Ten Years Later: Growing Up With Kurt Cobain

By Shadi Hamid

Kurt Cobain died on April 5th, 1994. On the eve of the 10th anniversary of his mysterious suicide, the music world will ask itself once again: “what if ?” I’m more interested, though, in remembering what was rather than wondering what could have been. What matters is remembering why Kurt Cobain mattered.

When Nirvana was at its peak, I was quite young – perhaps too young to form lasting, coherent thoughts. I wasn’t even yet a teenager. When I try to look back, it is hard for me to reconstruct the feelings, worries, hopes, and dreams that were part of me during those years. It’s all rather blurry.

I can only relive that period in hindsight and, as a result, I can catch only a glimmer of the curious mix of promise and confusion that marked that time of my life. Living something in hindsight is quite different than living it as it was actually happening. We didn’t have the benefit of retrospection then. It came and we lived and we moved on.

I don’t really know what I felt about Nirvana when Kurt was still alive. I can surely say I wasn’t a die-hard fan like some of my contemporaries. Nevertheless, I found this new genre of music – “grunge” – exciting. It was something fresh. It was powerful and dynamic and it actually said something.

A couple images stand out. I remember sifting through the local record store one day and stumbling across the album cover of Nevermind for the first time. This is weird, I thought. Here’s a baby in the water with his genitalia showing grasping for a dollar bill. Looking back, I wonder if Cobain was trying to make a statement. That from the moment we are born, we become slaves to money. That despite our better and more noble instincts, we are, whether we like it or not, creatures defined by our material interest. Or maybe he just thought it would be a funny picture that would grab the attention of potential record buyers.

No, I don’t remember where I was when Kurt Cobain died. I do recall, though, reading an article about it a couple months after it happened. The whole thing didn’t really register with me at that point. It didn’t hit me like it would later.

I also remember the first time I heard “The Man Who Sold the World.” I was blown away. And today I am still blown away by the resignation, the despair, and the beauty of it. That is one heck of a guitar solo. Understated but downright hypnotic.

But these are just bits and pieces assembled together from a time long gone. It was only during my sophomore year in college when I truly realized the power of Nirvana. I was flipping through the channels in my apartment, trying to find yet more ways to procrastinate. I stumbled onto a showing of Nirvana’s legendary “Unplugged” performance on MTV. There was Kurt Cobain with his guitar and his trademark anguish. Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl were looking stoic in the background letting their band mate and leader take center stage in what would turn out to be the band’s last televised performance. There was something ominously morbid about the whole setup. The candles, the lilies, the songs (five of which mentioned death), Cobain’s bizarrely frightening grimaces, and the ghostly, subdued atmosphere. Kurt had reportedly told Unplugged producer Alex Coletti that he had wanted it to look like a funeral. And it certainly did.

Then there was Cobain’s voice with its haunting intensity. But it was the last song, an impassioned cover of Leadbelly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night ?” that was perfectly chilling. It was the first time I had ever heard the song and let me just say that I have never seen or heard a vocal performance so evocative and disturbing. When Cobain started screaming like a caged animal at the end of the song, the heartbreaking power of it all was overwhelming. Listening to it, that many years later, you could almost taste death on the stage. You could also sense that you were watching a man who was truly different. And it was then that I understood why Cobain’s name could possibly be mentioned alongside that of John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix. He had transcended music.

Cobain, like Lennon, was a cultural icon (the kind of guy whose face you can put on a T-shirt). Where Lennon defined the 60s and 70s, Cobain towered over the 90s. If we’re talking about the power of music to express reality then Cobain was certainly a master. I’ve always felt that music is art only insofar as it says something that matters. And Cobain was always saying something important, connecting with an audience that could share in his frustration, sadness, pain, and alienation. The same cannot be said for most musicians today. Most music today doesn’t aspire to anything greater than itself. It is simply sound with the trappings of musical pretense but that doesn’t change the fact that it is still just that – sound.

And, yes, alienation is political. The fact that Kurt Cobain could kill himself when he was at the height of his talents should make us wonder. What is it about the society we live in which makes it so spiritually and personally unfulfilling that people feel a need to withdraw from society, medicate themselves into emotional numbness, and in some cases, take their own lives ?

In Nirvana’s music, there was an overwhelming sense that, for Cobain, something wasn’t quite right. Something didn’t make sense. The world around him was screwed up. And in the music, we get a sense of the powerlessness he must have felt in having to face such a world. Because of the irrevocable conflict inside of him, Cobain, like so many other tormented geniuses, was able to create art that was beautiful, uplifting and downright depressing all at once. Cobain’s music spoke to millions who felt the disconnect and confusion that colors and pervades our existence in an imperfect world. That is why Kurt Cobain mattered. And that is why he still does.

Shadi Hamid is a columnist at PopMatters.Com