Nirvana's "You Know You're Right" video
MTV

What's really disturbing about the newly released Nirvana song "You Know You're Right" aren't the feelings of remorse and pissed-offedness toward Kurt Cobain it resurrects; it's that doing so absolutely proves the adage: If you want to hurt someone who's lost everything, give them back something broken.

Case in point: the "You Know You're Right" video now in rotation on MTV.

Without getting into whether the song, which was recorded just a few months before Cobain's suicide in 1994, is good, hearing it on the radio and seeing the band back on MTV brings a certain satisfaction. Hearing Cobain's grainy caterwaul leads to the hope that putting Nirvana back in rotation wasn't something the industry did willingly, that they would have kept him and his camera-spitting memory buried if it weren't for all the money they know they can make pimping his image to new audiences.

Which brings us to the video. Whoever made it was faced with an interesting dilemma: splice together enough concert footage to portray Nirvana's history, energy and appeal both to familiar and — most importantly — new audiences in such a way that would be effective while at the same time not looking like a bad Kung Fu dub. It's safe to assume "You Know You're Right" was never performed and recorded on video.

The result is a three-minute pastiche, with no single shot lasting longer than about half a second. The only pauses take place during Cobain's drawn-out screams — something he did fairly consistently in the bulk of his songs. The video is nearly effective. It's easy to get caught up in the images of Nirvana breaking things, throwing instruments in the air, piercing amps with guitar and bass necks, wearing dresses, spitting on the crowd, smiling innocently, i.e., being "punk rock" in a way Linkin Park never will be. The video begins to look like a documentary, the new music playing over a compressed history of the band timelined by changes in Cobain's hair color.

On second and third viewing, however, it becomes clear that the producers of the video want people to believe Nirvana is actually performing the song. This is not a video for familiar audiences; it's aimed at the kids who haven't yet experienced the band, an audience ripe for plucking in the potential Nirvana shitstorm brewing on the horizon.

So the video is worse than a bad Kung Fu dub. This video is Cobain being dug up for the sake of an insidious puppetry, his image and voice remixed to create a bad bootleg representation — a copy of a copy on the order of Max Headroom stuttering out Coke commercials.

This is to be expected. John Lennon received the same treatment in 2000 via Paul McCartney's lame "Free Now."

Nirvana fever is poised for rebirth. The release of Cobain's journals, an eponymous greatest hits collection and the continuing saga of the fabled box set are building on the edge of the radar, ready to break. Inevitably, the phenomenon will be viewed two ways: as blessing a new generation with the pure vitriol that was Nirvana, or that a generation's angst is about to be leached of meaning as it is repackaged and resold to a finally ready target market. Soon we will know how Elvis fans felt when the King was digitally inserted into Forrest Gump.

But the memory-whoring argument doesn't hold because loved objects must be made free to all; what grates on the soul is the cheap and graceless way in which the video supplants reality. Thankfully, Nirvana features only one "new" song. Were there any more, Cobain might find himself pasted into any number of three-minute slide shows. A Space Ghost interview could still be pending.

What's saddest is that Nirvana is sanctioned by Cobain's bandmates, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, as well as his widow, Courtney Love, which means the trio must have had something to do with the evil video. While record label DGC might very well own the rights to enough performance material to construct its own "video," it didn't do it in the past to support whatever reissues it might have dreamed up. It would be nice to be able to demonize the record company, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

So what should the videomakers have done? Why not pay attention to the lyrics and play the song over footage from the 2000 presidential election, or pictures of Catholic priests ... something that might give the song and the band a new life outside the shadow of Cobain's suicide but still express the spirit of the music? A video with some balls. Magazines are already putting Cobain's miserable visage back on their covers. VH1 hyped the "Behind the Music" rockumentary that coincided with Nirvana's release, turning Nirvana into a Goth poster band rather than the messy grunge punks they were.

At its best, watching a purple-haired Cobain brings back the feelings inspired by those first hard chords of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," way back in 1991. Suddenly time is compressed and you feel a little older than you did before, because you realize it's been nearly nine years since Cobain disappointed us all. "You Know You're Right" and its video, as stumbling and imperfect as they both might be, still serve to shine a light on the desolate landscape of the last 10 years of rock music. Nirvana took the fun out of rock, overthrowing Whitesnake and Warrant, making music the serious emotional business it has the potential to be. But Nirvana didn't stick around to fill the passage, and bands like Matchbox 20 stepped in to fill the gap.

Like a kid given second-hand toys for Christmas, we can only be reminded by this video of everything we didn't get.

— James Stegall (james@sonewmedia.com)