CNN.com wrote an article about newly released photographs from the scene of Kurt Cobain's suicide. This is how that article begins:
"And I swear that I don't have a gun."
— Kurt Cobain, "Come As You Are"
Despite the pledge in those lyrics that went around the world in the early 1990s, police in Seattle say that Kurt Cobain did have at least one gun.
[Update: CNN has scrubbed the original lede from the article, but we took a screen shot of it.]
It's hard to imagine an article about Kurt Cobain starting with a worse lede than that, but the Deadspin staff thought it would be fun to try. Here's what we got:
"Here we are now / Entertain us," Kurt Cobain once sang, but apparently we weren't entertaining enough, because he shot himself.
"Buried / Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah," Kurt Cobain sang on "All Apologies," and buried he remains, but when Seattle police found a roll of undeveloped photos in an evidence locker this week, they reexamined his death, curious how he got that way.
"Rape me / Rape me, my friend," Kurt Cobain once wrote, but there's nothing friendly about this.
"Tender age in bloom," sang Kurt Cobain, who did not live to a tender age, because he put a shotgun in his mouth.
"I'm so happy / 'Cause today I found my friends / They're in my head," sang Kurt Cobain on "Lithium," possibly an ironic reference to the shotgun pellets that would later rip through his skull, ending his life.
"What else should I be? / All apologies." Well, you can start by not being dead, Kurt Cobain. Apology not accepted.
"Load up on guns, bring your friends / It's fun to lose and to pretend," sang Kurt Cobain, who eventually did load up his gun, but there was nothing fun or pretend about what he did next.
"Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally," Kurt Cobain once sang. Well, let's hope someone gave it to him, after he shot himself to death through his face.
"What else should I say?" asked Kurt Cobain, who was probably unable to say much after the speech center of his brain was splattered onto the wall.
"Hey! / Wait! / I've got a new complaint!" sang Kurt Cobain from the afterlife, upon discovering CNN was posting photos from the scene of his suicide 20 years later.
"You hang me out to dry," sang Kurt Cobain, who actually did not hang himself, but instead committed suicide by shotgun.
"Gun, gun, son of a gun / You are the only one," Kurt Cobain once sang, covering his beloved Vaselines. Did he sing it to the gun that he put in his mouth and used to kill himself? We don't know, but we do know what the box in which he kept the hypodermic needles he used to shoot himself up with heroin looked like, thanks to a discovery made this week by Seattle-area investigators.
"Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld / So I can sigh eternally," sang Kurt Cobain, whom Leonard Cohen outlived, because he did not blow his brains out.
"I'm on a plain," Kurt Cobain once sang, perhaps in a veiled reference to the Malaysian Airlines flight his wife, Courtney Love, would single-handedly locate using the Internet two decades later.
"I've been sucking on the walls of her anus / Anilingus," sang Kurt Cobain, who died sucking on the barrel of a shotgun.
"Wish away the pain / Hand out lobotomies / To save little families," sang Kurt Cobain, who lobotomized himself, in a way, when he fired a shotgun into his own mouth.
"Somewhere I have heard this before / In a dream my memory has stored," wrote Kurt Cobain, who possibly resorted to alternative memory storage because his own brain would soon be ravaged by a self-inflicted shotgun blast and rendered unusable.
On "Come as You Are," Kurt Cobain insisted, "I swear that I don't have a gun." History proved him a liar, as the grunge singer shot himself to death.
"We can plant a house, we can build a tree," Kurt Cobain once sang. But in fact the grunge singer can't do those things, because 20 years ago he injected himself with a lethal dose of heroin and then shot himself in the head.
"Oh no, not me," wailed Kurt Cobain as he covered Bowie. Oh yes. Yes you (via a self-inflicted gunshot to the head).
"It's OK to eat fish / 'Cause they don't have any feelings," Kurt Cobain once sang; victims of gunshot wounds to the head don't have feelings either, as Cobain perhaps discovered upon becoming one.
"Monkey see, monkey do," Kurt Cobain once pondered on "Stay Away." Cobain must have watched a monkey commit suicide, because he did, too.
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