Meaning
The song tells the story of a rock star who is destroyed by fame. For years, Marshall refused to comment on the commonly-held theory that it was written about Kurt Cobain, the late singer, songwriter and guitarist of the American rock band Nirvana, who committed suicide in 1994. When asked who the song was about in an interview with Helter Skelter, she replied, "You'll have to take a guess." When asked specifically if it was about Cobain, she replied, "It could be anybody!"
In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, however, Marshall confirmed that the song was about Cobain. "I've never told anybody this," she told interviewer Hermione Hoby, "but that is about Kurt Cobain. It's about him blowing his head off."
Years before confirming it was about Cobain, Marshall offered a less specific explanation of the song's meaning. "I'll never tell you what that song is about," she told Salon in 2006. "That feeling of not being understood, but supposedly being understood by everyone ... being inside of a spectacle, it's like being a prisoner of war. I don't know if that makes sense. It would be like being in an insane asylum, where you are who you are, and the only person you've ever been is yourself, but then they want you to be someone else."
Read more about this topic: I Don't Blame You
Famous quotes containing the word meaning:
“You had to have seen the corpses lying there in front of the school—the men with their caps covering their faces—to know the meaning of class hatred and the spirit of revenge.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)
“Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word “sophisticate” means, very simply, “obscene.” A sophisticated story is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a “sophisticate” means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)