The estate of Kurt Cobain has issued a statement about an opera adapted from the 2005 Gus Van Sant film Last Days.
In a statement to Consequence of Sound, the estate said, “‘Last Days’ has been created and written without permission. This show, just like the movie, is an unauthorized attempt to benefit from the brief meeting set up with Kurt and Gus Van Zant. This one meeting has been exploited for profit for thirty years now and enough is enough.”
As previously reported, the Last Days opera is a production taking place at the Royal Opera House in London. The Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence Oliver Leith told The Guardian in April the production “…plunges into the torment that created a modern myth.” Leith added, “I owe a lot of how I now make music to the sound of grunge from that time – I had never really thought about where my experimental mess and repetitions had come from.”
The spokesperson for the Royal Opera House responded to the Cobain estate saying, ” The Royal Opera’s production of ‘Last Days’ is adapted from Gus Van Sant’s cult film of the same name, released in 2005. It is a fictionalized account, and was produced with the permissions of Gus Van Sant and HBO.”
44 Best Songs From 44 Days Of Musical Greatness In 1991
“What a time to be alive!” It’s an expression that you hear often these days, but it was definitely true if you were a rock music fan in 1991. On August 12 of that year, Metallica released their self-titled album, often referred to as “The Black Album.”
Over the next two months, it was followed by a mind-blowing parade of classic albums: Pearl Jam’s classic debut, Ten, Guns N Roses’ long-anticipated Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. And on September 24, Soundgarden released Badmotorfinger, the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Nirvana unleashed Nevermind. By the way, a lot of other great albums came out during that span, including Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears, Mr. Bungle’s self-titled debut, Hole’s debut Pretty On The Inside, the Pixies’ Trompe Le Monde. It wasn’t just rock bands who were releasing great records: country superstar Garth Brooks put out Ropin’ The Wind and hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest dropped The Low End Theory and Naughty By Nature released their debut. There was something in the air, or in the water.
But for the purposes of this list, we’re sticking with Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Guns N Roses and Metallica. In honor of those incredible 44 days (they were tough if you were a student on a budget trying to buy all of these CDs!), we’re ranking the 44 best songs from those seven albums. We’re sure you’ll tell us what we missed and what we got wrong. But something that we can all agree on is that ’91 was a great and pretty much unprecedented time for rock music.
