Will Kurt Cobain roll in his grave when he envisions himself playing and singing Blink 182's "The Rock Song" or No Doubt's Ex-Girlfriend live in concert?

You bet.


I'm pretty sure seeing the late, beloved Grunge icon and Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain's likeliness alive and kicking ass are all kinds of cool and stuffs, but what Guitar Hero 5 is trying to achieve here is indeed mystifying... and dare I say so, stupidly unneccessary since this is not really a Guitar Hero: Nirvana (in the vein of GH: Aerosmith and GH: Metalica), where Kurt will be performing all his greatest hits, but is now slaved to play whatever crap song the player deemed fit to. Imagine Mickey Rourke's The Ram having fun making Kurt performing Bon Jovi's "You Give Love A Bad Name".

Now wait. That's actually a very apt choice, as notably so from the video below.



Someone gotta do this. After all, authorization to utilize Kurt's likeliness has to come from Courtney Love, who controls Cobain's estate. In fact, she did more than just providing the rights. According to this article from Rolling Stone, she provided photos and videos and input further advice on how she wants him to look in the game. (Poor sod still under the manipulative hands of his wife more than a decade after his death) As Jeff Gerstmann of Giant Bomb correctly pointed out, "it's the near-mythic legacy he left behind and the way the Nirvana catalog has been protected from commercial interests over the years that makes this stuff so harsh". Thankfully, Kurt is not all alone in his eternal grievance over this fiasco. The late great Johnny Cash is the other departed music icon getting his moment (no disrespect intended but boy do I wanna get him playing Blur's "Song 2") while Carlos Santana, Garbage 's Shirley Manson, and Muse 's Matthew Bellamy performed motion capture for their own playable avatars in the game.

Traumatized by the video up there? Hopefully, watching Kurt Cobain performing "Smell Likes Teen Spirit" might stabilize you a little.