On a drizzly foggy Tuesday in Seattle, Washington, Kurt Cobain died. He was just 27 years old. It was April 5, 1994, and the Nirvana frontman’s body wouldn’t be discovered by authorities for another three days. The police ruled it a suicide.
This isn’t news to many people; rare is the occasion when Kurt Cobain is remembered without allusion to his tragic, premature end. Devotees of rock draw connections between Cobain and other iconic musicians and artists who also died young; Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse and others are forever linked as members of the ‘27 Club.’ The name draws out the common thread: none lived past the age of 27.
In his lifetime, Cobain’s music was made for the youth. Nirvana’s brand of grunge - that messy mix of distorted guitars, sludgy baselines and unpolished vocals, high-contrast songs with lyrics dripping in angst, rage and apathy - was never intended to be laidback, easy listening. It spoke, or rather, it rasped, growled and shouted to the latchkey kids coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Generation X was a new breed of American teenager, raised among rising divorce rates, witness to surging crack cocaine use, and taught, due to the AIDS epidemic, that sex could kill them.
Kurt Cobain performing at Reading Festival, 30th August 1992.
Though they’d been on the Seattle grunge scene since the ‘80s, Nirvana’s mainstream career was short. It started in 1991, with the release of their album Nevermind and ended in 1994 with Kurt’s death. Yet, during that time they enjoyed massive success, propelling grunge out of the underground music scene and becoming a voice for kids written off as disengaged cynical slackers. Much of their musical repertoire is, if you listen for it, mired in that place and time.
The hit song ‘Come As You Are’ includes the lyrics “come doused in mud / soaked in bleach.” These were taken from an ‘80s Seattle campaign to combat the transmission of HIV through contaminated needles.
"Bleach your works before you get stoned" slogan, used on an AIDS prevention poster in the 1980s in the United States. In addition to ‘Come As You Are’ ‘Bleach’ campaign slogans inspired Nirvana to name their debut indie album Bleach.
‘Scentless Apprentice’ was inspired by the protagonist of the 1985 novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, by Patrick Suskind. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ a sardonic call to arms for teenage rebellion, was inspired by the ‘Teen Spirit’ deodorant launched in the US in 1991 and marketed to teenage girls. It was the favourite deodorant of Cobain’s girlfriend at the time, Tobi Vail, drummer for the grunge band Bikini Kill. She graffitied the phrase “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a wall after a night of heavy drinking, inspiring the title for Nirvana’s best-known song.
The ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ Music Video captures the frenetic energy and disillusionment of youth culture with its grungy aesthetic and iconic imagery of moshing teenagers.
Despite these anchors, and with thirty years now past since Cobain’s death and Nirvana’s disbandment, their influence has remained. It has lasted longer than Cobain himself lived, and ten times as long as the band was on the global stage. Nirvana T-shirts and hoodies flood the online clothing retailer website, ASOS. Nevermind was in the top 40 best-selling vinyl albums of 2023. The song ‘Something in the Way,’ a melancholic stripped-down account of the period Cobain spent as a rough sleeper, achieved an 86% increase in Spotify streams after featuring on the soundtrack of The Batman (2022).
The Batman (2022) Trailer, featuring ‘Something in the Way’ by Nirvana.
Beyond the band, Cobain has achieved cult-hero status. Unsurprisingly, countless songs reference the singer or have been written about him, including ‘Tearjerker’ by Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘About a Boy’ by Patti Smith, ‘Cobain’ by Lil Peep (feat. Lil Tracy), and, of course, ‘Friend of a Friend’, written by Nirvana drummer, Dave Grohl, for his band Foo Fighters. In 2011, writers James McCarthy and Barbaby Legg compiled a graphic novel, Godspeed: The Kurt Cobain Graphic, documenting Cobain’s life and self-image. The artwork by Flameboy includes a striking cover, depicting Cobain as a fallen angel.
Drummer Dave Grohl, 1989. Grohl played with Nirvana and later went on to form the band Foo Fighters.
The origins of such a prolonged and romanticised image of Cobain are easy to trace, and even easier to relate to for audiences with a history of teenage angst. Kurt reported a happy childhood until his parents’ divorce aged nine, which - he made no secret of the fact - troubled him. He lived in a blue-collar suburb of Aberdeen, Washington, before moving between the houses of relatives, friends, and occasionally sleeping under bridges. He spent his teenage years engaging in petty vandalism and making music, using a suitcase and wooden spoons for drum kit on home-recorded music demos and finding his way onto Seattle’s underground music scene. Somewhere along the way, he began styling himself as ‘Kurdt Kobain’.
Kurt Cobain playing drums at an assembly at Montesano High School, 1981, Montesano, Washington, US.
As an adult, Cobain struggled with substance abuse, depression and chronic stomach pain. His relationship with Courtney Love, leader of grunge group, Hole, was a brief, drug-fuelled courtship resulting in a wedding (to which Cobain wore his pyjamas), a child welfare investigation into their daughter, and an arrest for domestic violence, a charge which Cobain and Love denied.
On the music scene, Nirvana and Cobain were known for being vocally outspoken against intolerance. The liner notes of the album Incesticide (1992) included the request:
At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.
Stories circulate of Cobain vandalising cars with the spray tag “God is Gay” and wearing dresses to shows to protest sexism. If Generation X, characterised for their indifference and disengagement, lionised a band with this outlook, it was almost inevitable that Millenials and Gen Z, known for their awareness and activism for social issues, would find value in it too. This, coupled with the perpetual prevalence of teenage angst, has been enough to cement a legacy.
Kurt Cobain, pictured in a dress on the cover of The Face Magazine, September 1993.
The two surviving members of Nirvana - drummer Grohl and bassist Krist Novoselic - cultivate and remain very much in control of their public image. By contrast, the band’s frontman, Cobain, has been left to the purview of the public imagination. Over thirty years, the idea of Kurt Cobain permeates Nirvana’s musical and cultural legacy, now more concept than man. At once aspirational, relatable, and a cautionary tale about the unstable nature of the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle, Cobain remains the poster child (literally, in some instances) of teenage angst, even after all this time.
Interested in reading more articles? Check out all our other pieces, and subscribe to our Substack for a weekly blog!
Comments