So if you found the above 1 minute clip unbelievably boring, imagine having to sit through another 95 minutes of the same exact thing. That one minute is basically AJ Schnack’s About A Son, a documentary about Kurt Cobain as a whole. Me being knee deep into my own personal 90s revival, I was pretty excited when I first read about this film. The premise was to create a documentary based around the never before heard audio of interviews conducted by journalist Michael Azzerad with Kurt Cobain while preparing his 1993 book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana; which may as well have been on the required reading list for any high school aged outcast in the early 90s since it was the only book I ever saw some of my friends read in high school.

Unfortunately this film doesn’t come close to making any of this remotely engaging or interesting. How hard is it to make a Kurt Cobain documentary interesting? The same recycled information every VH1 Behind the Music style documentary about him can keep me tuned in for over an hour, so you’d think one with never before heard audio from the man himself would be a home run! Well, that’s just not the case. I wanted to gouge my eyes out after 15 minutes of this film. First off I’m surprised no one could be bothered in investing the time and money in cleaning up the audio so that the tape hiss didn’t just recede the whole thing into the background like static noise. But that is the least of this documentary’s problems. I thought the audio was going to be coupled with some relevant archival footage, photos, anything and it isn’t. The whole movie is set to moody backdrops of urban and industrial landscapes of Seattle and Washington state in general. I can only assume this was the director’s way of creating a feeling of malaise and dread to go with Kurt’s words and eventual outcome of his life. All this did was bore me to death because it in no way worked with the audio in presenting any sort of storyline or mood that kept you interested.

I have no clue if this is some new style of documentary making, if so someone please inform me of it’s name! About A Son, however is the second documentary in the last year I’ve seen done in this similar style. Robinson Devor’s Zoo (clip above) suffers from all the painful flaws as About A Son. Zoo is to put it bluntly, about bestiality. It focuses on a group of men who meet monthly at a farm and engage in giant barnyard orgies. During one of these orgies one of the men dies as a result of injuries he gets from having sex with a horse. I understand this isn’t going to be something everyone wants to see a documentary about, but you’d think at the very least there’s no way something this outrageous wouldn’t male for an interesting documentary. But again this film defies all the odds like About A Son and making what you’d think a very disturbing and difficult topic utterly boring. Zoo like About A Son uses audio interviews over, moody images of farms, animals and objects, but adds another equally boring element of sometimes having the audio over artsy mundane re-enactment scenes to imply a sense of sadness and dread. They don’t do any such thing, all they do is grind your interest in what you’re watching to a halt.

If you’re hankering to rent a Kurt Cobain documentary I implore you to skip About A Son and get Nick Broomfield’s 1998 documentary, Kurt & Courtney.

Now while Kurt & Courtney has an infinite amount of partial paranoia, conspiracy theory and sensationalism to be taken seriously, it is really interesting and a fun watch. Best of all is it’s focus on Kurt’s best friend, Dylan Carlson.

Some hardcore Nirvana fans may recognize him as the guy whom In Bloom is about. You know HE IS “the one who likes all our pretty songs, and he likes to sing along, and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don’t know what it means”. Others may recognize Dylan as the man behind the band Earth. I’d never seen Dylan on camera before and from the footage here he very much portrayed as the character Kurt Cobain presented on In Bloom. That makes it so hard to look at him as this prototypical cult figure who helped create what is today the modern sludgy doom metal scene.

This is similar to my post regarding the Melvin’s Houdini a little while back. I was actually kind of shocked to find out that Earth had taken on this cult like status in the past few years. I remember back in like ‘95-96, when I was full into my drone & noise phase (Earth, Hovercraft, Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation, Labradford, etc, etc) that Earth was the one band most of my friends into the same music just couldn’t stand. To them the reason in owning any Earth records wasn’t the music, but the novelty to say owning a William Shattner album. You owned it simply because you could say “Oh check this crap out. This is Kurt Cobain’s best friend’s band… man this shit sucks!” It was too slow, repetitive and didn’t build to anything which as a result made it boring instead of unnerving and intersting. I owned 3 or so Earth albums, they weren’t my favorites at the time by far. In fact, they were usually left them off the CD player until a deep, deep catatonic bake was in session and ANYTHING probably would have sounded interesting. To me they were the fringe of my noise & drone fascination of a decade ago. And today the fringe of one movement makes the archetype of another. It’s funny what a few years can do to your perception. Now that I’m full out of my noise and drone music phase, I can appreciate Earth on a totally different level than ever before. I guess like Dylan Carlson, I too needed some time off from Earth to revalue what I was hearing.

Now what does this have to do with anything besides me stringing a movie I hated into Band I was sort of into way back when? Well Earth after a nine year hiatus from albums (1996-2005) returned to look at what they had sewn with devotees like Boris and Sun O))) and began releasing new albums. Their newest The Bee’s Made Honey In the Lion’s Skull is out now on Southern Lord. So hopefully that long ass post post clears up the glut of no posts for the last 2 days! I’m surprised I could string all that into one post. Who by the way have a new album out on Southern Lord called The Bee’s Made Honey In the Lion’s Skull. And much like this post, It’s pretty epic!