1999

22.3

On 8 April 1994, one of America’s most prominent representatives of youth subculture put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Kurt Cobain, lead singer and guitarist for the grunge-rock band Nirvana, is certainly not the only overwrought rock star to have taken his own life at or near the peak of his career. Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself; Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and others died while they were still active members of rock culture. What distinguishes Cobain from the others, however, is the role he had assumed—or been given—before his death. For many disaffected American kids, Cobain had become an icon, a model, a cathartic outlet for their problems—disintegrating families, economic troubles, and so on. As the spokesperson for a subculture with nothing to claim for its own but angst, fear and disaffection, Cobain’s music and lyrics spoke (loud) volumes about the troubled society we live in. His musical career was a cry of anguish; his suicide stands as an exclamation point.

For those who claimed membership in the "disaffected youth" subculture so commonly labeled "Generation X," Cobain’s death has taken on a significance far beyond his corpus of work. Four albums worth of new material and two sets of rereleases do not guarantee a place in the rock and roll canon; Cobain has a place, however, in spite of having claimed periodically that he didn’t really want it. At the heart of Cobain’s suicidal act, then, would seem to lie two interesting issues: (1) the tension between his conflicting purposes/desires to be famous and to be left alone; and (2) the question of agency in a postmodern, mass-mediated society. Put another way, there was a conflict between Cobain’s attempts to position himself among several scenes and the demands those scenes placed on him.

The interplay between Cobain’s scenes makes naming them difficult. There was, first of all, the Generation X youth subculture, much of whose lore emanates from Seattle in the early 1990s. The cover story for Time’s 19 June 1997 issue describes Generation X in this way:

So what happened to those lazy, listless baby busters who supposedly typified the new generation? Beavis and Butt-head were their icons; Beck’s "Loser" was their song ("Savin’ all your food stamps and burnin’ down the trailer park"); Richard Linklater’s "Slacker," with its Austin, Texas, deadbeats, was their movie. This was the MTV generation: Net surfing, nihilistic nipple piercers whining about McJobs; latchkey legacies, fearful of commitment. Passive and powerless, they were content, it seemed, to party on in a Wayne’s Netherworld, one with more antiheroes—Kurt Cobain, Dennis Rodman, the Menendez brothers—than role models. The label that stuck was from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X, a tale of languid youths musing over "mental ground zero—the location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb: frequently a shopping mall. (58)

Alongside whatever part of youth American-style fit the Generation X label, there was the world of popular music, which Nirvana made a huge mark on with their 1991 release Nevermind. There was the mass culture of the early 1990s, which paid Cobain and his band, as well as his troubled family, a great deal of attention. Finally, there was the man himself, struggling with his fame and his goals. These layers intersect at many points, one of which represents the crossing-over of alternative, youth subculture into the mass culture. Nirvana was the first of a new generation of "punk" bands to achieve mass commercial success.

Writers who covered the troubled musician during and after his career probably were not surprised by his death. After all, some two months earlier, Cobain had been hospitalized in Rome, Italy, where he had been discovered in the bathtub of his hotel room, in a coma apparently brought on by mixing heroin, barbiturates, and champagne. The popular music press raged with debates over whether he had attempted suicide. The only comment Cobain made came out as soon as he came out of the coma. According to Bruce Handy’s account in Time (18 April 1994), Cobain looked around at the crowd of press and fans in his hospital room and said, "What am I doing here? Get these fucking tubes out of my nose!"

After his recovery from the Rome incident, however, the short remainder of Cobain’s life appeared to be going well. In his last interview, he claimed to have kicked his heroin habit, stopped drinking, and cured himself of chronic stomach pains that had troubled him for years. Also, his marriage to Courtney Love, an original "Riot Grrl" and lead screamer for the band Hole, looked to be relatively stable. "I’ve never been happier in my life," Cobain claimed to David Fricke ("Kurt Cobain" 37). Cobain’s own words paint a picture of a man who is in control of his life for the first time in a long time—maybe ever. He seems happy, content, and ready to get on with his business. Ironically, it was during that same interview that he talked about his gun collection (from which the suicide weapon eventually came) publicly for the first time. He explained that he liked to shoot targets, but could never shoot a human being.

Such an unsettling self-concept would not be surprising coming from the man who penned lyrics like these from Nirvana’s first hit song, 1991’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit": "Load up on guns / And bring your friends / It’s fun to lose." Like the vast majority of Cobain’s lyrics, this song is strongly negative. Along with the negative impressions these lyrics create, there is also an air of passivity that pervades Cobain’s work, revealed starkly on the 1993 release In Utero, which featured the song "Rape Me." Cobain repeatedly screamed the chorus of the song: "Rape me, rape me, rape me again!" Probably the most famous example of both his negativity and his passivity is the chorus of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," lines that may have become an anthem for the 1990s: "Here we are now. Entertain us." Although Cobain may very well have encapsulated the feelings of much of so-called Generation X in these lyrics, he did not really seem to think that this small part of a song would become the slacker/grunge/punk mantra. As Cobain told David Fricke, he wrote "Smells like Teen Spirit" to describe his own feelings about going to parties: "That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was ‘Well, here we are, entertain us. You invited us here’" ("Kurt Cobain" 38). Of course, part of the reason that these lyrics have become the catch-phrase they have is that they are the most audible in the whole song.

Cobain has said much here about the passivity of the generation to which he belongs. Even when he goes to parties, he does not want to take an active role in the situation. He would prefer to have the fun brought to him. If a situation is "boring or uncomfortable," it must be because the host of the party isn’t working hard enough. In other words, the situation is bad because somebody else made it that way. This forfeiting of agency—after all, he could have been aggressive at parties if he’d wanted to be—may ultimately reflect the tension Cobain felt in his own life. There is something to be said for the idea that his suicide was one of the most active roles he ever took in anything.

Cobain’s music also mixes moods. The vast majority of Nirvana songs follow a pattern of moving from hard power-rock riffs to softer, slower melodic sections during verses. The dynamic of the music suggests the same passive-aggressiveness that the lyrics do, switching back and forth between anger and depression. Music and social critics describe the effect in a variety of ways. Dick Dahl, in the Utne Reader, says: "Like the Replacements, Nirvana describes a world of youthful alienation. Sometimes the music broods, sometimes it swaggers. But it does so in a dark intellectual valley walled off on one end by mindless adolescence and on the other by the empty, spirit-killing world of adulthood" (42-43). In this passage, Dahl has located Nirvana in a scene that few could hope to live in happily. He has placed Kurt Cobain at the crossroads between his unhappy childhood and his hopeless adulthood, a condition that many young adults claim to find themselves in. A less analytical but nonetheless interesting observation about Nirvana’s sound comes from Chris Mundy of Rolling Stone, who says, "If guitars could talk, Cobain’s would scream, melodically and irreverently, ‘What are you looking at?’" (39).

Another important point about Cobain’s personality was his willingness to wear the hat of the "punk," the destructive (of both self and property), nihilistic, angry young man. Of course, his diving into the crowd and smashing instruments was not totally original. Pete Townshend, guitarist for the Who, had been smashing guitars on stage since 1965. Slam-dancing and crowd-surfing had been popular since the late 1970s as a sign that punks were willing to trust each other even as they disclaimed membership in any other social group. Still, Cobain’s adoption of these punk idioms indicates that he was sympathetic to certain punk ideologies. In an obituary in the New Yorker, Alex Ross writes, "Cobain was at once irritated and intrigued by the randomness of his new audience. He lashed out at the ‘jock numbskulls, frat boys and metal kids’ who jammed clubs and arenas for his . . . tours. But he liked the idea of bending their minds toward his own punk ideals and left-leaning politics . . . " (104). Cobain was a punk, but he resented the misappropriation of his "punk ideals" by the mainstream youth culture. He seems to have perceived mainstream youth culture as having latched onto something in his music other than its message of pain.

This idea of misappropriation raises a key set of issues in understanding Cobain’s life and death. While Ross claims that Cobain "liked the idea of bending their minds," Cobain himself disclaims the role as the voice of a generation. In his own words, "‘I never wanted to sing. . . . I just wanted to play rhythm guitar—hide in the back and just play’" (Fricke, "Kurt Cobain" 35). As Simon Reynolds and Joy Press explain in their analysis of underground rock movements, The Sex Revolts:

Commentators described Nirvana’s constituency as the "slacker" generation, twentysomethings who were directionless, incapable of personal or political commitment. Similarly, Cobain talked about feeling "disgusted with my generation’s apathy, and with my own apathy and spinelessness." Nirvana’s music quakes with the frustration of the slacker who wants to become vertebrate. But . . . Nirvana couldn’t shift from dormant to militant because, like most of the American underground, they were sceptical about attempts to politicise rock and marshal it into a movement. (98)

Having detailed Cobain’s role in this process, it seems useful to turn the question around, asking, "How do various scenes see Cobain as an agent?" I begin with a comparatively narrow scene—the 1990s punk/disaffected youth subculture. Through this lens, we can say that the "scene" consisted of a number of bands and their fans. The focus was loud, abrasive, self-deprecating music, along with the attendant fashions and attitudes. Alex Ross explains in his aforementioned obituary: "In the deep dusk of the Bush Administration, some segments of the nation’s youth undoubtedly identified with Cobain’s punkish world view, his sympathies and discontents, and yes, the diminished opportunities of an entire generation. Others just got off on the crushing power of the sound" (104). Ross’s description touches on the mood of many teenagers and young adults in the early 1990s.

We know, furthermore, that many of these listeners looked to Cobain for certain messages. In other words, his audience identified with him, perhaps more than he identified with them. The outpouring of media coverage in the weeks after Cobain’s death provides a wealth of examples. Two articles are representative, both in tone and in content. The first is a letter to the editor of Time (18 Apr, 1994) in which the writer claims: "Many think Cobain was selfish and crude, but he spoke to many young people around the world. His extremely personal songs exposed the inner pain each one of us hides. Luckily he shared some of his heartache with us, so we didn’t feel so alone"(8). The writer, Nirvana fan Julie Wickerham, believes that the angst of Generation X is so widespread as to be universal. At the same time, in one of the great paradoxes of Generation X, the angst and "heartache" are "extremely personal." Herein lies another source of tension for this generation. The "twentysomethings" feel pain and fear that are very intensely private and personal, but at the same time know that everyone else feels them too. As a result, to people like Wickerham, Kurt Cobain’s greatest contribution to society is that he was willing to externalize and share the pain. Her repeated use of first-person plural pronouns, especially in conjunction with negative emotions, clearly indicates her identification with Cobain’s message.

The second example comes from an obituary in the New York Times (17 Apr. 1994). Music writer Lorraine Ali suggests that the cause of Cobain’s personal pain may arguably have been the cause of his success:

Kurt Cobain was one among a league of kids raised by 60’s parents who shuffled their children from relative to relative in a quest for personal freedom. Courtney Love (Cobain’s widow) of Hole, Bill Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and Moby are just a few more. They suffered the fallout of free love, and as adults, they sell millions of albums to peers who can relate to their rootless anger and dysfunction. (C28)

Cobain himself expressed some of the tension between selfish, nihilistic punkness and capitalist, greedy celebrity when asked after a late 1993 concert in Chicago why the band had not played "Smells Like Teen Spirit." He responded, "I don’t even remember the guitar solo on ‘Teen Spirit.’ It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. But I’m not interested in that kind of stuff" (Fricke, "Kurt Cobain" 35). He was "not interested" in playing the band’s most famous song, the song that probably drew most of the crowd, but later in the same interview, he suggested some willingness to accommodate the crowd when he claimed, "We have failed in showing the lighter, more dynamic side of our band. The big guitar sound is what the kids want to hear" (40). At this point, I hear him saying that he was willing to sacrifice the artistic integrity of his band for sales. These conflicting positions are emblematic of his professional career, and circumscribe the paradox of his existence. A talented but very private and unstable young man was set up as the conductor of America’s youth culture primal scream orchestra. He wanted the money and the fame, but not the attendant power and responsibility.

In the complex situation that led up to Cobain’s suicide, then, we can see what we might call competing, or conflicting, purposes. Until 8 April 1994, Cobain seemed willing to give in to the demands of celebrity, to the scene in which he was located. Something changed, however, before that final day. His suicide note speaks to this change of heart at length. For example, he wrote:

I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to, as well as creating music, along with really writing something for too many years now. I feel guilty beyond words about these things, for example when we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowd begins. . . . The fact is, I can’t fool you, any of you. It simply isn’t fair to you, or to me. The worst crime I can think of would be to pull people off by faking it, pretending as if I’m having one hundred percent fun. Sometimes I feel as though I should have a punch-in time clock before I walk out on-stage.

Cobain’s descent into this state had a long (relative to the rock and roll world) and storied history. His career in music began as a roadie for the seminal Seattle punk band the Melvins. He played in garage bands that nobody cared about until Nirvana formed in 1986. Up until that point, Cobain was nothing if not a punk kid. With the formation of his first relatively stable band, and especially after the release of their first record, 1989’s Bleach, the picture began to change. As his music began to affect larger audiences, his own intentions as a musician became steadily less important. Of course, he acted willingly as he played music that was less and less his own, but his suicide, viewed from within the punk/grunge scene, can be seen as an attempt to stop that trend. He seemed to think he could only regain control by removing himself.

But what happens to this explanation if we examine it in a different scenic context? Looking at Cobain’s suicide through the eyes of a record-label executive, or any other pop music businessperson, changes things considerably. The gist of the story is the same. Cobain’s personality does not appear any more stable when we take more destabilizing factors, such as money and pressure from his record label (industry giant DGC Records), into account. He still was trapped in the limbo between DIY punk and rock star. But by 1994, the popular music scene had changed, and Cobain’s status as pop icon had diminished.

Several events indicate the shifts that were taking place. To begin with, the sales figures for Nirvana’s second major-label release, Incesticide, were disappointing. The record was a collection of B-sides and covers, many of which had been recorded before Nevermind. Most of the band’s new fans were not prepared for the raw punk energy of this record, and it sold fewer than 100,000 copies. David Geffen of DGC records, the label which released both Nevermind and Incesticide, took a beating in the industry for allowing the band to release such unpolished work on the heels of their early success. Apparently, the reaction to Incesticide was so bad that Geffen tried to assert some control over the band’s next project, 1993’s In Utero. During the last few months before the record came out, the popular music press published article after article claiming that Cobain and producer Butch Vig were engaging in screaming matches and even fist-fights over the sound of the album. The band tried to fire Vig, but Geffen wouldn’t let them. Eventually, Vig and Cobain worked out their differences, and in his Rolling Stone interview with David Fricke (27 Jan. 1994) Cobain claimed to be satisfied with the product (37). Unfortunately for Cobain, the damage had been done; many fans of the band saw such squabbling over production values as unfit behavior for a punk.

These were not the only problems Nirvana faced trying to stay at the top. Other bands, particularly Pearl Jam and the Stone Temple Pilots, were beginning to carve out their own niches in the grunge market, and every record they sold was a Nirvana record left on the shelf. Other "punk" bands were beginning to make their marks as well. Two bands in particular, Green Day and the Offspring, spearheaded the return of more "garage" punk to the scene; both of these bands showed clear influences of the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols, the bands that defined 1970s British and American punk rock. I can understand why Kurt Cobain was not happy with this new development. Garage punk appropriated the angst and discontent of the 1990s from Cobain, and combined it with more melodic songs to create a more listenable misery.

On top of these factors, there was another kind of pressure generated from within the Seattle scene, but multiplied by the scene’s presence within the larger mass culture. Steve Fisk, a Seattle record producer, explains in the Seattle-scene documentary Hype, that "There’s an old Brains song, ‘Money Changes Everything.’ I think we adapted that to ‘Nirvana Changes Everything.’" Prior to 1992, when Nevermind topped the Billboard charts, most Seattle scene-sters seemed to believe that the wave of hype had ended. Dawn Anderson, editor of a Seattle fanzine called Backlash, says in Hype: "If you say the word ‘scene’ everybody rolls their eyes and laughs at you . . . so a lot of people thought it had reached its peak and by the end of the year we were all going to go back to doing what we were doing, go back to our little small-town utopia. In about 1990, we all went, ‘Oh good, it’s over.’" Of course, the explosion of Nirvana onto the national scene, coupled with the success of fellow Seattle bands Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and the Screaming Trees brought intense new attention to bear on a scene that didn’t even take itself very seriously.

The growth of Seattle-mania is well-documented; not only did the music itself become an object of national attention, but the "grunge" style became a fashion hit. Such disparate sources as the New York Times fashion section, GQ, and the J.C. Penney catalogue proclaimed the ascendance of the grunge uniform: beat-up canvas tennis shoes, ratty blue-jeans (or cut-offs during the summer) with long-johns underneath, a t-shirt with some unknown band’s logo on it, and a flannel shirt, tied around the waist in warm weather. Although Nirvana clearly wasn’t independently responsible for this kind of attention, it seems clear that their success was a focusing point for the tension that the country brought to bear on the scene, the scene brought to bear on itself, and ultimately that the scene brought to bear on the band. In many ways, the health of Nirvana became a sort of litmus test for the health of the scene.

The arrival of several new punk bands (Green Day, The Offspring, and others) partially signified the breakdown of Seattle’s national presence. Post-Cobain, several other events contributed to this process. Two of Seattle’s most successful bands, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, broke up within two years of Cobain’s death. Pearl Jam, who actually sold more records than Nirvana, has taken a turn away from grunge, towards more melodic and less socially-conscious music. And we might ask, what did the scene accomplish during its tenure as the mecca of the rock music world? Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam says in Hype:

If all this influence that this part of the country has and this musical scene had, if it doesn’t do anything with it, that would be the tragedy. If it doesn’t do something with it, like make some kind of change or make some kind of difference, this group of people who feels this certain way, this group of people who could fix these certain things that the underdogs we’ve lived with, we’ve all met, if they finally get to the forefront and nothing comes of it, that would be the tragedy.

But the news isn’t all bad. Years after the death of Kurt Cobain, those of us who follow popular culture and youth subcultures are still looking at his career and his suicide as representations of the zeitgeist of the early 1990s. The mood seems to have improved since 1994 as more and more people in their twenties have begun to reject the "Generation X" label, and very possibly, Cobain’s suicide has something to do with that. Those who were captivated by his songs saw their leader take himself out of the rat race, and the world did not end. Some saw his suicide as a betrayal; he represented a generation on the public stage and chose to give up that position. Some saw his suicide as a tragedy; a man with the world in the palm of his hand let it all go because he couldn’t handle the pressures of fame. Some saw his suicide as liberating; the man who most powerfully articulated a subculture’s blackness and hopelessness was gone. Whichever way we read the suicide of Kurt Cobain, we cannot underestimate his influence on the youth culture of this country, and on popular music around the world. In his place in Heaven, or his cold, dark corner of Hell, he can be assured that his life and death have meant at least something to somebody, which is more than he seems ever to have hoped for.

Seth Kahn
The Writing Program
Syracuse University
239 H.B. Crouse Hall
Syracuse, NY 13210
 
 

Cobain, Kurt. Suicide Note. 8 April 1994.

Dahl, Dick. "Is It Only Rock ‘N’ Roll?" Utne Reader May/June 1992: 42-43.

Fricke, David. "Heart-shaped Noise." Rolling Stone 2 June 1994: 63-69.

—. "Kurt Cobain: the Rolling Stone Interview." Rolling Stone 27 January 1994: 34-42.

Handy, Bruce. "Never Mind." Time 18 April 1994: 70-72.

Hornblower, Margaret. "Great xpectations: slackers? Hardly." Time 9 June 1997: 58.

Hype. Dir. Doug Pray. Republic Pictures, 1997.

Neely, Kim. "Nirvana Tops the Album Chart." Rolling Stone 20 February 1992: 15-16.

Nirvana. In Utero. DGC 24607, 1993.

—. Nevermind. DGC 24425, 1991.

Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1995.

Ross, Alex. "Generation Exit." New Yorker 25 April 1994: 102-106.

Star, Alexander. "Teen Spirit." The New Republic 2 May 1994: 42.

Tilsner, Julie. "From Trash Can Straight to Seventh Avenue." Business Week 22 May 1993: 39.