Frances Bean Cobain To Lana Del Rey: “Stop Romanticising Death”

While everyone else follows the back-and-forth between Lana Del Rey and The Guardian journalist Tim Jonze, Frances Bean Cobain has offered Del Rey some perspective on the comments that sparked the controversy. The daughter of the late Kurt Cobain chided the singer for glorifying death.

“The death of young musicians isn’t something to romanticise,” Frances Bean took to Twitter to write. “I’ll never know my father because he died young and it becomes a desirable feat because people like you think it’s ‘cool’. Well, it’s fucking not. Embrace life, because you only get one life.”

While discussing her heroes — most of whom had died young — in an interview with The Guardian last week, Del Rey replied in the affirmative when asked if she saw dying young as glamorous. She then added, “I wish I was dead already… I do! I don’t want to have to keep doing this. But I am.”

Del Rey later retracted the comments, saying journalist Tim Jonze was “sinister” and “calculated” and posed as a fan to secure Del Rey’s trust and goad her into saying incendiary things. Jonze responded via the paper, defending his interview questions and sharing audio of Del Rey’s quote.

“The [people you] mentioned wasted [their lives]. Don’t be one of those people,” Frances Bean added on Twitter. After a fan told the daughter of the Nirvana singer to take it easy on Del Rey, she replied, “I told her to not waste her life… I literally said embrace this life because you only get one.”

“I’m not attacking anyone. I have no animosity towards Lana, I was just trying to put things in perspective from personal experience,” she added. Tagging Del Rey’s personal Twitter account in each dispatch, Frances Bean cautioned the singer, “[You’re] too talented to waste it away.”

Buzz Osbourne expressed similar sentiments when speaking to Music Feeds last month. The Melvins frontman and a personal friend of Kurt Cobain said it was “insane” to look at the situation surrounding the Nirvana frontman’s death as anything besides a tragedy and a “nightmare.”

“If [fans] wanna look at, through rose-coloured glasses, a situation where a heroin addict, who was a friend of mine, dies under absolutely tragic circumstances, if they wanna see the romantic side of that or like there is somehow some good to that then they’re insane,” stated the Melvins leader.

Gallery: Lana Del Rey – The Palace Theatre, Melbourne – 23/07/2012

Photos by Andrew Briscoe

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