A newly-unearthed interview with Kurt Cobain has seen the late grunge icon sharing his thoughts on the quality of white rappers.
Back in early 1992, Nirvana famously made history when their album Nevermind managed to steal the top spot on the Billboard 200 from Michael Jackson’s Dangerous.
However, if you were to look at the charts just one year earlier, you would have been witnessing the tail-end of a 16-week chart domination by Vanilla Ice – one of the earliest white rappers to achieve some major success.
Now, another newly-unearthed interview from Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain has seen the rocker expressing his thoughts on the then-growing trend of white rappers in the music scene.
As CTV News reports, then 21-year-old Canadian radio host Roberto Lorusso interviewed Cobain just days before the release of Nevermind in September of 1991. Now, 27 years later, he has shared the audio for the world to hear.
“I read […] you’re a big fan of rap but dislike white rap groups,” Lorusso noted to Cobain in the interview, before reciting one of his previous comments on the genre. “And this is a quote: ‘The white man has ripped off the black man for long enough.’”
“Oh, I don’t know, was I drunk at that time?” Cobain responded after being asked his thoughts on US musical group Consolidated. “I’m a fan of rap music but most of it’s so misogynist that I can’t even deal with it.”
“I’m really not that much of a fan, I totally respect and love it because it’s one of the only original forms of music that’s been introduced.”
“But the white man doing rap is just like watching a white man dance,” he continued. “We can’t dance, we can’t rap, you know?”
While speaking to CTV News of the interview, Roberto Lorusso explained that the interview clearly showed his nerves, and how unprepared he was to talk shop with a soon-to-be musical icon.
“Nirvana wasn’t huge at that point, so I hadn’t heard any of the new record,” Lorusso explained. “(I had) no idea that it was going to be such a meteoric rise of the artist at the time, but nonetheless for me, it was a big deal and I was remarkably nervous.”
On his Bandcamp page where he posted the interview, Lorusso explained in detail that he could see that Kurt Cobain appeared troubled despite their increasing popularity.
“As we spoke I got a vague sense that he wasn’t really enjoying their success. I couldn’t understand it,” he explained. “I was so enamoured with and envious of his talent and success I just couldn’t understand how he could have been so indifferent to it. A few years later it became very clear why.”
When I reflected on this experience, I realized that success doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if your world is falling apart. Depression is a cruel thief that bankrupts your life with one fleeting moment of joy at a time. It still bums me out. ”
Check out Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’:
