By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Have you ever heard celebrity news so strange that it makes you repeatedly confirm that you’re not reading satire? This happened to us recently when reading Helen Mirren’s comments about Kurt Cobain in her recent interview with the Evening Standard’s Brave New World. During that interview, the acclaimed actor bizarrely mourned Cobain by noting that the Nirvana frontman didn’t live long enough to experience GPS.
Kurt Cobain missed the GPS
Helen Mirren told her interviewer the following: “I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died at that time, because he never saw the GPS. She continued to extol the virtues of technology, saying, “GPS is the most wonderful thing, watching my little blue spot walking down the street.” » Summarizing her fascination with this modern technology, she said: “I find it completely magical and incredible. »
As you can imagine, the internet has had a field day poking fun at Helen Mirren’s comments about Kurt Cobain, with most pointing out that it’s a really bizarre way to mourn a deceased celebrity. Others pointed out how the actor’s comments resembled the satirical website’s parody content. Click holewho regularly posts fake celebrity quotes in their “They Said What?!” ” section.
In fact, the site published a fake quote from Mirren in 2015 – “You haven’t truly lived until you’ve slept” – but the actor’s recent quote about GPS seems more absurd than any satire.
To be fair to Helen Mirren, her comments about Kurt Cobain make a little more sense in context. It all started while she was meditating on getting older and marveling at the fact that she is now 79 years old.
Although the sentiment was expressed in a strange way, it seems like Mirren was thinking about how getting older can be a blessing because you can occasionally experience mind-blowing innovations. Most of us take GPS for granted today, but in 1994 (the year the Nirvana singer died), it would have seemed like technology straight out of Star Trek.
An obsession with the Nirvana singer?
If you watch other Helen Mirren interviews, her fixation on Kurt Cobain and technology is eerily consistent: in 2014, she expressed disbelief to Oprah Winfrey, saying that when Cobain died, “he almost never computer view. 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 at Daily Mailsaying, “If I had died at 27, the age Kurt Cobain (of the rock band Nirvana) died in 1994, I would have never even known the Internet existed!” »
Helen Mirren’s critics might think it’s a bit macabre that she uses Kurt Cobain as a pop culture shorthand for dying too young. However, the general thrust of his many comparisons is his constant gratitude for being able to experience so many technological wonders as he grew older. The Internet already seems miraculous to the average child of the ’80s, and it’s even more of a fascinating innovation to someone who is 79 years old.
Helen Mirren may be making headlines for this bizarre quote about Kurt Cobain, but it seems her heart is in the right place. Like most Nirvana fans, she mourns a talent lost too soon, and she especially mourns all the incredible things the struggling singer never got the chance to experience. And we honestly think Cobain would have loved the Internet because it embodies the qualities of the “Teen Spirit”: in particular, it’s both stupid and infectious.
Source: Variety