Commemorating Cobain

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Tom Slater insists that “try as we might, it’s impossible to separate the man from his music”:

Cobain was widely hailed as the last great rock icon – someone whose life, work and time coalesced to form one totemic legend. Any claim that pop music, in and of itself, can attain some level of immortality, as if, like the great works of antiquity, we can easily separate the work from the man and the myth, is ludicrous. Popular culture is always intertwined with the conditions, and often the person, that helped create it and make it cool. The question, two decades on, is what do we make of it all; of Nirvana, Generation X and Cobain himself.

In an angst-ridden satirical essay, Zachary Lipez offers advice to writers looking to mark the occasion as “an excellent opportunity to write about what Kurt Cobain meant to you.” Josh Jones criticizes some recent commemorations of Cobain, particularly grimacing at the media’s “cultish fascination with newly-released police photos of [his] death scene”:

Atrocious though such coverage may be, there’s good reason beyond nostalgia, hero-worship, or sick fascination to revisit Cobain’s legacy. On April 10, Michael Stipe will induct Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, formally enshrining the once scruffy outsiders in the hallowed company of ultimate rock insider-dom. This gesture might make some people (maybe it’s just me) feel a little conflicted. After all, wasn’t it precisely the grandiose, popular-kid culture of halls of fame that drove Cobain to the margins, where he did his best work, and ultimately drove him to hate what he’d become—a star? In his strange suicide note, we see Cobain beating himself up for being unable to live up to the hype—unable, as he put it, to be a “Freddy Mercury” and “relish in the love and adoration from the crowd.” There’s something, perhaps, almost tragically insensitive, however well-intentioned, in posthumously turning Kurt Cobain into Elvis.

Two days after his body was found, thousands of fans met to mourn at a candlelight vigil in Seattle, where they heard a recording of Courtney Love reading her husband’s suicide note (a note that sparked the Dish’s long-running thread on suicide):

Anyone can now read Cobain’s suicide note. Google showcases a series of image files, JPEGs tinted in different shades of scanner. Some have been rendered artistically with superimposed images of Cobain’s face, or the less tactful splattering of digitally generated blood. If you prefer, you can read the note in print in several Cobain biographies or his published journals. You can study the directions his handwriting slants and the cross-outs and the font size. You can read it over and over, thinking that you are in that moment and might be able to stop what’s coming before you finish.

But in 1994, two days after his body was found, there was no search engine waiting to share the most private moment of his life. There was only his wife, who–like him–understood that generation and foresaw the sea change his death would cause. By reading the note, she offered them access to all of the incomplete answers–that he was overwhelmed by a lack of passion for writing and playing music, that he felt guilty about that emptiness, that he believed himself to be infantile, narcissistic, too sensitive, unappreciative, erratic, hateful. The note was not vengeful; it was hopeless and apologetic. She delivered it with periodically dispersed commentary, as though reading aloud a harsh break-up note she’d found shoved into the slats of her locker. But she also cried, and her sobs were genuine and resonant. Her uninhibited grief transformed his death into something messy and visceral and selfish and ultimately public, offering the several thousand impressionable young adults in Seattle Center the opportunity to identify with her pain, not his.

She highlights David Fricke’s January 1994 Rolling Stone cover story on Cobain, in which he spoke candidly about pain and suicide:

Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?

For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.

This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.

Even as satire, though, a song like that ["I Hate Myself And I Want To Die"] can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.

That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time.

Jillian Mapes pays tribute to Cobain with a thoughtful round-up of articles, interviews, and photographs. Alan Light contemplates how Nirvana affected the music industry:

In the wake of Nirvana’s success, the low-wattage radio stations and Xeroxed fanzines of the “college rock” scene were transformed into a marketing monolith known as “alternative culture”. Seattle’s thrift-store anti-fashion took over couture runways and mall stores. Nirvana, like Woodstock, marked both the pinnacle and the end of an underground movement – the moment that Madison Avenue witnessed the scale of a new audience and pounced. This commodification was a big part of what tormented Cobain in his final years, but ultimately it’s neither good nor bad – it’s just what happens when culture meets capitalism…. So, yes, Nirvana changed the world, at least for a moment.

(Video: Cobain performs “Come As You Are” in a rehearsal for MTV Unplugged, November 1993)