Kurt Cobain / Photo Courtesy Alice Wheeler, April 2004
Kurt Cobain was many things while he was alive -- punk, pop star, hero, victim, junkie, feminist, geek avenger, wise ass. But ten years after his death, he's something else entirely. He's a ghost. His songs play every so often on iPods, jukeboxes, at ball games. An undiscovered one, "You Know You're Right," surfaced in 2002. The same year, his journals were published as a pricey coffee-table hardcover (Journals). Now there's a "classic alternative" radio format that may enshrine Nirvana as the new Led Zeppelin. But these flickers in the current pop world merely highlight his absence, reminding us of a figure who's becoming harder to see.
Cobain's career was short even by rock standards -- three albums and out. He was, by his own admission, unprolific, and, after long battles with his former bandmates, his widow, Courtney Love, has established tight control over what remains of his recorded output. And although John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and other rock superstars died young, none had so much of the field to himself in his heyday or quite the exit strategy. Cobain's closest peer, Tupac Shakur, isn't a ghost. He's a full-time rap star. A workaholic in a medium where the tape's always running, he's still collaborating, topping charts, showing up in movies. And his postmortem role seems in many ways like wish fulfillment. "I got more to say," you can hear him taunting. "I'm gonna haunt you motherfuckers forever!" A video ("I Ain't Mad at Cha") that depicts him rapping in heaven was released just days after his death.
The shirt Cobain wore in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video
In a short speech he taped right after his best friend and band leader died, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic advised fans, "Let's keep the music with us. We'll always have it forever." And he was right: The music speaks for itself. As a songwriter, Cobain was spookily brilliant. He had a way of making his offhand jokes and teen vernacular sound ancient and profound, with a melodic drama that verged on telekinesis. But this also had everything to do with who he was.
"There's part of him that was a cultural revolutionary and part of him that was a classic song craftsman," says Danny Goldberg, a former Nirvana manager and founder of Artemis Records. "This was someone who was inspired by the Melvins, but who listened to a lot of the Beatles. He had that dual talent: an emotional cultural talent and a songwriting genius. Which is why people talk about John Lennon in a different tone of voice than Paul McCartney. Kurt was one of the masters of the craft, in addition to being a voice of adolescents of all ages."
Songs like "Pennyroyal Tea," "Heart-Shaped Box," "Come as You Are," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and "In Bloom" will outlive us all. But those of us who are living now, who remember when Kurt Cobain the person was here living, talking, and creating -- we experienced something else, too. We learned a story that has a certain beginning and a certain ending. And the fact is, Cobain's last work, which is now available worldwide on websites, isn't a song, drawing, or film. It's a piece of writing that reads, THIS NOTE SHOULD BE PRETTY EASY TO UNDERSTAND.
In April 1994, the mainstream media grappled with the death of an icon whose music they'd barely processed. Only two years earlier, The New York Times tried to get with the hip new thing by earnestly issuing a "grunge lexicon," concocted on the spot by a pranking Sub Pop receptionist. Back then, mainstream hoaxes were easier to pull, secrets easier to keep. Less than 10 percent of the population had Internet access. And the era's new, vaguely Brad Pitt-looking "it" boy -- the Justin Timberlake of his time -- occasionally wore black nail polish or a dress, dyed his hair with strawberry Kool-Aid, and sang, on MTV in prime time, lyrics like "Sell the kids for food" and "Nature is a whore."
But soon after he died, the media gave a specific cast to Cobain's quickly cooling image. The clips that played in the days after his death were from Nirvana's late-1993 MTV Unplugged appearance. They showed a frail 26-year-old who looked both much younger and much older, crouched over an acoustic guitar, clearly in misery. He was bathed in blue light and surrounded by lilies, the American flower of death. The set, designed by Cobain, was specifically meant to resemble a funeral. Of the six cover songs he played, five mentioned death.
At the height of his notoriety, jazz great Charlie Parker complained that people were paying to see the world's most famous junkie. Cobain, among other things, is his generation's most famous suicide. "I mean, people die," says Moore. "But I can't think of too many musicians of his caliber and celebrity that died that way." When people heard of Cobain's death, they tended to have a two-part reaction, first to the death, then to the method. People who OD, drive drunk, or invite murder threats have a pretty reckless disregard for their lives and the lives of their loved ones. But Cobain's last act was different.
Goldberg remembers him as "the typical artistic control freak, someone who edited his home video meticulously." But years later, it's easy to wonder whether he was a control freak on a level few had imagined. What if he was so attentive, so farsighted in his performance art, that he somehow, maybe unconsciously, had his whole curtain call plotted out? There he is in the last shot of the "Teen Spirit" video. An eerie yellow blur, too close to the camera to be in focus, he scream-sings those last words: a denial, a denial, a denial…. As Dave Grohl's drums crash to a halt, he holds that last word for a drawn-out, head-quivering note. Then suddenly, viciously, he snaps his mouth shut. The end.
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