Nirvana would release their final studio album, In-Utero in September of 1993.
Ahead of the album’s releaese, the band’s label DGC records would issue ‘Heart Shaped Box’ as the
first single in late August. The song would top the alternative rock charts in America,
go top 10 in several countries in Europe.. The video for the song, the last the band filmed
with frontman Cobain before his untimely death. The video would also net the band
two MTV VMA Awards the following year in 1994 including best alternative video.
But not everyone celebrated success of the song as we’ll discuss in today’s video.
The song 'heart shaped box' dated back to 1992 as did several other songs that appeared on in-utero.
It was a song that Cobain struggled to finish. In fact, his wife at the time Courntey Love
wanted to use the song for her band Hole telling Rolling Stone.
"We had this huge closet," "And I heard him in there working on 'Heart-Shaped Box.'
He did that in five minutes. She would recall knocking on the door asking Kurt what? do you
need that riff and he would respond f you! and would slam the door in Love's face.
Cobain initially relied on his bandmates to help finish the song recalling "I was
trying to wait for [bassist Krist Novoselic] and [drummer Dave Grohl] to come up with something,
but it just turned into noise all the time." Cobain took one more stab at the song and was
able to finally come up with a vocal melody and finished the song. Kurt would reportedly write the
song after watching a documentary about children with cancer telling biographer Michael Azzerad
"Any time I think about it, it makes me sadder than anything I can think of." But Azerrad would
contend that despite Cobain's explanation, the song was about his wife courtney love.
In March of 1994 Variety would report that former Nirvana director Kevin Kerslake
would sue the band for copyright infringement over the video for heart shaped box. Kersalke worked
with the band on their music videos for Sliver, Come as you are, lithium and in-bloom and claimed
that he was originally asked to direct the video for Heart Shaped Box. According to the director,
the band reached out to him in the summer of 1992 to come up with a video treatment.
Kerslake claimed he came up with five ideas for the music video. Right before the band was set to
film the music video for heart shaped box, he was told the band wanted to use a different director,
dutch filmmaker Anton Corbjin. Up until this point Corbjin had worked as a photographer
and director mostly famously capturing the front cover of U2’s album Joshua Tree. Cobain was drawn
to Corbjin’s work after seeing a video he had made with Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order.
Kerslake’s lawsuit contended that he came up with the concept of and i quote ″a young girl
wearing a white robe,, a flower-filled room, fields of poppies, a forest of gnarled trees,
a scarecrow-like character and an old man on a cross.″ Kerslake would tell Loudersound that
some elements of the heart shaped box video dated back to his shoot he did for inbloom revealing
“The original concept that we were going to shoot for In Bloom had to do with a girl who grew up in
a KKK family, and it was a lot more overt in terms of the social message in the song.
But sadly due to time constraints we couldn’t afford to do such a lavish video,
so we decided on this concept after discussing The Beatles level of fame that the band was
going through at the time. He would add “We were actually in the middle of the Nirvana documentary
[Live! Tonight! Sold Out!!] when Kurt died, but that project was complicated by the fact there
was a law suit going on, which was rooted in the origin of the Heart-Shaped Box video. That
sadly complicated our relationship he'd say ”The lawsuit would be settled out of court.
Heart Shaped Box’s music video would center around the theme of disease and how it slowly
destroys the human body. The video would employ a colorization treatment very similar to technicolor
that was frequently used by hollywood. Corbijn would shoot the original video in color, before
it was transferred to black and white & then his team would then send the footage to mexico where
each frame of the video would be hand-painted. Corbjin would claim that by the time he was
brought on to work on the video, Cobain had some pretty detailed and elaborate ideas drawn up,
some of which were recurring themes in Nirvana’s music including body image and fetuses. Corbjin
would tell Spin magazine I tend to look at a good idea for what it is, regardless of its source, so
when Kurt presented his very precisely thought-out ideas, there was no way to ignore that quality and
not to use them. It is extremely rare to encounter musicians with such well-expressed and original
ideas for their own work. It certainly was not frustrating, and accordingly, I always attribute
most of the ideas to Kurt. Corbjin would go on to reveal that the shoot was pretty easy
and Kurt was great to collaborate with & Corbjin would contribute a few of his own ideas adding “
the road through the poppies, the fake mechanical birds and paper butterflies & Mother Earth”
character woman who shares a lot of similarities to the woman on the front of in-utero.
Corbjin was supposed to work with Nirvana on their follow up video to heart shaped box
revealinng to the new yorker “Kurt asked me again for the next video,
Pennyroyal Tea, but I felt that I couldn’t top the Heart Shaped Box video and turned it down,”.
“He then said that without me he would never make another video, and unfortunately he never did.”
When Nirvana won the award for best alternative video in 1994, it would happen several months
after Cobain's death and it proved to be a bittersweet moment as you can see here. Thank you.
Well im not the most vocal person in the world but it'd be silly to say that
it doesn't feel like there's something missing and i think about kurt everyday
and i'd like to thank everybody for paying attention to our band. thanks.
In 2016 the girl who appears in the video wearing the white robe Kelsey Rohr would post a photo of
herself with former nirvana drummer dave grohl with a caption that read "Today Dave Grohl and
I picked up right where we left off 23 years ago on set of Nirvana's last music video 'Heart-Shaped
Box.' Today reminded me that I peaked at 6 years old BUT I was the most badass kid on
the playground. Today was the absolute coolest. Or in Dave's words seeing each other today was a
'historic moment!' What a legend!!" she'd say. Rohr wouldn't appear to have a career in show
business as that was her sole credit on IMDB. That does it for today’s video guys thanks
for watching. Be sure to hit the like button and subscribe.