Kurt Cobain, David Bowie and Don Draper: The Men Who Sold the World

“I guarantee we will screw this song up” says Kurt Cobain as he and his band Nirvana launch into a cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” on their epic MTV Unplugged performance in the fall of 1993. Kurt, Dave Grohl and Krist Novacelic (along with Pat Smear and Laurie Goldstein) nailed it on the first try. But the rest of Kurt's life, of course, was a disaster. 

Hearing this brilliant performance a few days ago, on the 20^th anniversary of Kurt’s suicide, it was hard not to wonder if Kurt chose it because he knew he had the world and he wasn’t interested in hanging onto it. Many have noticed that the show’s décor has a funereal quality to it, and some wonder if the show was his way of saying goodbye, a few months early.

When Nirvana played it, "The Man Who Sold the World" was a relatively obscure song in the  Bowie oeuvre, the title track of one of his pre-Ziggy Stardust records. Few in the audience seem to recognize it.

Not surprisingly, it immediately leapt in stature after Kurt made it his own. Of course it helps that it's a fantastic, futuristic song.

I saw Bowie on a tour with Nine Inch Nails in 1995 and before he sang the tune, he  said something to the effect that he was honored Kurt decided to sing it and would love to have known why he selected it. Here's a wonderful version from a circa-'95 BBC special. 

"The Man Who Sold the World" has reared its head again on the cultrual landscape, this time in the Season 7 trailer for Mad Men, playing over trippy graphics by legendary designer Milton Glaser, who is well known for his poster of Bob Dylan, a visionary cat who had a Cobain-like following but somehow managed to make it to the other side.

Is using "The Man Who Sold the World" Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's way of saying that Don Draper's suicide as inevitable as Kurt's seems in hindsight? Is it a hint that Don, an ad-Man Who Sold the World to the world, is going to pull a Cobain, a quarter century before Cobain? 

Or maybe Don will be murdered by his estranged, unstable blonde wife, as some suspect Kurt was. 

I guess we'll find out when Mad Men concludes its seventh, final and tortuously dragged out season, which starts this weekend and ends 12 episodes later sometime next year. Is this any way to thank your fans? Maybe we'll be the ones checking out early.

Buy on iTunes:

Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York

David Bowie, The Man Who Sold the World