Credit: YouTube / NBC
Sun 8 March 2026 6:30, UK
Kurt Cobain was nothing if not one of the most easygoing music snobs in the world.
He may have single-handedly changed the course of music overnight, the minute that Nirvana became the biggest band in the world, but there was a good chance that he would also be contradictory about nearly everything on the charts while championing some of the most obscure bands in his record collection. It’s not like he had bad taste in music by any means, but there were more than a few questionable records scattered throughout his collection that most people would never admit to owning.
Then again, Cobain was proud to get rid of a lot of the cornerstone rock albums in his catalogue as well. He had grown up playing along to songs by AC/DC and Aerosmith, but when he found out that every single one of their lyrics seemed to be about the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic to play them. Those caused him a lot of secondhand embarrassment, and something in his DNA changed once punk became a regular part of his diet.
But even outside of his love for bands like Sex Pistols and The Clash, there were more than a few albums that were reserved for the real outsiders in his collection. He was an outcast growing up in Seattle, but records by the likes of Daniel Johnston have become classics in their own way, well after Cobain talked about him. And while The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World is one of the most notoriously bad albums in history, it’s easy to see the charm that Cobain saw in it if you listen to how he talked about his favourite bands.
Even on that grading curve, though, Cobain did have a great love of cheesy pop music. One of his favourite records of all time was Meet the Beatles, and half the reason why he wanted to write ‘About a Girl’ was to capture that same feeling that he heard when he listened to his favourite R.E.M. records. But liking ‘Seasons in the Sun’ is one of the most uncool things that any artist could have admitted to even back then.
Although Cobain was always hard to gauge because he spent so much of his time trying to be ironic, he was genuinely sincere when naming the Terry Jacks song one of his fondest memories when he was a kid, saying, “Yes, I did [sing it]. I don’t know the words. One of the only singles I can remember from my childhood that I used to cry to. It’s such an emotional song.” The song clearly wasn’t going to be one of their singles, but there is a dark underbelly to the song that checks out with Cobain’s style.
While anyone else would have wanted to look through the tealeaves a little bit and see that Cobain was so preoccupied with a song about death, it’s not really about that. The tune is famously one of the most reviled singles to have ever charted, and while it does frequently make it onto lists of the worst hits of all time, there is at least a little bit of charm to the way that it’s constructed.
You’re not going to hear me say that Jacks is the greatest vocalist of all time, but you can definitely hear the Beach Boys-esque kind of artist that he was trying to be when he played this song. The arrangement is fairly decent as well, but something about a guy talking about his final hours and saying goodbye to all of his friends and family was always going to be a bit much for most people to take. If you haven’t heard it, just imagine someone making the greatest sunshine pop song of all time, only for it to be about them losing their dog, and you’re somewhere in the neighbourhood of what’s going on here.
But the fact that Cobain liked it is a lesson that all the worst songs in the world have the potential to provide a net positive to the world in some way. Most people would have been ashamed to even say that they heard the tune, but if it weren’t this unbearably chipper song about death, perhaps we wouldn’t have got the sad strains of ‘All Apologies’.