The Ghost of Kurt Cobain 4

Kurt Cobain / Photo Courtesy Alice Wheeler, April 2004

Of course, parts of  Kurt Cobain's spirit -- the violent, the gentle, the weird -- are alive in pop music. Is Eminem, for instance, carrying some mystic Cobain gene? Both have alter egos: Kurdt Kobain, Slim Shady. Both were (are) left-handed, mom-hating, daughter-having, dysfunctional-wife-marrying, grossness-loving, rhyme-spitting little guys who were utterly remade by a musical subculture, then tried to represent it as subverting the mainstream -- even when it became the mainstream.
But obviously, there's a huge gap between a gay-baiting rapper who "just don't give a fuck" and Kurt Cobain. To write songs like Cobain's, you need more than imagination, verbal dexterity, and a gift for dynamics and melody. You sort of have to give a fuck -- about people different from yourself, about problems beyond your experience. "Kurt was really into expressing an allegiance to sensitivity as opposed to [being] Mr. Tough Guy," recalls Moore. "You see kids into the whole Cobain thing [now] who are outcasts from the rap-metal, baseball-hat-wearing Limp Bizkit kids, the middle-class teenage gangstas. It would have been interesting to see how Kurt would've reacted to all that."
Cobain certainly didn't seem thrilled with humanity; it's safe to say he was a snob. But his ability to connect with other viewpoints was almost reflexive. For every lyric that sounded like a piss rant about fame, there's one like "Polly," based on a news story about a rape/murder, that shows a scary level of empathy for both victim and killer. Ruminating in the numb cadence of the killer's thoughts, Cobain nods forward to a conclusion that indicts the dark side in everyone. It's the song Bob Dylan reportedly singled out at a Nirvana concert, saying, "The kid has heart."
So many musical styles exploded throughout the '90s with their genre-hopping, crowd-surfing partisans. But something about the Nirvana ethos spoke to a larger truth about growing up in a particular post-baby boom world. It was ironic, sure, but also vulnerable, self-effacing, conscientious, trying hard to be cool, but not "cool." Come as you are -- unless you're a jerk. Even the idea of coolness was associated with an underdog conscience, if only as a reaction to the regressive Republican, hair-metal social order it came under. Sure, the shortcomings were easy to caricature. Cobain's end briefly stamped a whole scene and cultural experience -- if not a generation -- with the reputation of being amoral, sarcastic, solipsistic, self-pitying drama queens. Rock triumphalists from Gene Simmons to Noel Gallagher made a point of denouncing the brooding crybabies of '90s rock, as if Nirvana had ridden to massive pop-music fame on a staunch anti-fun platform.
Megan Jasper, the Sub Pop's receptionist, now the label's general manager, demurs: "They were really funny, goofy guys. They'd really 'blow into town' -- it was sort of an event. I remember them showing up at the office on mornings after shows, all hungover with makeup running down their faces." Moore, too, had a different sense of what the pre-MTV mosh pit meant. "Punk-rock culture was very celebratory. Anybody who was involved with it was just having the best time of their lives. The nihilism and negativity were sort of elemental tools for attacking boredom, just an affront to conservative standards."
But people are always uncomfortable with something as mainstream as Nirvana that doesn't make its meanings clear or its intentions obvious. Everybody knows how to react to a Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" -- with outrage, delight, or indifference, depending on your own little group. But a dress-wearing, golden-boy, junkie, rock-cliché, rock-original, underground superstar whose lyrics mixed jokey word games with agonized confessions and self-destructive tirades? He was always going to be problematic. Even for the little group that raised him.
As Cobain wrote in Journals, "I like to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork." There's something noble about that honesty and about the attempt to embody both those personalities, maybe even something "American" in the best sense of the expression. But this too had its consequences.
An Egyptian papyrus scroll bears what some believe is the first-known suicide note. It begins "Lo, my name is abhorred / Lo, more than the odour of carrion / On summer days when the sky is hot… Death is before me today / As the odour of lotus flowers / As when one sitteth on the shore of drunkenness." If they'd had irony back in ancient Egypt, the author might have just written "I hate myself and want to die" and jumped in the Nile.
The irony, apathy, and general ennui that pundits attributed to Kurt Cobain's age group was supposedly a reaction to the sense that everything had been tried, every rebellion co-opted, every truth a cliché. So it's doubly-ironic -- if such a thing is possible -- that fans growing up now think of Cobain as a valiant symbol of a time when rock music was more real and meaningful. But they do, and they're not entirely wrong. No one knew what was going to happen when Nirvana began their assault on history and culture (and MTV). Cobain had to traverse the '90s along with the rest of us. And as someone who is exactly his age, I can assure you that he wasn't the only casualty.