Helen Mirren Mourns Kurt Cobain In The Weirdest Possible Way
Ever encountered some celebrity news so weird that it makes you repeatedly confirm that you’re not reading satire? That happened to us recently when reading about the comments Helen Mirren made about Kurt Cobain in her recent interview with the Evening Standard’s Brave New World. During this interview, the acclaimed actor bizarrely mourned Cobain by noting that the Nirvana frontman didn’t live long enough to experience GPS.
Kurt Cobain Missed Out On GPS
Helen Mirren told her interviewer the following: “I always say, it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did, because he never saw GPS.” She continued extolling the virtues of the technology, saying, “GPS is the most wonderful thing, to watch my little blue spot walking down the street.” Summing up her fascination with this modern technology, she declared, “I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”
As you might imagine, the internet had a field day mocking Helen Mirren’s comments about Kurt Cobain, with most pointing out that this is a really bizarre way to mourn a dead celebrity. Others pointed out how much the actor’s comments resembled parody content from the satire website Clickhole, which regularly publishes fake quotes from celebs in their “They Said What?!” section.
In fact, the site posted a fake Mirren quote back in 2015–”You haven’t really lived until you’ve slept”–but the actor’s recent quote about GPS seems more absurd than any satire.
There’s More To Her Comments
In fairness to Helen Mirren, her comments about Kurt Cobain make a bit more sense in context. It all began when she was meditating on getting older and marveling at the fact that she is now 79 years old.
While the sentiment was expressed in a weird way, it seems like Mirren was reflecting on how getting older can be something of a blessing because you get to experience the occasional mind-blowing innovation. Most of us take GPS for granted now, but in 1994 (the year the Nirvana singer died), this would have seemed like technology straight out of Star Trek.
An Obsession With The Nirvana Singer?
If you go back and watch other Helen Mirren interviews, her fixation on Kurt Cobain and technology has been weirdly consistent: in 2014, she expressed disbelief to Oprah Winfrey that when Cobain died, “he hardly ever saw a computer.” In 2015, she admitted to Cosmopolitan that she was “totally blown away” that Cobain “died without knowing the internet.”
In 2016, she echoed these thoughts to the Daily Mail, saying, “If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain [of rock band Nirvana] died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet!”
Critics of Helen Mirren might think it’s a tad ghoulish that she seemingly uses Kurt Cobain as a pop culture shorthand for dying too young. However, the general thrust of her many comparisons is her ongoing gratitude that she has been able to experience so many technological wonders as she has gotten older. The internet already seems miraculous to the average ‘80s kid, and it’s that much more of a fascinating innovation to someone who is 79.
Helen Mirren might be making headlines thanks to this bizarre quote about Kurt Cobain, but it seems like her heart is in the right place. Like most Nirvana fans, she mourns a talent that was lost too soon, and she specifically mourns all of the amazing things that the troubled singer never had the chance to experience. And we honestly think Cobain would have loved the internet because it embodies the qualities of “Teen Spirit:” specifically, it is both stupid and contagious.
Source: Variety
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