ABSTRACT

This dissertation discusses the concept of noise as an operator associated with language and the possibility of bodily transformation in the work of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. It works on the aesthetic productions surrounding In Utero (1993), the songs, lyrics, musical ambientation, imagery and audiovisual compositions. The text discusses a number of themes related to memory, community, authorial figure, fame, media, writing, death, representation, communication, silence and transformation. It seeks to (re)construct the notion of body, especially the body in performance, as a focal point for understanding the poetics of Nirvana and for the discussions surrounding pop culture in contemporary times. The argument begins with explorations focused on the recognition and analysis of specific aspects of Nirvana's work such as: the heritage of Pop Art and Literature, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the confusion between life and work caused by dealing with mass media, the representation of the body in In Utero, the ethics of the punk community, the ritualistic aspect of the communal event of live performance and the human-machine relationship, with broad outlines referring to various aspects of the clash of binomials such as commodification and integrity, life and work, organization and chaos, belonging and alienation. These aspects are not isolated, but fluent, transient and erased. Nirvana’s poetical project is built on this tension. The concept of noise was then used as an operator of these tensions, the noise that is inherent to media (including the media of the body) and is the transformative capacity of text and media itself, its iconic failure to record and communicate. This process is structural in Cobain’s poetics. The next methodological step was, then, to demonstrate how this noisy operator is found and applies to the texts as a key of access and transformation of the work. Analyses of the Heart- Shaped Box video and of other songs such as “Scentless Aprentice”, “Milk it”, “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”, “Tourette's” and “All Apologies” are performed to build the argument.The concept of noise was applied to the method as well, with four overlaping readings of the texts, scraping them consecutively to obtain new levels, not of depth but of projection, in light, sound, letter and voice. Some important theoretical dialogues are executed with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, Leda Maria Martins, Decio Torres Cruz, Carrie Jaurès Noland, Greil Marcus, Phillip Auslander, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler. .

Key-words: Nirvana; Body; Noise; Pop Literatura; Punk Culture.