As the daughter of rock stars Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Frances Bean Cobain is, she says, the "O.G. Blue Ivy [Carter]." She's not wrong: Like JAY-Z and Beyonce's firstborn, Frances was the most famous celebrity scion in pop culture when the Nirvana singer-guitarist and the Hole frontwoman welcomed her in 1992 at the height of the grunge scene's popularity.
Frances made the comment when she sat down with RuPaul and Michelle Visage for their Jan. 30 "What's the Tee?" podcast and also opened up about everything from her own music and art to her friendships with other celebrity kids and how she's spent her inheritance.
She admitted that for a long time, she struggled to manage the money she gets from the estate of her father, who committed suicide in 1994 at age 27 when Frances was just 20 months old, because "the one way I was shown how to live was live in excess," she explained, as reported by DailyMail.com. "It took me stepping away from that and getting sober in order to realize that no matter how much money you think you have, it's not permanent."
Frances got sober in 2016. Since then, she's made a point to educate herself about her money — documents from her recent divorce from musician Isaiah Silva revealed she earns a reported $100,000 a month from Kurt's estate — and who's managing it. "I'd like to say that within the last two years I have taken real accountability for every single thing, talking to the people in charge of my money and having in-depth meetings as well as recognizing that you don't have to live lavishly in order to live well," she explained on the podcast, which she taped after judging the Feb. 1 Judy Garland-themed episode of "RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars."
"My relationship with money is different because I didn't earn it. So it's almost like this big giant loan that I'll never get rid of, and it's almost like I have this foreign relationship to it or like a [hint of] guilt because it feels like money from somebody that I've never met, let alone earned myself," she explained, according to DailyMail.com.
Frances, like her parents, plays guitar and sings. But she hasn't branded herself as a musician like them for many reasons ("There's kind of this dirty association with musicianship in my family, just because it hasn't ended particularly well," she said), instead spending the last several years doing other things like working as a model and a visual and graffiti artist and executive producing "Montage of Heck," a documentary about her dad.
Now, however, she's more comfortable being seen as a musician (she's posted her art and performances on social media) — which she called "the family business" — despite the pressure that comes with people expecting her to be "the second female coming of Kurt."
"If people need that outlet in order to look at my music and my art and go, 'it's just like your dad,' that's okay. If that's the association they make, that's a pretty damn good association, there are worse things to be called," she said. "But what I think is making me and pushing me to kind of go for it is that I don't sound or act or am anything like my parents' artistry. When I sing, it's a definitive sort of own space that I'm making for myself."
Frances also talked about her place among the famous kids of other stars, "my weird community of celebrity children," W magazine reported.
"It's hard to submit yourself into that world because it's so pretentious and s—-y," she said. "It's filled to the brim with the worst people I've ever met. But when you weed out certain types of people and certain people that want to utilize where they're from as a means to justify their own bulls—, then you can find really beautiful people."
Those beauties include Billie Lourd, the daughter of the late Carrie Fisher (who was actually friends with Frances's mom, Courtney). "Me and [Billie] kind of looked at each other and were like, 'Your mom's crazy? Your mom's crazy? Let's be friends!,'" Frances said on the podcast.
Sean Lennon, the son of the late John Lennon and artist Yoko Ono, is also a friend. "[We] have a kind of soul connectivity," Frances said. "When you weed out s—-y people and you find the good ones, that's where it is."