Following the death of Kurt Cobain, only two other performers have fronted Nirvana. Paul McCartney and Post Malone. On paper, both are horrific choices. One was mocked by Cobain, the other peaked when they worked with Mark Wahlberg of Funky Bunch fame in Spenser Confidential. Having The Beatles member and Wings frontman appear, however briefly, as the lead singer of a Nirvana line-up is a bold move we rarely see on stage these days. He and the remaining members provide Cut Me Some Slack, a song made to support Dave Grohl’s Sound City documentary. The odds are not in the favour of this wild and wonderful overlap, and yet it works. Scarce live performances of Cut Me Some Slack and a Grammy-winning studio effort, and a very memorable and entertaining one at that. Listeners were just a few shows away from a McCartney cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Instead of that is Cut Me Some Slack, a song which has the man behind Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da capture the spirit of heavier rock and grunge fundamentals. It’s an incredible recording from McCartney and Nirvana, an insane overlap which somehow works. Part of it is the harsher, croaking vocal work from the Wings frontman, who even manages to fit a few “oohs” in there for good measure, as though he were performing Silly Little Love Songs. Part of the surprise is in forgetting that McCartney has some real rockers in his discography. Moments of instrumental madness which has prepared him for a collaboration with a band whose defining trait was an ambitious, noisy edge. It suits him just fine, and after so many years of whittling away pop slop, to hear McCartney return to those Helter Skelter howls is a treat. Cut Me Some Slack is an instrumentally glorious song.
Part of its brilliance is succeeding in spite of itself. But beyond that, the McCartney and Nirvana match-up is the collaboration of strong musicians with similar attitudes to creativity. Those wants of being let free and left be are chilling moments from McCartney, whose vocal work brings an extra layer of cool to the lyrics. Simple, but effective. The focus is not the lyrics anyway, the constant calls for “mama” have a ‘60s appeal to them, that old rocker way. But that is brought to life, and convincingly so, by Nirvana. They are more of a backing band here, but their instrumental influence is the core of the song. Softened a tad to keep McCartney at the forefront, but certainly ambitious enough to be a worthy follow-up to their work with Cobain.
McCartney and Nirvana want to “have some fun,” and that is exactly what they do. Grohl sounds great behind the drum kit, and the guitar work from Pat Smear is monumental. It’s the charge the song needs most of all in this “Nirvana reunion,” as McCartney would call it. What started as a jam becomes a blur of what McCartney did best in the latter days of The Beatles, and what Nirvana sparked in moments across their discography. A wild meeting which makes for a brilliant and catchy piece of work. Magnificent stuff and a lot of fun, but it does feel like a hollow adaptation of The White Album towards the end. That’s not because McCartney is present but because of the harmonising backing it. It should have been Smear on guitar, which does come in, but it gets dangerously close to heavy rock pastiche.
