If people were plastering the image of Kurt Cobain's suicide all over the internet, those who are his fans would be up in arms. No-one who was an admirer of Kurt's would ever do something so disrespectful.
Yet people who claim to be admirers of Mayhem and Dead (Per Ohlin) see nothing wrong with exploiting the troubled end to his troubled life.
Perhaps its because I could give a shit less about image that I just do not fucking get this idiot behavior. I don't care a fart in a category five hurricane for the stage image of anyone I listen to (although I must say that Alice Cooper really has a pretty cool act.) I care about the music itself and I tend to come to care about the person beneath the image.
However, there is something beyond being seduced by the "evul blak metul" in the moronic actions of those who display this photograph.
The people who find something "cool" in this miserable image are lacking in basic common sense, a modicum of intelligence, empathy, or all three. They don't seem to be able to discern the difference between this photo of an actual event and events created by special effects. They do not think before they act and are quick to justify their ugly behavior. These are tendencies of sociopaths. Do I think that everybody who is guilty of this behavior is a sociopath? Probably not, but I do think that all of them need to grow the fuck up and check their actions before they do something that will have harmful consequences. The subject of this photograph has four siblings who love him, as well as simply being worthy of more respect than is accorded him by continually exploiting him in such an ugly way.
While I grudgingly admit that the person who took the photograph (Euronymous) was intelligent, he lacked both common sense and empathy. He was a sociopath. This is not to say that he would ever have become a serial murderer. Most sociopaths in fact never kill anybody. But he didn't care about how the consequences of his actions would affect other people. His complete lack of empathy for others has a tendency to make me lack empathy for his eventual fate, although murder is never a good thing. Put simply, he wasn't a very nice guy although I think at the heart of it all he was actually rather desperate to be liked. He had a serious inferiority complex and allowed this to color his actions in rather ugly ways. He stated that he wanted people to hate and fear him and this is not the emotion that he inspires. My initial reaction to him was revulsion. However as time has gone on he generally tends to inspire pity. This is far from the reaction that he would have wanted but it is the one that he deserves.
The person behind the Dead stage image has been described by those who knew him as a nice guy with a lot of problems. I have come to believe that his obsession with death and decay was caused by an unusual psychiatric disorder called Cotard Syndrome. This disorder causes the sufferer to believe that they are in fact dead and rotting. It is usually caused by a head injury. I also feel that he suffered from dissociative identity disorder, in part due to events that I can't prove (posthumous conversations with him) and in part due to objective viewing of accounts of his behavior, videos, and his own writing. His predilection for self-injury shows him to have possessed a high degree of self-loathing. He was also highly intelligent and very talented and offstage appeared to be soft-spoken, polite, and more than a bit unsure of himself. At any rate he deserved better than he got, and I have no problem with saying that all y'all who continue to commit psychic rape on him every time you display that sad image of the culmination of a troubled life deserve to have the world's biggest corn cob implanted where the sun don't shine.
Here 'tis, ready for implantation. And those deserving do not merit butter to ease its passage.
