KURT COBAIN AND EDVARD MUNCH
These two artists are the masters of sublimation, concerned with pain and isolation and mind sickness. They convert this sickness into something beautiful—a beauty that is comforting and oddly warm. It resonates with a rich texture that nonetheless maintains its intense anxiety and suffering.
The screaming final lines of Nirvana’s Unplugged rendition of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” cut into us as acutely as Munch’s most famous painting.
Munch’s piece Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones) depicts desolate minds near each other with no hope of intimacy, while Cobain takes this bleakness even further in “Drain You.”
“One baby to another says, ‘I’m lucky to have met you… It is now my duty to completely drain you.'”