When Activision announced that Kurt Cobain would be a playable avatar in Guitar Hero 5, music fans worldwide let out one collective sigh. Now some more problems come to light — Dave Grohl & Krist Novoselic, the drummer and bassist of Nirvana, and the widow of Kurt Cobain — Courtney Love, both say that they are not responsible for allowing the game to animate a likeness of Kurt Cobain for the game.

Courtney took to Twitter to let people know her opinions; here are the original messages, unchanged:

“activision is fulllof shit they have a a contcrct called a deal memo that said upon approvale they could use an avatar i approved i. and i never inteneded to aPPROVE this shit, they are doing a recall you can be sure o fthat. waita ew hours maybe tomorrow press and etc all sorts of shit, and even then i had no intention of doing his btw we get NO money for this, travesty, Frances gets NO money for the rape. activision know this aos very very bad press indeed wait til you see what MY lovely lawyer has cooked up, i never ever signed off on this.”

Apparently Love also blames Grohl for this “travesty,” although Grohl and Novoselic issued the following joint statement:

“This is a statement regarding Nirvana, Guitar Hero and the likeness of the late Kurt Cobain.

We want people to know that we are dismayed and very disappointed in the way a facsimile of Kurt is used in the Guitar Hero game. The name and likeness of Kurt Cobain are the sole property of his estate – we have no control whatsoever in that area.

While we were aware of Kurt’s image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn’t know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants. We urge Activision to do the right thing in “re-locking” Kurt’s character so that this won’t continue in the future.

It’s hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists’ music alongside cartoon characters. Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl”

The issue seems not to be that Kurt Cobain is a playable character, but that he can be played in any track that players want. Want him to sing Bush’s “Comedown”? Okay. How about Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love A Bad Name.” While it is certainly funny looking, it is something that I am pretty sure Mr. Cobain himself wouldn’t have approved of. Love, Grohl and Novoselic would have ALL had to agree to allow the music in the game, but Grohl and Novoselic appear to be in the clear — the control of Kurt’s LIKENESS would be placed on the estate of Kurt Cobain, which is under the control of Courtney Love.

Regardless, as a huge fan of Nirvana, I hope everything gets ironed out. Activision has been making terrible games and pushing the Guitar Hero name in the dirt for several years now, if they really did create Kurt’s likeness without approval they are in for a world of legal problems.