Nirvana Song “Breed” Finally Licensed, Kurt Cobain Rolls Over in His Grave, Dave Grohl Writes a Lame Song About It, Krist Novoselic Does… Nothing

Well, well, well. It’s finally happened. You might want to avert your eyes, purists and Kurt-worshipers. The shaggy, legendary man that you loved for giving the underdog the benefit of the doubt within the heretofore (and here-ever after, some might say) insidiously clueless and utterly tasteless music industry has finally completed his post-death transformation, rising from his singer/songwriter ashes to becoming a pawn of the Man (and much more quickly than Jimmy Page, too).

So if you’re a Kurt-Freak (i.e., do you call him by his first name all the time?), prepare to be slightly humiliated and/or mortified, as Nirvana's "Breed" will officially be the first (oh, but probably not their last) song from their catalog to be used in advertising. And I bet you’ll never even GUESS who’s indirectly responsible!

That’s right: earlier this year, everyone’s favorite widower Courtney Love, who owned the vast majority of the rights to Nirvana's back catalog, up and sold 25% of it to the Primary Wave Music Publishing company for a reported $50 million. Word is she needed... groceries.

Now the fiendishly good-fortuned organization, reportedly one of the most aggressive groups acquiring music publishing rights for licensing (TMT News), and also apparently one of the most tactless, have done-saw fit to sell use of the track "Breed" for an Austrian Telecom ad (hey, Kurt was nothing if not a masterful communicator, right?), the videogame Major League Baseball 2K7 (and we all know how much Cobain advocated professional sports), and of course the upcoming film Shoot ‘Em Up (hmm, I wonder if there’s any shotgun suicides in that movie).

So there you have it. I guess you just can’t beat big business, no matter how many hideous sweaters and Daniel Johnston t-shirts you wore in life. Oh, and in case you were wondering; finance-related website portfolio.com reports that Publishing companies can earn between $10,000 and $300,000 for a song's use in a film and between $5,000 and $40,000 for use on television.

That’s a lot of groceries.

Most Read



Etc.