Who are the prophets of our day and what are they saying? I often think about the prophet Jeremiah and how his calling relates to the role of the artist. I started thinking about it even more after recently watching the HBO documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. In the film, director Brett Morgen masterfully uses Cobain’s personal writings and sketches to reveal the heart of an artist that was once called “the spokesman of a generation.” Until watching this documentary, I had forgotten how many Nirvana songs I actually liked, despite the fact that I wasn’t much of a grunge fan in the 90s. But as I listened to the lyrics of some favorites like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are”, I couldn’t help but to think, if Kurt Cobain was the voice of a generation, then we have some serious things to think about as a generation and as a nation, and it’s not very pretty.
It’s probably no secret at this point that Cobain started using drugs at a very early age, and that his life ended tragically at the equally young age of 27 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Morgen presents Cobain as a loving child with a big heart with a great home life, but things go horribly wrong once his parents divorce. As a result, drugs, depression, isolation and homelessness became regularities in his life. Ultimately, the absurdity of celebrity life and the constant misjudgement of his character took its toll not just physically but mentally. By the end of the documentary, Morgen wonders if it was irony or coincidence that one of the songs he wrote for Nirvana’s last album In Utero was called “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” It was probably only an eerie coincidence.
Morgan also makes clear that even though Cobain wrestled with his own inner demons, he thought very deeply about society’s woes. Whether it is via songs like “Come As You Are,” which ridiculed the contradictory expectations society forces on people, or “Polly,” a song about a real-life 14 year old girl who was raped and killed after a punk rock concert, or Cobain’s cryptic sketches of crosses and dismemberment which symbolically denounced racism and homophobia, Montage of Heck depicts Cobain as a troubled soul who used his art to draw attention to the fallen aspects of our world.
And if you look beyond the surface of this documentary, you can also see an artist who had a deep desire to see the world made right. Despite all of his commercial success, Cobain’s social consciousness was rarely celebrated in the media. This angered him to no end. Cobain may have been a spokesman, but what he was telling us didn’t seem like good news.
To see any parallel between the rock star’s reality and Jeremiah, we must think about the relationship between God, the prophet, and the people. God’s long-standing relationship with Israel is often characterized by the love he has for his chosen people. After all, God’s love and faithfulness brought them out of Egypt, delivered them from the hands of the Philistines, and brought them through countless other battles to prove his strength and sovereignty. But that love did not come without price, and it did not come without anguish.
The prophet Jeremiah knew the dark side of this relationship all too well. Having lived through and been influenced by the reign of Josiah, the Babylonian exile, and the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah had a greater sense than those around him that Israel’s sin was testing God’s patience. Sometimes referred to as the “weeping prophet,” Jeremiah expressed his grief of this impending doom by sharing his reflections and conversations with God through poetry and prose within the book of Jeremiah. According to Walter Brueggemann, author of The Prophetic Imagination,
Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose…Jeremiah knew long before the others that the end was coming and that God had had enough of indifferent affluence, cynical oppression, and presumptive religion. He knew that the freedom of God had been so grossly violated (as in Genesis 2–3) that death was at the door and would not pass over. (Brueggeman 47)
The paradigms in Jeremiah mirror the life of a street poet, crying out for justice and repentance. In Jeremiah 4:19, the prophet weeps, “Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I write in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! My heart pounds within me, I cannot keep silent.” Much of Jeremiah’s ministry was rooted in this type of deep pain over seeing his own nation destroy itself.
As the son of a priest, Jeremiah was raised knowing that he was to be prophet to the nations (Jeremiah 1:5). The fact that Jeremiah’s audience was the people of his own nation puts his prophecies in an interesting context. Despite Jeremiah’s concern for his people, they disregarded him just as much as they disregarded God. The people called Jeremiah and other prophets windbags and even took it a step further by demanding that famine and sword fall on the prophets. They did not take them seriously. To imagine Jeremiah’s prophetic message in the midst of this type of environment is to understand his grief. As God’s spokesman, he had a mandate to deliver a very specific word to his people and they rejected him. This is typical of prophets and people. The difference with Jeremiah, is that Jeremiah is quite vocal about his anguish over this fact. Cobain was just as vocal about his disdain for the media.
Jeremiah and Kurt Cobain were two spokesmen for their respective generations. They were two men telling the truth about their societies. One’s audience lauded him as an artistic genius, even as they misunderstood and destroyed him; the other was regarded as a misfit and a windbag by his peers, ignored and ridiculed because they saw God’s words as empty threats.
In her sermon “The ‘Underside’ of Jeremiah: Gods, Goddesses and Matters of Gender,” writer and scholar Rev. Renita Weems reminds us that the desperate and argumentative voice of Jeremiah probably won him more enemies than friends. She also reminds us that the prophet Jeremiah is constantly in conflict with priests, kings, other worshippers, other prophets, and even with God as he struggles to make sense of the fallen world around him. She asks,
What kind of language does a prophet employ to convey his or her message? Whatever language that works. Language that works is language that pierces the comfortable numbness that grips one’s audience. For a listener to stomp away muttering (every great prophet ought to have at least one listener who stomps away muttering ‘How dare you’), is not a bad thing to happen when you are a prophet. Plucking up and uprooting is wrenching work. Both to audience and speaker.
This wrenching work can deplete the perceived value of a person, particularly a public figure. Weems provides another example of this by reminding us of the ways in which society heralds Martin Luther King’s accomplishments, forgetting that at the time of his death, his moral authority had waned, he was resented by young militants, liberals, and the government alike, and that all of this backlash resulted in his own depression and insomnia.
I don’t know of many churches that would label Kurt Cobain as a prophet or even as someone who had anything valuable to say about the holiness of God, as we would do with Jeremiah and would likely do with Martin Luther King. While I don’t mean to draw a strict parallel between Kurt Cobain and Jeremiah, I do have to wonder how we would react if he were to walk into our churches today.
Jeremiah knew that he was called by God “to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” (Jeremiah 1:10). Cobain, on the other hand, was not called out to speak for God or to be prophet. Cobain as well as fellow bandmate, Dave Grohl, have claimed that many of Nirvana’s songs were open to interpretation or that they did not have any intentional meaning at all. Yet, the influence of Cobain’s music continues to speak for itself.
Perhaps a better comparison between these two men is simply their passion as artists who cared deeply for their environment, and in that sense became proclaimers of collective and individualist despair. In that regard alone, is Kurt Cobain’s voice less valid because he was not a traditional prophet of the church? Just as we need the prophet-on-bahalf-of-God voice of despair, perhaps sometimes we also need to be confronted with the simply human voice of despair in order for the need for healing to become imperative.
In a recent interview on KCRW, Brett Morgen stated that while directing Montage of Heck, he was surprised to find that thirteen-year-olds today still see Kurt Cobain as a spokesman for them. He said that when teenagers begin to discover that their parents are not the superheroes they once thought they were, they turn to Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, which is very telling about the voices that make some teenagers feel understood. What is our posture toward the Cobains of our generation who might be preaching a message that scares us, challenges us, chastises us, or questions God? The church has become much more accepting and thoughtful about films where God’s grace and love shines through, even if that message is less overt. But can we be equally accepting and thoughtful about those films that scream at us and keep us up at night?
As we wrestle with injustice and turmoil in our world today, it is sometimes easier to ignore, ridicule or question someone’s voice than to listen and engage. How do we find meaning in “Load up on guns, bring your friends/It’s fun to lose and to pretend/She’s over-bored and self-assured/Oh no, I know a dirty word” (“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 1991)? If there is meaning at all, it is found bit-by-bit, line-by-line, all with a willingness to admit the ways we are mutually haunted by the same sin, a willingness to include ourselves in that same generation.
Similarly, Jeremiah had something to say about his life and his generation. And the things he had to say were not about love and joy and peace and all those wonderful attributes we like to hear in the Christian story. There is a place for those stories, because that is the hope in which we ultimately believe. But what about when the prophets come to us with bad news? What about when the artists and the street poets of today are angry with God, or when they cry out against racism or sexism or injustice? When the prophets confront us with the reality of our despair, are we willing to listen just as intently?
I was eager to watch Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck mainly because, like so many people, I was curious and intrigued by his suicide. Was there a trigger for him on April 5, 1994, the day in which he decided to take his own life? What were the events that happened on that day? Did someone or something set him off? Ironically, the documentary does not deal with any of that. It tells a much more compelling story about a man who had something to say about his life and his generation.