It’s been thirty years since Kurt Cobain died. I remember vividly watching the evening news with my parents and hearing the presenter announce it. Kurt’s suicide dominated the media cycle, and with the benefit of hindsight, there’s a convincing narrative that the release of Parklife and Supersonic in the immediate aftermath of Nirvana’s demise signalled a seachange in the UK’s music scene.
But I didn’t see that at the time. I mainly remember feeling disappointed rather than sad. Disappointed that I’d now never see Nirvana live and that Kurt would never write or release any more music.
In a music-focused WhatsApp chat, a few of my friends and I discussed what we thought Kurt might be doing now - were he still alive, aged 57.
Perhaps recording a podcast with guitarist Pat Smear, discussing obscure punk seven inches.
Maybe working on various side projects and solo albums, including weird avant-garde noise.
In this parallel universe, Nirvana could have ended up like many of their grunge peers, still releasing albums every couple of years. No longer the zeitgeist-defining force of the early 90s, and more comfortable with themselves as a result.
By all accounts, Kurt was a restless soul full of contradictions and paradoxes. He once said he wanted the adoration of John Lennon with the anonymity of Ringo Starr. Charles R. Cross’s biography reveals that Kurt altered much of his past when he retold it, convincing himself of his own version of the truth.
We’ll never know which direction Kurt’s future would have taken him, but I like to think of Kurt joining that rare pantheon of musicians who embody reinvention and experimentation. Bowie, Blur, Prince, Radiohead, Bjork - I’m sure you can think of others.
It’s the trickiest path to take - any kind of significant change in style risks alienating your fanbase. It can easily go full Spinal Tap. It requires a large amount of stoicism - listening to Kid A now with hindsight, you can see it as a development of OK Computer and the bridge into Radiohead’s second phase. At the time, it blew people’s minds. The criticism was fierce - it takes bravery and conviction to stay the course and ignore the external noise.
There’s also nothing wrong with the alternative. I love Neil Young to death, but he does his Neil Young thing pretty much every time. Just because Neil isn’t suddenly going through a grime phase or getting really into Aphex Twin, doesn’t make his creativity any less valuable.
It often comes down to how people feel about the creative process. If writing songs on an acoustic guitar or turning epic jams into songs still works and feels good, do it. But artists who reinvent themselves often talk about becoming bored with an instrument. They pick up a guitar and find themselves unable to break out of the same old chord progressions or rhythms.
Like many creative endeavours, they have their processes and neural pathways they can easily slip into and that easily produce results. And, as anyone coming up with strategies and ideas knows, sometimes you just need an idea - having those tried and tested routes is essential. But sometimes, you have an opportunity to force yourself out of those ways of working.
And it is an act of force. It requires a fundamental change in approach. For a musician, that may mean picking up a new instrument, finding a new writing partner, or putting themselves in a completely new environment. Kendrick Lamar broke his writer’s block with a trip to South Africa; when he got home, ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ flowed out of him with comparative ease.
We can try similar approaches to our comms planning and campaigns. Walking is great for coming up with ideas; taking a walk along an unfamiliar route is even better. Walking an unfamiliar road makes you more likely to notice your environment and see it slightly differently.
We can’t pick up a new instrument, but we can identify fresh stimuli - looking for inspiration outside your usual sources. Testing out alternative idea-generation techniques. According to HBR, one of the most common uses of ChatGPT is to support creativity.
We can have also ChatGPT exhaust the obvious ideas much more quickly, forcing us to keep going until we uncover something fresher. Numerous studies show that having more ideas results in better ideas.
We can easily take a leaf out of musicians’ books and find new collaborators. A new environment with new people and fresh, different approaches can work wonders for unlocking that knotty problem that just refuses to be solved.
But maybe sometimes any approach is the wrong approach. A new client brief or project inevitably activates habits and muscle memories - get a team together, get research going, map out the journey, and develop a deck template. You know the drill.
Perhaps, if we’re looking to reinvent how we work or think, it’s the whole process that keeps us locked into our tried and tested pathways. Maybe, to take a leaf out of
’s book, we need to think more about what our success looks like - what we want the outputs or the end result to BE before we get started. Or in other words:"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." Antoine de Saint Exupéry
David Bowie wants to be a rock star so alien that it seems as though he literally came to us from out of space. Radiohead want to escape the shackles of being the “ultimate rock band” and become the antithesis of rock. Pep Guardiola decides he needs a very traditional “big man up top” in order to perfect the perfect football machine.
With PR and comms ideas, sometimes you need the process to even get an understanding of what the idea could be. But, particularly if you’ve been working with a client for a long time, a clear picture of the end product will make the process feel fresh and different. It will undoubtedly help us move away from our tried-and-tested favourites, those same old rhythms and sounds that your client may expect to hear.
Sadly, we’ll never know what vision Kurt had in mind for Nirvana or his own music. Maybe if he’d stayed with us longer, Kurt could have perfected his “famous/but not famous” vision as a musician. He also said that the period of Nirvana he loved the most was just before they broke through with Smells Like Teen Spirit. So maybe there was a future of starting bands and then disbanding them at a certain level of popularity - like an endless Sex Pistols loop. But maybe both those visions speak to “wanting the fame without any actual fame”, and perhaps that’s a circle that can never be squared.