PBS’ Blank On Blank series is a trove of excellent animated clips that breathe new life into old interviews, and we constantly find ourselves getting drawn back to it.
From Leonard Cohen talking about the bizarre origins of Sisters of Mercy to John and Yoko discussing love, there are so many gems lurking on the web series’ archive, and we’ve just came across another one that we reckon you might like.
Watch Kurt Cobain discuss rejecting cock rock culture and struggling with his sexual identity in a 1993 interview with Jon Savage.
This one features an interview between Kurt Cobain and Jon Savage in July 1993, recorded in a New York City hotel room just a few months before In Utero was released.
In the interview, Cobain opens up about his high school days and feeling “so different and so crazy” that people often just left him alone. “I always felt that they would vote me ‘Most likely to kill everyone at a high school dance’,” he says.
As per usual, Cobain is starkly honest, discussing feeling closer to women than he was to men and how he “always felt that [women] weren’t treated with respect”, and while he liked to listen to classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, eventually he realised that a lot of their music was sexist, and immediately lost interest, instead finding solace in punk.
Savage also gets Cobain to talk about his heritage, and how he recently discovered his Irish roots. He also talks about thinking he might be gay. “I thought that might be the solution to my problem,” he says.
Most heartbreakingly, he also talks about feeling more optimistic at the time than he had since his parents got divorced when he was seven, having recently married Courtney Love and become a father. Less than a year after the interview took place, Cobain took his own life.
Watch it below, via Blank on Blank.
