Krist Novoselic has made his presidential choice

Krist Novoselic - very much the other one out of Nirvana - has decided he's going to through his weight behind the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. The Libertarian party, of course, is very much the Kirst Novoselic of US parties.

Novoselic has also defended Citizens United, says Politico:

Novoselic then tweeted a link to a blog post written last Thursday in which he laid out his thoughts on the landmark 2010 Citizens United case and the history of campaign finance law in general.
"The best one can do to serve democracy is to understand and study issues," he wrote in the nearly 3,700-word treatise. "Don’t believe the hype about Citizens United. It was a good ruling that protected the right of people to hear information without the government picking and choosing who could speak."

It's not, but you can see why extremely rich people like to believe that.

We're Going Places: Nirvana - Taking Punk To The Masses

Seattle's EMP, Gehry-designed like a discarded sheath at the foot of the Space Needle, is a hell of a venue; broadly collecting together popular culture. There's a suspicion that the idea is it's a museum of things that aren't usually in museums, but with most cities with a large young-ish population having tried similar schemes with mixed success, it's not quite as unusual as it might like to think it is.

Amongst the exhibits is a celebration of Nirvana, Taking Punk To The Masses. (Because he spent so much time sharing bills with the band, it's also accidentally something of a history of Tad as well.)

It's not clear who it's aimed at - tubby, balding guys who remember when all this was in the present tense and for whom the explication makes you feel like you've just come round in a hospital and the nurses aren't sure you can remember who you are; or the kids who choose a Nirvana shirt when the Ramones one is in the wash? It falls somewhere between the two, and that makes the lovingly-curated show strain a bit.

There are pieces of the true cross on display - demo tapes, Kurt's stripey green jumper, setlists and smashed equipment. But they're all tucked away in glass cabinets, giving them a reverence that they existed to reject. Like orcas, punk stuff doesn't really thrive in a small, visitor-friendly box and it loses its power. (Sure, I got insanely excited seeing the Fastbacks' name on a flier, but not as insanely excited as I would have done if there had been some Fastbacks actually playing.)

An extensive oral history project sits on a massive screen - pretty much ignored, as these huge screens tend to be; at best prodded for a few seconds before the visitor moves on - and this seems to offer the context and other voices (and the experience) that the static displays miss. It suggests that, really, this might work better as an online project rather than a thing to go to. I would have loved to have spent longer poking about in the fanzine section, but when you're already being reminded the museum closes in a half hour, and there are other people milling about, waiting for their poke at the screen, it's not the time or the place. (This also seems the place where - the walk-ons for Courtney and the odd mention of Bikini Kill excepted - most of the not-male experience seems to have been shunted to.)

Across the way, there's an exhibit of indie video games where visitors are happily playing with the games themselves on numerous large screens. It makes sense - how do you understand the evolution of video games better than by playing them for yourself?

So why didn't this logic not get applied to the Nirvana exhibition? Sure, reading the form letter they sent to fans was fun ("when we're in your home town of _______________ I hope we can hang out with cool people like you"), but nothing in the room felt like it did watching Kurt beyond-dead-panning on Top Of The Pops, or that lurch on the Friday night wwhen the news broke.

Crucially, if there's an argument for having punk (of any era) in a museum, it should be to provide the kick up the arse that all punk did; all punk does. You should leave the EMP wanting to form a band, or do a zine, or even just play a record. Instead, it just makes you want to wander over to the gift shop.

In the middle of the museum as we leave, there's a massive (100 foot? 200 foot?) screen playing a Tacocat performance for KEXP. It feels more subversive than anything in the Nirvana display. That's got to be wrong.

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Nirvana: Choosing your words

Bruce Pavitt wanted to recall how he could see the end coming for Nirvana. Which is fine, he was running their label. But could he have chosen his words more carefully?:

Nirvana were "pretty lifeless" at the end of their career.

The 'Heart Shaped Box' band's live shows were known for being past paced, ferocious and full of energy, but by Christmas 1993 - four months before frontman Kurt Cobain committed suicide - their former record label boss Bruce Pavitt could see signs of burnout.

Pretty lifeless maybe not the words you want to use about a band which ended when their leader killed himself.

1993 all over again: 2 - Credit To The Nation

2. Credit To The Nation - Call It What You Want

Apparently, Credit To The Nation are currently in the midst of a comeback. Back in 2011, there was talk of a new album - it would have been their first release since 1996's Daddy Always Wanted Me to Grow a Pair of Wings; instead, it seems to have become their first unreleased album since 1998's Keep Your Mouth Shut.

The single is a nice bit of agit-poppery, but you wonder if it would have got a second glance from Kings Reach Tower without, you know, the opening bit.

The Money Will Roll Right In: Nirvana - The Musical

In the midst of his testimony over at the Britney Spears trial, Sam Lufti appeared to suggest on oath that there's plans for a Nirvana version of Mama Mia.

It might sound unlikely, but for two things.

One, Lufti currently represents Courtney Love.

And, two, the fact that an idea is a bad one won't stop it if it can make a lot of money.

Rumours that Ben Elton is already trying to think up ways to wrap a cheery family evening around a full cast bellowing of Rape Me could not be confirmed at this time.

Gordon in the morning: Oh well, whatever...

There's a round on Buzzcocks where the panel are going to be invited to spot the grown-up who was once the baby on the cover of Nevermind - this is meant to be a challenge, despite the way Spencer Eldon turns up on television and online more regularly than adverts for the Money Advisory Service.

They're on Never Mind The Buzzcocks. There's the baby from the Nirvana album. They have pixelated squares over their genitals. The headline, surely, is Nevermind The Bollocks?

It’s a case of Nevermind the Nirvana boy on the Buzzcocks

What?

If that sounds clunky, here's the teaser text designed to tempt people from the front page of Bizarre to the story:

PHIL Jupitus and Noel Fielding had to attempt to identify the 21-year-old version of the nude baby that was photographed in a swimming pool and would go on to be one of the most iconic images within music for many years up until the present day - in a new episode of the hit music-comedy panel show

I understand in one of Michael Gove's new exams, students will be invited to try translating that into English.

Twittergem: Courtney Love

Courtney Love finally uses social networking for something other than yelling at her daughter and claiming that Trent Reznor has stolen the lead from her roof:

@LanaDelRey@bryanadamsBryan has anyone told Lana what Heartshaped box is about?

— Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) July 30, 2012

@LanaDelReyso umm next time you sing it,think about myvagina will you? lolxc

— Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) July 30, 2012

Gordon in the morning: Courtney makes an offer

Yikes - has Courtney Love really told that woman off the annoying Marks And Spencer advert that she can do a Nirvana song? Gordon's Lucy Connolly says so:

X Factor Janet Devlin’s Nirvana go-ahead

Except then he admits that the story is really "Courtney does @tweet":

WILD rocker Courtney Love has come up with a plan to help Janet Devlin win The X Factor – by letting her sing a Nirvana track.

The widow of the grunge band's frontman Kurt Cobain — whose ancestors are from the same part of County Tyrone as flame-haired Janet — tweeted Simon Cowell yesterday to suggest the idea.

The Hole singer posted: "@SimonCowell you want some Nirvana songs? @JanetJealousy is from same town as Kurt? I have the perfect idea for that, call me babe."

I'd have thought that basing a news story on a tweet from Courtney would be like pitching a tent on Brighton beach - uncomfortable to begin with and certain to be washed out to sea before the night was out.

Dave Grohl is a bit like God

This year's Shockwaves NME Shockwaves Awards are going to give their Shockwaves Shockwaves Godlike Genius Award to Dave Grohl, it was announced about an hour ago.

Dave is pleased:

Dave Grohl says: “It's really flattering and really good company to be in. It's a nice thing to be acknowledge for doing something that you love to do, but in truth I don't consider it a body of work because I don't consider it work, I just consider it this incredible luxury that I get to play music and travel the world and feed my kids. It's pretty great. Awards and lists can get silly sometimes but I'm very appreciative of this. It's really cool to be called a godlike genius!”

Yes, nothing silly about an award sponsored by hairgrease.

Grohl always seems like a thoroughly nice bloke, and giving him a prize seems fair enough.

Not sure that 'genius' sits particularly comfortably, though. Given how he denied the link between HIV and AIDS, raising money for a group that pushed that line, muddled-headed at best might be a more apt title.

NME editor Krissi Murison says: “An NME Godlike Genius is a very rare thing. To qualify, an artist must not only be a musical visionary, have an unparalleled legacy and a decade-spanning career, but also still be meaningful to young bands and music fans today. Whether it’s headlining the world's greatest festivals, staging his own mega-gigs, releasing a series of hugely successful albums, collaborating with everyone from The Prodigy to Paul McCartney or still surprising fans with projects like Them Crooked Vultures, Dave Grohl is at the centre of everything interesting that is happening in music.

To be honest, Them Crooked Vultures, and working with Macca and Prodigy smacks of a career which has run aground - much as how the Oscars and BAFTAs will give a lifetime award to a director or actor who looks like they might not be around for the next prize night, it makes sense for the NME to try and get a prize into hands that are just starting to pull on string driving gloves for a life of trundling in the middle lane.

Also: at the centre of everything interesting happening in music? Really? Are you sure?

Gordon in the morning: Making movies

In a wonderful piece of misguided stunt casting, Robert Pattinson has been lined up (apparently) to be Kurt Cobain in the biopic of his life. What an insane suggestion. Who would be so bats as to think that works?

R-Patz has been in regular contact with Kurt's widow COURTNEY LOVE, who has been handed a key role in the production by bosses at Universal Pictures.

The HOLE singer wanted R-Patz as Kurt and SCARLETT JOHANSSON to portray her. My graphics team have mocked up Rob and Scarlett as the hellraising pair.

Maybe there is more to Pattinson than mumbling and taking his shirt off, but it seems hard to believe it. Perhaps Love has added the direction 'Kurt squints a little'.

For once, I think Gordon's analysis might be spot-on:

I have to say, the 14-year-old in me was a little bit sick when I found out a Twilight vampire was playing a rock idol.

But at least it's an improvement on the man lined up to play Kurt in the West End - Footballers' Wives star GARY LUCY.

It's a bit like the Comic Strip's Strike, only with Alexei Sayle's miner encouraging the drafting in of the likes of Meryl Streep.

[UPDATE: Thank you to the young person who pointed out that I'd mistakenly called Robert Pattinson Robin. I'm afraid the other error contained in this article - the suggestion that Pattinson is an actor capable of portraying Kurt Cobain is beyond my powers to update.]

Kasabian set their sights a little too high

Inspiration is always a good thing. Nice to have something to aim for. And so why should we all react with stifled giggles when NME announces where Kasabian's ambitions lay?

Kasabian have said their next album will draw on Nirvana and Pink Floyd as influences.

Apparently Serge has had a go at that RockStar game thingy and reckons that he's mastered the Cobain bloke doing the Bon Jovi song, so they're all set.

Seriously: Pink Floyd and Nirvana? Come on, you're struggling with sounding a bit like a Hard Fi tribute act. Ambition is great, but let's be a bit realistic.

"Sergio Pizzorno has got a body of songs that are sounding great," frontman Tom Meighan told BBC 6Music. "There’s one that sounds like Nirvana, which is really grungy, a big riff."

And... the Pink Floyd "influence"?

"It’s nothing like what we’ve done on this record, it’s really old school grunge. There’s a lot of Pink Floyd, 'Dark Side Of The Moon', piano-based songs at the minute."

Note the cautious use of the phrase "at the minute", as if aware that a back door must be left ajar to allow an embarrassed 'well, we took all of them off in the end' should the collective ear of the nation hear the record and say "wasn't there meant to be some Pink Floyd going on here? Because all I can hear is Keane?"

It's what Kurt would have wanted

Or, at least, if Kurt hadn't, specifically, wanted there to be a glitzy double-disc 20th anniversary reissue of Bleach, he'd at the very least have mentioned that in his suicide note, wouldn't he?

Nirvana untouched: Plans to work Cobain's corpse flops

Back in 2006, Courtney Love did a deal bringing in a company called Primary Wave Music Publishing to work on the Nirvana back catalogue. They paid her fifty million dollars, with the plan of using the songs to soundtrack adverts and video games.

It hasn't been a staggering success, with the company having managed to scrape a return of a little under two and a half million.

Why so? Partly because it's Nirvana - you're not really going to get that many supermarket chains lining up to use Polly as a soundtrack for their ad spots, are you?

And partly - perhaps more so - because Primary Wave only controlled 50% of the catalogue; the other 50% was controlled by Love and the rest of the band:

A source told Portfolio that one deal to license a number of NIRVANA songs for a special episode of "CSI: Miami", that would be written around the music, collapsed when Love, the publisher and former members of NIRVANA asked for "twice the industry standard" in licensing fees, leading CBS-TV to back off.

At least Courtney didn't insist on writing the episode of CSI. CBS should thank its lucky stars it didn't spend weeks taking delivery of small pieces of paper with the words "plottKILLRy ANADAms" scrawled all over.

It's what Kurt would have wanted, probably

The gentle ruffle of a PR email brings news of an attempt to cash-in on Kurt Cobain's, erm, 42nd birthday:

On Friday, February 20th, former Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would have turned 42. The iconic alternative-rock legend, who died tragically in 1994, was an innovator and trendsetter, not just musically but stylistically as well, wearing a succession of thrift-store, punk-rock or homemade T-shirts. This year you can remember Cobain wearing one of the singular, striking shirts he incorporated into his own unique sense of fashion. Choose between Kurt's ironic "Grunge is Dead" shirt; his "Hi, How Are You," shirt sporting a design from outside musician Daniel Johnston; his vintage "Motorbike" shirt, sporting the slogan "Live to Ride, Ride to Live"; his "Sounds" shirt, featuring the logo from the magazine of the same name; and his "Olympia Beer" shirt, a nod to one of the music scenes that ultimately fostered Nirvana.

Hopefully, the puzzlement at why anyone would start to treat a 42nd birthday like a bicentenary would have stopped most people reading on to through the rest of it.

The thicket of 'why not imitate his homemade-thrift shop look by, erm buying a t-shirt from a tshirt company' would probably have proved enough of a logical conundrum to claim other travellers moving wearily through the release.

Any who survived would have perished, at their own hands, at the description of Daniel Johnston as an "outside musician". Isn't an outside musician a busker?

Still, there you have it: Pay tribute to a man with a unique look by dressing like you've chosen to go as him to a fancy dress party.

Another story featuring Courtney Love and missing money

This time, though, the tale is a little easier to follow as the accusations come not from, but are about, Courtney. She's being sued by London & Co, who claims she owes them a million dollars following the sale of her share of Nirvana's back catalogue.

They had, the claim, an oral contract with Courtney - which, we'd suggest would be about as watertight as a paperbag oiltanker - to get five per cent of any income the catalogue generated; they reckon they were due a million bucks as a result of it.

Of course, an oral contract is a difficult thing - it's hard to prove what anyone meant by it. Having said that, the same is true of most stuff Courtney writes down these days.

It's all up to the courts now.

Rav Singh: Are you sure she hasn't just lost them?

A curious tale pops up in Rav Singh's blog on the News of the World today:

THE music world was In Bloom-in' shock last night after hearing that the ashes of grunge god KURT COBAIN have been PINCHED!

I can also reveal that the wife of the NIRVANA legend, COURTNEY LOVE, is said to be "suicidal" after finding Kurt's remains missing from her Hollywood home.

In Bloom-in shocked?

Courtney said: "I can't believe anyone would take Kurt's ashes from me.

"I find it disgusting and right now I'm suicidal.

"If I don't get them back I don't know what I'll do."

The sad news will sicken the millions of Cobain and Nirvana fans worldwide.

Will it? Really? Sicken? It might upset a few of them, and some might feel a slight queasiness at this latest in a long line of stories bouncing out of Courtneyworld. But sickened? Really?

Stipe is haunted by Kurt

Michael Stipe has trouble shaking off the blues when he tries to listen to Nirvana records:

"He had reached a point where he was about to push through to something that was so phenomenal and so beautiful.

"It was all written, it was all right there and it was so obvious where he was going, and then he didn’t make it.

"I still have trouble - I can’t listen to an entire Nirvana record."

Similarly, these days most people have trouble making it all the way through an REM album.

Sorry, did you say 'tribute'? We heard 'nasty marketing campaign stunt'.

Converse - with the full blessing of Courtney Love - are to launch a Kurt Cobain plimsole. We say full blessing, clearly it could only have been given one-handed as the other would have been counting the money.

In a press release, Converse said: "To honour Cobain, in May, Converse will debut their Kurt Cobain collection of shoes featuring artwork and scribbles borrowed from Cobain's personal notebooks.

"It will mark a central part of the year-long 100th Anniversary 'Welcome to the Converse Century' celebration."

Aha. It's an honour for your corpse to dug up, and your personal diaries ransacked in order to help sell some overpriced training shoes. An honour right up there with 'having someone piss through your letterbox'.

Kurt Cobain buys house

According to Courtney Love... [Hello everybody! This post begins with the words 'according to Courtney Love', which is on a par with 'If Nostaradamus is to be believed' and 'Unless Russell Grant's powers of prediction are failing him'. But go with us, eh?] ... someone has been ripping off the estate of Kurt Cobain to the tune of thirty six million quid.

Apparently she's known about it for years, but was, you know, not in a position to do anything about it for a while:

“I knew it had been going on since when I went cuckoo — bananas — in 2003.

“It was fraud after fraud. But nobody believed me until now. I did a check on my deceased husband’s social security number and he has a house in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He bought it last year.

“I would like to know how. He should probably get his ass back home if that is the case.”

We're a little lost as to why, if she knew all about it, and was busily making time to throw bottles at people's houses, she didn't go out of her way to do anything about it in a hands-on way.

The idea that people who had nothing to do with Kurt's talents creaming off income from the Nirvana back catalogue is a bit sickening, isn't it? Using his name and likeness to generate an income is almost unforgivable. You can see why Courtney would be really annoyed at other people doing that.

Why are you all staring?

It's a hard life being Frances Bean Cobain, it really is:

“These people are fascinated by me, but I haven't done anything.

"If you're a big Nirvana fan, a big Hole fan, then I understand why you would want to get to know me, but I'm not my parents.

“I get it, I really do, but at the same time it's creepy. People need to wait until I've done something valid with my life."

It's quite cute she's so sweet to her Mom, pretending there are such things as "big Hole fans". Of course, her protestations that 'little ole me ain't done anything' would be a bit more convincing if she wasn't talking to Harpers Bazaar while doing a fashion shoot for them. Shouldn't she have told Harpers that she's not done anything worthy of a big spread in a glossy magazine?