A couple of days ago, I designed a wallpaper for my computer desktop with a black
and white photo of Kurt Cobain and text that read ’Kurt Cobain: 1967-1994’-a modest way
of paying my respects on Cobain’s tenth death anniversary. A lot of people asked me who
guy on my desktop was, more out of curiosity than anything else; Others familiar with
Cobain wanted to know why I thought highly of a man who was a drug addict, wrote depressing
lyrics, and in the end drove himself to suicide. I responded by referring to the lyrics
Cobain wrote and how he seemed to capture the general unease of adolescene years
in a way few songwriters have managed to do so. By the end of my ranting, few people
were convinced the guy needed to be remembered. ’’So what?’’, they said.
Normally, I wouldn’t give a rat’s behind of what people thought of me, my idols, my
interests, or anything else I hold dear. But somewhere in this head of mine, lies a
a wee part of me that gets pissed off when the work of a person I admire is
questioned: Claims that the Wachowski brothers (Directors of the Matrix trilogy) are better
directors compared to Stanley Kubrik; Saying Dannielle Stelle is a better witer than
Shakespere (William, not Nicolas) because her work is not boring (If anything, her work IS
boring); Jokes on account of Kurt Cobain’s death (’What is Cobain’s greatest gift? HIS AIM!’)
-You get the idea. The very suggestion that Shakespere, Kubrick, Cobain etc are not ’good enough’
is heresy to me. You say I am overeacting? haha. People are being mudered because of thier religous
beliefs -That, my friend, is overreacting. If the ’Holier than thou’ school can rant, yack, kill
for the sake of an entity that no one has seen, then I certainly can rant and yack for the sake
of my idols (Think I got a wee bit carried away).
But let’s get back to Kurt Cobain for the time being. To understand why Cobain is praised by some,
worshipped by many, you will need to know a bit of the man’s life. Kurt Cobain was born to a lower
middle class family in Aberdeen, Washington. Poverty aside, Cobain was a happy, but hyper active child,
regularly on medication. When he was nine years old, his parents divorced. It was the beginning of
the tragedy of Kurt Cobain. As he grew older, Cobain began to get increasingly distanced from
the rest of the kids in school, almost to the point where he was called ’queer’, ’psycho’. He never
sought to rectify this situation. Instead he became even more withdrawn, getting sollace from
writing poetry, listening to his favorite rock bands and painting. By the time he was 15, he had
decided that rock music was his destiny. By 1987, he had his own band ’Faecal matter’-the earliest
incarnation of Nirvana which went on to change the American music scene. Two years later, they released
thier first album, ’Bleach’. It hinted at the greatness that was to come, with Cobain penned songs such
as ’About a girl’ and ’Negative creep’ becoming underground favorites. At this point in time, America,
by all accounts, was in the midst of a ’Musical drought’. An entire generation grew up on Vannila Ice
and other prepackaged bands, often unaware of the contributions of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Led Zepplin
or The Doors. Against this backdrop came Cobain and Co, with musical intensity of punk rock and melodic
splendor of pop rock. Bleach became a gem to those crying out for change, but went unnoticed in the
mainstream market.
The band’s next album, Nevermind, released two years later changed all that and
alot more. To this day, it is considered to be the most important rock album of the 90’s.
Some even call it the last ’great rock album’. The songs in Nevermind were Cobain’s first attempts of
fueling his anger and frustration through his lyrics:’Smells like teen spirit’, speaking of teenage
detachment and anghast became an anthem for disenchanted youth; ’Something in the way’-a painful
biographical account of the times he spent living under a bridge. As the album sales increased, so
did the media attention on the band and particularly Cobain. Depression caught on, so did drugs. The
next three years flew by with concerts, marriage, birth of a baby, drug rehabilitation, and two more
albums. Throughout those two years the danger signs were , on hindsight, obvious as Cobain became
increasingly unstable. Observers took it on face value. To them it was merely the eccentrcies of a rock
star. They had seen it before with Lenon, Hendrix, even Elvis Presly. On April 8th 1994, news began
to leak out of the death of Kurt Cobain. He had run away from a drug rehab centre and shot himself three
days earlier. What followed was similar to the reaction towards the loss of John Lennon: grief, loss,
feelings of emptiness. The man dubbed to be ’the spokesman for an entire generation’ was no more.
Flash foward ten years. No make that nine years. An adolescent boy going through the same thing most
adolescents go through: Uncertainty, vulnerability, lack of confidence, over confidence, lack of focus,
detachment from society, anger, frustration, weird sence of humor.........you get the idea, don’t you?
The boy gets his hands on Nirvana CDs. At first the unintelligable lyrics mean nothing to him.
He only cares for the thundering drums and the loud guitar.
It doesn’t take long before he begings to hear snippets of great poetry in the songs of Nirvana:
’My heart is broke, but I have some glue........’
’we’ll float around, hangout in clouds, then we come down, and have a hangover’
’I am worse at what I do best, and for this gift I feel so blessed’
’Iam so ugly, but thats okay, cause so are you’
’Light my candles, in a daze cause I found God’
’I need an easy friend, I do.... with an ear to lend’
He is intrigued, so much so that he gets on the internet and downloads the lyrics for all Nirvana
songs. And the more he listens, the more he makes sence out of it all. He feels that the writer is
talking to him. Personally. About anger, frustration and pain. That boy is me. Fans of Cobain’s lyrics
will know what I am talking about. Cobain’s lyrics have a way of stripping away the excess and getting
down to the essence in a way that is undescribable. He was not the first to do it. Whatever he said
through his lyrics was told a long long time ago by a certain playwright hailing from Stratford. But
Cobain somehow managed to capture the volatile personality of an adolescent in modern society. I am
not saying Shakespere’s work is outdated -Not in a million years. I am saying Shakespere is the
master, Cobain, conscioulsy or otherwise, is one of a long list of students. Every now and then, one
of these student’s work will speak directly to his generation in a voice that drowns out the
collective voices of his peers, and renders them almost meaningless.
Cobain is that voice for our times.
RIP KURT COBAIN.