“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” was released on Friday as the most recent documentary of the life of Nirvana front man, Kurt Cobain.

The filmmaker of the HBO documentary, Brett Morgen, worked alongside executive producer Cobain’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, according to an April 8 Rolling Stone article. On top of working with Cobain’s daughter, Morgen was also given access to Cobain’s personal items by his widow, Courtney Love.

Patrick MacDougall, an instructor at the Setnor School of Music at Syracuse University, said having the family’s backing for a documentary is important for the validity of the film. Not having the family be a part of the film would “only lead people to question the truth in it.”

Cobain influenced a lot of young bands and people gravitated toward his sound because Cobain had a style like no one else, MacDougall added.

“Currently, he’s the face and sound of the Seattle grunge movement,” MacDougall said. “Every generation has a voice of angst and misunderstood youth and he was that for the grunge era.”

MacDougall said when a group becomes popular in a new genre, record labels start to look for other artists that have a similar style. Because Cobain was so popular, he made the grunge movement even bigger, he added.

The transition from the 1980s to the early 1990s is what MacDougall said is the reason for Cobain’s success. Timing is everything and it was Cobain who helped initiate the movement from electronic music to band performances during this time, MacDougall said.

David Rezak, director of the Bandier Program at SU, added that the antithesis of the “polished pop” and pretentious “hair-band era,” also known as the 1980s, was grunge.

“(Cobain) spoke to the sneaker-wearing disenfranchised generation that felt a little lost,” Rezak said.

MacDougall said he thinks the purpose of “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” is to reintroduce Cobain to a new generation of youth. He said he thinks young artists of today will draw from Cobain’s sound, and that rock is still influenced by Cobain.

“Kurt Cobain will be synonymous with rock forever,” MacDougal said.

If Cobain were still alive, MacDougall thinks he would have continued to influence music.

“Who knows what kinds of great things he would have done? But we wouldn’t have Foo Fighters,” MacDougall said. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Foo Fighters wouldn’t be around because Nirvana probably wouldn’t have broken up.”

Rezak said he thinks that anything Cobain would have done after Nirvana would have been creative. However, he said Cobain wouldn’t have changed the course of music because the way people consumed music was changing.

“Nirvana specifically and grunge generally was the music industry writing itself,” Rezak said. “There was a cultural shift away from pretention and back to the roots of rock and roll, which I think is a positive thing.”

Rezak said one of the biggest influences Cobain had was on Converse sneakers. He said Cobain completely turned around the 1960s brand because they were the “perfect dressed-down clothing for the grunge era.”

Unlike many other artists, Rezak said that Nirvana’s music videos helped their promotion team sell records. He said that the videos broke faster than radio and that their music took time.

“He is a sort of this tragic hero to a lot of young people, and rightly so because he was so gifted,” Rezak said. “He has a legacy of brilliant, creative art, which makes him more of a cult hero. It almost adds credence to his legend in a very sad way.”

Published on April 27, 2015 at 9:30 pm

Contact Katelyn: kmfaubel@syr.edu