openly communicated their deepest insecurities and fears in their songs. As Lennon once candidly described the truth behind his song “Help”:
“When ‘Help’ came out, I was actually crying out for help. Most people think it’s just a fast rock ‘n’ roll song. Now I may be very positive, yes, yes, but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window, you know.” In a 1971 interview with Radio Monte Carlo, John Lennon openly admitted that he had considered suicide before, particularly during his teens.
If “Help” was John Lennon’s cry for help, “Pennyroyal Tea” was Kurt’s. (“Sit and drink pennyroyal tea/Still the life that’s inside of me.”) Kurt Cobain often spoke about the debilitating chronic stomach pain which had plagued him for years. Cobain said he would have done anything to escape it. He claimed that heroin was the only thing that brought him some small degree of relief.
Even in his suicide note, Cobain acknowledged to his fans that the pain had finally become unbearable. “Thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and concern during the past years,” he wrote.