Entries associated with the tag "Kurt Cobain":

I'm not one to knock on someone else's hustle, and as a recovering sneaker addict I have a hard time bagging on any sort of special-edition shoe, no matter how ridiculous, but I can't really hang with Converse's Kurt Cobain signature series. It's not so much that the series includes prescuffed replicas of the shoes he killed himself in--which is at least as morbid and exploitative as the death-certificate T-shirts that came out within days of his suicide--but that the insoles of the death shoes have "punk rock means freedom" written on them.

Will some 17-year-old kids please start a punk band that is so obnoxious and shitty that no one as old as I am can get into it? Otherwise I'm afraid that after this atrocity the cosmic punk scales are gonna end up tipped the wrong way.

In tackiness news, Dr. Martens has enlisted the aid of four dead counterculture icons to hawk footwear from beyond the grave. Like the old advertising adage goes, nothing moves units quite like nauseating your consumer base.

Beyond the general ickiness of the campaign, I've been thinking all day about what these pictures say about Saatchi and Saatchi's particular view of the afterlife. Apparently heaven is really fucking boring. If you take the images at face value, it looks like Kurt Cobain is spending eternity sitting around being bummed, Joe Strummer's so bored to tears that he's about to collapse (or marybe he's just practicing his poses for a comeback as a Calvin Klein model), and Joey Ramone is spending his eternal reward whistling and tapping his foot, waiting for something interesting at all to happen. I'm taking Sid's apparent good humor as proof to my theory that if you die while you're wasted you arrive in heaven still high, and you stay that way forever.

The only upside I can see to the whole situation is the potential for getting an outraged and probably incoherent Courtney Love back in the news. It's always so drab when she's away.