Beautiful, inspirational mural confuses David Spade for Kurt Cobain

By Clayton Purdom  |  September 25, 2017 | 5:00pm
Aux Features David Spade
Beautiful, inspirational mural confuses David Spade for Kurt Cobain

In the race-to-the-bottom rhetoric of much internet humor, you don’t need a setup or a punchline, you just need a meme, the easier and dumber the better. Rickrolls and “All-Star” and Bee Movie are their own fully structured jokes, and the less funny their context, the better. They are designed to be infuriating.

Still, there’s something wonderfully comprehensive about this Kurt Cobain mural by Australian graffiti artist Lushsux, which manages to not only confuse the transformative punk icon with Joe Dirt 2 star David Spade but also misattribute a quote, from Neil Young, to him. That Cobain originally paraphrased Young’s lyric in his suicide adds a hint of tastelessness to the already precision-tuned offensiveness of the mural, although the earnest, beach-shirt airbrush quality of the artwork doesn’t hurt.

The mural itself is in Linz, Austria, but it was essentially designed to go viral, which it has, even resulting in the attention of former Nirvana songwriter David Spade himself:

To sort of answer Spade’s question as to why that picture was appended to that caption, the source appears to be this tweet from last year, but in a much larger sense, his question is its own answer. It’s an internet joke. Much of Lushsux’s other graffiti work pulls from internet culture to decidedly low-brow ends, but this a high point, a sort of “Use the force, Harry” for ’90s kids.

 
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