Frances Bean Cobain Tells Lana Del Rey To Stop Thinking Death Is Cool

Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, has taken issue with pop star Lana Del Rey’s claim in an interview with The Guardian that she wishes she were already dead. Del Rey is 27, the ominous age at which many musicians, including Cobain, died.Del Rey has always had a certain sadness beyond the seasonal kind in her music; most of the time, it seems congruous with the ambiguous, somewhat-autobiographical, somewhat-not character she portrays. She sat down for an hour-long interviewwith Guardian editor Tim Jonze while on tour in New Orleans earlier this month. And while she talked about many things in the interview, her errant death wish is what Jonze led with.

Del Rey tweeted that she wasn’t particularly pleased with the interview. Those since deleted tweets read:

“I regret trusting the Guardian- I didn’t want to do an interview but the journalist was persistent. Alexis was masked as a fan but was hiding sinister ambitious and angles Maybe he’s actually the boring one looking for something interesting to write about. His leading questions about death and persona were calculated.” (sic)

Alexis Petridis didn’t interview her, obviously, but he did review her new album Ultraviolence, which seems to indicate that she simply looked at the interview online, saw Petridis’ byline in a bigger font and went with that. Petridis is the one who said the people she wrote songs about were “awful” and “boring.”

Jonze responded to her tweets by posting the audio snippet of the interview where she says exactly what he said—that she wants to die.

In the audio, she definitely says she wants to die, no doubt about it, but not in the order in which his interview begins.

He asks her why so many of her icons have died young—27-clubbers Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Janis Jopin and Jimi Hendrix, as well as Elvis Presley, who died at age 42.

She says she’s not sure, but her attraction to them is more their music and personalities. He asks her if dying young is something she would think is glamorous in herself, acknowledging it’s a dark question.

“Um, yeah, I mean… you know, I wish I was dead already,” she says with a laugh.

“Don’t say that,” Jonze says.

She goes on to say:

“I do, you know, I don’t want to have to like, keep doing this, but I am.”

He asks her if she means being a pop star or being alive and she replies, “Everything.”

“That’s just how I feel,” she continues. “If it wasn’t that way, I wouldn’t say it, but I mean, you know I think I’d be scared if I knew it was happening or if I knew it was coming, but I mean…”

Frances Bean Cobain did not think Del Rey’s comments about wishing she were dead were cool at all, although her comments on the issue came two days after Del Rey already denounced the interview. (Her denouncement inspired lots of hate The Guardian's way, which is ironic considering Del Rey also talks in the interview about all the vitriol she gets for her music, appearance and past.)

She tweeted at Lana: “the death of young musicians isn’t something to romanticize. I’ll never know my father because he died young & it becomes a desirable feat because ppl like u think it’s “cool.” Well, it’s fucking not. Embrace life, because u only get one life. The ppl u mentioned wasted that life. Don’t be 1 of those ppl. ur too talented to waste it away.”

Cobain was accused by Lana fans of attacking her, and tweeted this, which is the only Tweet from the saga that remains:

In a thrilling conclusion to this saga, people on the Internet from all camps were mean to each other.