Generation Exit: Kurt Cobain
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, April 25, 1994
When Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the band Nirvana, killed himself two weeks ago with a shotgun blast to the head, major media outlets gave the story wide play and warmed to its significance. Dan Rather led off rather hesitantly, his face full of dim amazement as he read aloud such phrases as "the Seattle sound" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit." But ABC ventured bravely into interpretation, explaining the grunge phenomenon to "people over thirty" and obtaining one man-in-the-street reaction. "When you reach that kind of fame and you're still miserable, there's something wrong," a long-haired stoner-looking dude observed. And NBC's reporter ambitiously invoked "the violence, the drugs, and the diminished opportunities of an entire generation," with Tom Brokaw appending a regretful smirk. This was only the evening of the first day: the newsstands are now heavy with fresh musings on the latest lost generation, the twilit twentysomethings, the new unhappiness.
From the outset of his career, the desperately individualistic Cobain was caught in a great media babble about grunge style and twentysomething discontent. His excruciatingly personal, self-reflective songs became exhibits in the nation's ongoing symposium on generational identity—a fruitless project blending the principles of sociology and astrology. Those of us at the receiving end of "Generation X" theories find them infuriating enough; Cobain, hounded with titles like "Crown Prince of Generation X," buckled under them. He was loudly and publicly tormented by his notoriety, his influence, his importance. Everything written about him and his wife Courtney Love seemed to wound him in some way. "I do not want what I have got," he sang on his last album, yearning for oblivion of one kind or another.
And yet he chose a way of death guaranteed to bring down an avalanche of prying analytical chatter far in excess of anything he had experienced while he was alive. This is the contradictory allure of suicide, to leave the chattering world behind and yet to stage-manage the exit so that one is talked about in the right way. This was also the paradox of Cobain's bizarre pop-star career—his choice both to abandon everyday life and to try to cast some larger spell over it. He thought he could appropriate blank categories like Generation X and alternative culture and fill them with the earnest ideals of the punk-rock subculture from which he came. He thought he could take the road less traveled by and then convince everyone to follow him. It's amazing he got as far as he did.
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Alternative: a breathtakingly meaningless word, the emptiest cultural category imaginable. It proposes that the Establishment is reprehensible, but that our substitute Establishment can somehow blissfully co-exist with theirs on the same commercial playing-field. It differs from sixties notions of counterculture insofar as no one took it seriously even at the beginning; it sold out as a matter of principle. MTV, the video clubhouse that brought the Nirvanamania to fever pitch, seized on the alternative label was a way to laterally diversify its offerings, much as soft drink companies seek to invent new flavors. The aesthetic microscope has not been invented that could find a really significant difference between an alternative band like Pearl Jam and the regular-guy rock that it supposedly replaces.
Alternative music in the 90's claims descent from the punk-rock movement that traversed America in the 1970's and 80's. The claim is false because punk in its pure form disavowed commercial success. On the surface, it was a motley array of youth subcultures: high-school misfits of all kinds, skateboard kids, hardcore skinheads, doped-out post-collegiate slackers, whatever. Its peculiar obsession was musical autonomy: independent labels, clubs installed in suburban garages and warehouses, flyers and fanzines Xeroxed after hours. Some of the music was vulgar and dumb, some of it brilliantly inventive; rock finally had a viable avant-garde. In the 80's, this "do-it-yourself" network solidified into independent or "indie" rock, anchored on the galaxy of college-rock stations and alternative newspapers. Dumbness persisted, but there were always scattered bands picking out weird, rich chords and giving no thought to a major-label future.
Nirvana, which frequented indie-rock scenes in Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle, Washington before blundering into the mainstream, was perfectly poised between the margin and the center. The band didn't have to dilute itself to make the transition, because its brand of "grunge rock" already drew more on the thunderous tread of hard rock and heavy metal than on the clean, fast, matter-of-fact attack of punk or hardcore. Where punk and indie bands made vocals secondary to the disordered clamor of guitars, Nirvana depended on Cobain's resonantly snarling voice, an instrument full of commercial potential from the start. But the singer was resolutely punk in spirit. He undermined his own publicity campaigns and used his commercial clout to support lesser-known bands; he was planning to start his own label, Exploitation Records, and distribute the records himself while on tour.
The songs on Nirvana's breakthrough second album, "Nevermind," walked a difficult line between punk form and pop content. For the most part, they triumphed, and more than that they struck a nerve, not only with trend-seeking kids but with people in their twenties or older who recognized the mix of components that went into the music. Dave Grohl, the dead-on drummer who kept Nirvana on an even keel, has a pragmatic view of his band's appeal: "The songs were catchy and they were simple, just like an ABC song when you were a kid." Cobain was a close, direct presence, everyone's friendless friend. Despite their sometimes messy roar, the songs were cunningly crafted. They had a seductive way of switching midstream from plaintive meditation to all-out frenzy. If people still listen to Nirvana ten years from now, it will be on the strength of the music, not Cobain's nascent martyr legend.
It was in the fall of 1991 that Nirvana mysteriously took hold of the nation's youth consciousness and began selling records in the millions. It's best not to analyze this sudden popularity too closely; as Michael Azerrad points out in "Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana," the kind of instantaneous word-of-mouth sensation that lifted the band to the top of the charts also buoyed the careers of such differently talented personalities as Peter Frampton and Vanilla Ice. Adolescents are an omnipotent commercial force precisely because their tastes are so mercurial. In the deep dusk of the Bush administration, portions 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.
Cobain was simultaneously irritated and fascinated by the randomness of his new audience. He lashed out the "jock numbskulls, frat boys, and metal kids" (in Azerrad's words) who jammed clubs and arenas for his post-"Nevermind" tours. But he also liked the idea of bending their minds toward his own punk ideals and left-leaning politics: "I wanted to fool people at first. I wanted people to think that we were no different than Guns n' Roses. Because that way they would listen to the music first, accept us, and then maybe start listening to a few things that we had to say." After the initial period of fame, he let loose with social messages, not as heavy-handed or earnest as R.E.M.'s but carefully aimed. He was happy to discover that high schools were divided between Nirvana kids and Guns n' Roses kids.
The zeal for subversion was well meant, but naive to the point of delusion. By condemning racists, sexists, and homophobes in his audiences, he may have promoted the cause of politically correct language in certain high-school cliques, but he did not and could not attack the deep-seated prejudices smoldering beneath that language. When he declared himself "gay in spirit," as he did in an interview with the gay weekly "The Advocate," he made a political toy out of fragile identity. Try imagining yourself as a "Nirvana kid" in high school who thinks he might really be gay--will it be any help that your friends are running around saying "yeah, fags are cool" or spray-painting "God is gay" on walls, as Cobain did in high school? Disavowals of masculine aggression rang false alongside a stage show that dealt in sonic aggression and equipment-smashing mayhem.
The business of social engineering through rock lyrics is an impossible one. Rock 'n' roll has never been and will never be a vehicle for social amelioration, despite many fond hopes. Music is robbed of its intentions and associations as it goes out into the great wide open; like a rumor passed through a crowd, it emerges utterly changed. Pop songs become the property of their fans and are marked with the circumstances of their consumption, not their creation. An unsought listenership can brand the music indelibly, as the Beatles discovered with "Helter Skelter." Or as Cobain discovered when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" played over the P.A. at a Guns 'n' Roses show in Madison Square Garden while women in the audience were ogled on giant video screens.
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In his suicide note, Cobain gestured toward all these crises, advertising his lack of passion and his disconnection from the broad rock audience. The story underneath is probably more simple and sad: he was trying to get off drugs and found himself helpless without their support. He leaned on drugs long before he became famous--the malevolent media circus of his last few years cannot be easily blamed. He always looked tired and haggard. The rest of the story lies between him and his dealer. It's easy to make too much of these inevitable chemical tragedies--witness the overexamined case of River Phoenix, whom some of us necrologized last November. Next time it will not shock me when a vulnerable, talented misfit approximately my age infiltrates celebrity culture, then dies playing the abusive games of rebellion. But it will make me just as sad.
Killing himself when and as he did, Cobain at least managed to deliver a final jolt to the rock world he loved and loathed. Rock stars are glamorized for dying young, but they aren't supposed to kill themselves on purpose. Greil Marcus' invaluable compendium, "Rock Death in the 1970's," records, among 115 untimely demises, dozens of drug mishaps and only a handful of suicides. A transcendent drug-induced descent is the preferred exit. Certainly, suicide puts a different light on his career; all the lyrics all look like suicide notes now ("What else could I write / I don't have the right / What else should I be / All apologies"). He made his death unrhapsodizable.
The rage we feel at suicides may be motivated by love, but it is the love that comes of possession, not compassion. It is society's urge to repossess the defective individual. The most mordant words on the subject are still John Donne's, in defense of righteous suicide: "No detestation nor dehortation against this sin of desperation (when it is a sin) can be too earnest. But yet since it may be without infidelity, it cannot be greater than that." This sin cannot be greater than our own urge to rationalize and allegorize the recently dead, especially those who were somehow faithful to themselves.
