Kurt Cobain Performs Bon Jovi Classic In Guitar Hero 5


Kurt Cobain - Guitar Hero 5

Kurt Cobain - Guitar Hero 5




Picture this: Kurt Cobain prancing around the stage belting out Bon Jovi’s hair-raising ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’, shroud in a glam rock backdrop. Unthinkable? Nirvana fans seem to think so.

The decision to include the likeness of Nirvana’s iconic frontman as a playable avatar in the fifth instalment of the Guitar Hero series has been met with varied reactions with the music and gaming worlds.

Many fans of both the game and Nirvana, who fronted the rise of alternative rock in the early ‘90s, were ecstatic to hear of the long overdue inclusion of the band’s cathartic anthem ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as well as ‘Lithium’ on the soundtrack, but the follow-up announcement of Cobain as a controllable in-game character proved an eyebrow raiser.

Perhaps his inclusion will guarantee that the fifth edition of the gaming phenomenon is in Cobain’s own words a ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ but the Seattle band’s faithful supporters will be Scoffing when they see Cobain yell “Yeah boyyyyyyyy!”

Many are calling it ridiculous, in-dignifying and defacing the legacy of the man who opposed commercialism to such an extent that the pressures of superstardom are said to contributed to his death in 1994. Now gamers have the tongue in cheek ability to have Cobain sing along to the hair metal he helped to bury.
This is the man who scraped off the studio polish for Nirvana’s rasping, abrasive follow-up classic “In Utero”. Drenched in unsavoury squealing feedback and a raw, live sound, courtesy of producer Steve Albini, it was Nirvana as Cobain had envisaged. The natural sound was deemed “unreleasable” at the time.

Nirvana were also renowned for their run-in with MTV executives who insisted the band perform ‘Lithium’ over the proposed new song ‘Rape Me’ at the 1992 MTV Music Video Awards. Cobain’s final stab at the MTV bosses was playing the opening bars of the aforementioned outlawed song, “just to give MTV a little heart palpitation” before exploding into a fierce rendition of Lithium, culminating in instrument obliteration, Novoselic taking a bass to the face after a misjudging the landing, and Cobain ascending the towering amplifiers. It was a statement of resistance toward the insatiable corporation Cobain despised.

At one point he even branded fellow grunge monarchs Pearl Jam commercial sell-outs, a fact which helped shape the rest of Pearl Jam’s career as they withdrew from the spotlight and changed their musical direction. So, with all this in mind, how do you view Cobain’s inclusion in the new Guitar Hero game? Is button-bashing his ghost into ‘performing’ songs he helped dethrone a little too tasteless? The widespread view is that Cobain would never have signed this off had he been alive. Smells Like ‘Territorial Grave Pissings’. What do you think?


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4 Comments

  1. indonesianpasserby 6 September, 2009
  2. Everts Garay 6 September, 2009
  3. sharkie002 8 September, 2009
  4. aedjp 10 September, 2009