Frances Bean Cobain sat down for a chat with RuPaul and Michelle Visage for their What’s the Tea podcast, and opened up about what it’s like to live in the digital age — and how she vows to remain real when everyone else seems so “filtered.” During the talk, Cobain said that her life is rooted in “authenticity” and name dropped the Kardashian sisters for being fake.
“That is what I’m trying to provide in the service of this world, since it’s very lacking. Like, In the age of the Kardashian — and that’s fine, they specifically fill that role for a reason — but everything is so saturated and filtered and conceived,” the visual artist and model said, as Radar Online shared.
Cobain has lived a tumultuous life, having allegedly been born codependent on heavy narcotics due to her mother’s heroin use during the first few weeks of her pregnancy with Cobain, as the Huffington Post revealed. Her father, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, took his own life in 1994 — just a few days after his daughter, a toddler at the time, last visited him in the Exodus Recovery Center.
She spent years living with temporary guardians, including her grandparents, as her mother continued to struggle with drugs and alcohol. All that conflict, Cobain says, has helped her become a more genuine person.
“What people really are thirsty for, I think, in an artistic way, is being able to see somebody for who they are. All the messy bits involved,” she added in her sit down with What’s the Tea .
Cobain has struggled with addiction herself, and says that she doesn’t mind when fans of her parents support her musical endeavors — the majority of which she shares on social media — and says that it’s a pretty good association to have.
“If people need that outlet in order to look at my music, or look at my art, and say, ‘It’s just like your dad’—if they need that, that’s O.K.,” Cobain noted, as Vanity Fair reported.
The podcast also took RuPaul and Cobain down a different road on memory lane, and the duo shared the story of the iconic photo of Cobain, her father Kurt, and RuPaul in drag that showed 2-year old Cobain crying in RuPaul’s arms at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1993. Cobain opened up to RuPaul and jokingly said that she was pretty confident that the snap encapsulated her personality being formed, and added that RuPaul helped form her essence from a young age.
These days, Cobain is happy, healthy, and sober — and continues to share her art on her social media platforms with fans of not only hers, but also those who enjoyed the music of both of her parents.