Even In His Youth: Looking Back at Nirvana and Kurt Cobain

It’s 25 years since Kurt Cobain died. Killed by depression and addiction. The people that escaped 1994 have steadily wrinkled with entropy but Cobain, having taken the James Dean trade-off — a lifetime for a good-looking corpse — remains preserved, statued in time, receding into the distance while the rest of us float further out into space. The Rolling Stones continue to gather no moss, or are actively smothering themselves in it depending on who you ask — either way, they are still shedding skin and changing shape. Whereas Nirvana already feels like a sturdy, familiar furniture-piece in the collective memory. Rather than questionable late-career albums, experiments into new genres and sought-for reunions, Nirvana had an impromptu end that gave the band its final, unalterable form. Which can give them a feeling of unreality, especially for a fan like me born after ’94: a feeling like Nirvana were never a living, tangible presence at all but rather were always an object to be prodded, poked, idolised, touched, but — to steal a line from Ian Curtis — touched from a distance, further all the time.

But that first paragraph gives off the wrong idea. I don’t want to write an ‘objective’ overview of Nirvana (I’m sure Wikipedia has that covered). I ‘discovered’ them as a kid maybe six or seven years old. They were the music of my childhood and teenagerhood, the centrepiece at least. I’ve tried writing about them lots of times, but always get stuck between writing a personal remembrance about my own experience of the band and an overview of what Nirvana ‘meant’; but, honestly, Nirvana and me are so entangled in my head there’s no way to separate them. Hence this essay attempts a bit of both. Kristin Dombek writes that the fear of narcissism is itself a narcissism, and so maybe this intro-as-apology warning that what follows will include a lot about myself — some of it quite personal — is just my own narcissism on display; but to me there was no other way to write about Nirvana.

* * *

I have no ‘first memory’ of Nirvana. One day they were here and I couldn’t remember not knowing them — the way most things fall smoothly into existence when you’re young. In the corner of my parents’ living room was a shelf with CDs and VHS tapes and Playstation One games. Some had ‘18’ stamped across them which meant they weren’t for me (yet). To look at that shelf with young eyes: it pointed to how many things I’d missed, having been born too late for them; and to how much catching up I had to do. I took Nirvana, their greatest hits album, off the shelf after hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ through its constant MTV rotation. I hated every song on the album, bar ‘Teen Spirit’. But something inarticulable drew me back for another listen, and another… each listen a new song opened up to me, until I knew the lyrics and guitar riffs by heart.

The songs were doused in personality — in moody, angry energy, levelled out by Cobain’s vulnerability — and they were catchy without being annoying. They were dark too — maybe the first dark (i.e. non ‘kid-friendly’) thing I loved. But none of this is what I cared about at the time; I liked Nirvana hedonistically, I liked the sound. It’s only looking back that I can put reasons onto why they clicked for me. It’s strange, thinking of all the things my brain picked up on that I didn’t, all the unconscious perceptions that guided me when I thought I was just chasing what was fun. A brain clearly always knows more than the person it is inside of.

I’d go to school in a sweater-jacket because that’s the sort of thing Cobain wore. (Bought by my mum, so not quite rock’n’roll.) And I scoured early torrenting sites (LimeWire was my favourite) searching for bootleg recordings and neglected B-sides. If I’d been a less timid, more inventive kid maybe I’d have formed a Nirvana cover band, or any sort of band, or grown my hair long and wild and dyed it an ‘alternative’ colour, or found my own unique way to channel the rebellious spirit. But I felt naturally inclined to hide my interests and passions from others, finding a shame in being seen. Instead, I consumed as much Nirvana as I could and told everyone I knew about them, probably to an annoying degree, and over years ingrained it into my head that Cobain was the messiah, or at least the ‘personal Jesus’ Depeche Mode sang about. I took it as a given that there was something in Cobain’s story about how a person should be, about what a life should look like. Maybe culture really is the religion of the religionless: media stars in the place of idols and saints, fables replaced by rags-to-riches (and rise and fall, and sometimes rise again) stories, rituals in the form of live shows and award ceremonies, communion with people online brought together by shared personal taste.

I was defensive of Nirvana, like I was their only fan. I probably would have loved it if I was. There were other artists I liked, mostly contemporary — none of them measured up. In high school I overheard a table of popular kids talking about how good ‘Teen Spirit’ was, like it was a new, obscure song only they knew about, and one girl added that ‘Heart Shaped Box’ was good too — and it made me feel strangely done-over. It was as if a treasure chest I buried years before had been dug up and its contents shared out to everyone, who treated them too much like commodities and not with the sacredness I clearly thought they deserved. This isn’t a unique experience: the ‘I liked it before it was cool’ cliché is a cliché for a reason, and of course I didn’t even do that, arriving more than a decade late. My interest in Nirvana blurred the line between fandom and obsession but — thankfully — I was young and naïve and didn’t care.

These ‘formative influences’ can manifest as anything. I’m sure the reader can think back to their own. A videogame series, a filmmaker or fiction writer’s oeuvre, a hobby or sport or favourite hangout. Whatever it was that took you over completely — even if only for a short time — and in retrospect played an indispensable part in forming whoever it is you are. Pink Floyd sing of the ‘fritter and waste’ of unconscious youthful days: ‘Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town, waiting for someone or something to show you the way.’ We all latch onto these somethings and someones, none of us knowing the way. And, amid a culture-saturated childhood, rockstars are particularly enticing figures to project onto. My internal image of what angst is, of what dark emotions look like, of what rebellion and punk are, of what a rock band is and how an album should be put together, all have their roots in my idolisation of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. (I thought ‘never mind’ was spelled as one word until my late teens.) For a while they were the template I used to rigidly rate all other music. And to make sense of a lot more than just music.

A strange quirk of these formative obsessions is a need at some point to tear them down. To identify all their flaws, not with a calm critical eye but with the ferociousness of a messy breakup. To grow bigger than and transcend them, presumably as a way to grow bigger than and transcend an older version of yourself. I went through a period of rejecting Nirvana, thinking they were a lesser band than the artists who inspired them. (I’m partly to blame: if all this had happened in the days of Vinyl my Nirvana records would be unlistenable from being overplayed.) But I came back to them. At first as a nostalgia trip, then once again as a fan. If you can pass through the ‘tearing them down’ stage and still love your idols you’ll know your love isn’t naïve. I still love Nirvana, but there’s a sober clarity to it now, a mature understanding, albeit without the intensity one is capable of when young.

* * *

Like any musical ‘movement’, grunge meant more in marketing-speak than anywhere else. Alice in Chains and Soundgarden were heavy rock, sometimes veering into thrash metal, and Pearl Jam were stadium rockers. The closest to Nirvana was Hole, for obvious reasons. (For those coming at this blind: Hole’s frontwoman Courtney Love was Cobain’s wife.) Hole is the black sheep of the grunge family due to their frontwoman’s reputation, but their ’90s output is filled with good stuff.

Grunge was forged in Seattle and so — music being sensitive to place — the bands do have similarities. The cold, often snow-covered climate of Washington couldn’t help but produce unforgiving, dark, dangerous-sounding music. And small industrial towns like the one Cobain grew up in gave grunge a heavy, belligerent sound. Seattle is close to America’s North-Western-most point, it had no Summer of Love; Seattleites watched the counterculture on tv. (Cobain’s parents are sometime described as hippies but they were hippies more in spirit than in anything else.) The grunge sound, as much as it can be narrowed down, is grimy, hostile, understated and lo-fi, but with a sensitive, somewhat sombre, core. (They ditched the bravado and misogyny of ’80s hair metal.) Keith Richards later said Exile on Main Street — the 1972 Stones’ album often (rightly) voted their best — was the first grunge album. Which is true enough: Exile has the low-life, deadbeat, one-whiskey-too-many sound down perfectly, and none of The Stones’ hit singles on it, no anthems; it’s probably a better fit for the word grunge than any of the music that went on to be classified as such.

I’m sure some people suspect Nirvana’s fandom comes from the what if? that can’t help but hang over Cobain’s head. They only recorded three albums (a fitting beginning middle and end). And even counting their early lineups — when Cobain, bassist Krist Novelistic and whoever was drumming with them at the time called themselves Pen Cap Chew, Fecal Matter, and Ted Ed Fred, among other rubbish names — the band existed for less than a decade. But music isn’t a numbers game. An artist can record and tour consistently for decades, making a large amount of decent music, and never catch the lighting energy that bleeds out of every note of a Nirvana track. (Foo Fighters, for example.)

Take Cobain’s vocals. He wasn’t a great singer, in the technical sense of being able to hit the highest highs or lowest lows, but his voice naturally expressed his angst. Even if you can’t make out the words, the sound of Cobain’s voice gets the message across: it expresses the rage in Nirvana’s music, but also the timid, wounded heart guarded by that rage. People recognised a part of themselves in his voice. And that came organically: years spent fine-tuning your voice in singing lessons can do a lot of things but it can’t do that.

Admittedly I could sit here typing out gushing praise of Nirvana ad infinitum but what would be the use of that? Music criticism isn’t a numbers game either (at least it shouldn’t be). What were Nirvana doing and why did so many people respond so strongly to it?

Nirvana weren’t innovators. Of course in a strict sense nobody is. It’s often said creativity isn’t formed in a vacuum — so where does it come from? From reshaping, meshing-together, reinterpreting the past, which occurs whether the artist is aware she’s doing it or not. Eons ago the atoms that now make up your body made up stars in far-away galaxies and so too is every work of art constructed from the germ of countless ancestors, some obvious, some reborn in an upside-down way or altered beyond recognition. Nirvana’s music is open and loving about its influences. As was Cobain, who in interviews used every chance he got to talk up the obscure bands (Meat Puppets, The Melvins, Fang, The Breeders, The Vaselines…) that shaped his own sound, often giving them the best publicity they ever got. And Nirvana was a band heavy with influences. Cobain was two years old when Woodstock was rocking and he grew up in the ’70s, remembered by some as rock’s heyday. The punks tried to escape the world baby boomers created but ended up becoming a key part of it. Nirvana were still playing rock music that had easily traceable roots going back to the black Country & Blues artists Elvis ‘appropriated’. (An ancestry which would soon end, or at least wither. But that’s a whole different conversation. For a good take read Sasha Frere-Jones’s ‘A Paler Shade of White’.) Nirvana rose up inside a culture that had burnt itself out through over-production. They stood on the hilltop after the main procession had came and went, sifting through the debris, trying to make something out of it.

Here is the late Mark Fisher, a music critic and Marxist theorist: ‘In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché. The impasse that paralysed Cobain is precisely the one that Frederic Jameson described: like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in “a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles in the imaginary museum”.’ Through the decades rock and pop music, once domains of transgression, became so commercialised and hyper self-aware the whole thing began to eat itself. Nirvana didn’t respond with irony but played things straight, enjoying the experience of sculpting what could still be patched together out of materials leftover in the dead museum.

Cobain ends ‘Teen Spirit’ screaming ‘a denial, a denial, a denial’. But who is he denying? What is he opposed to? Everything, we might suppose. A denial of people, of society, of expectations, of making music that is good and original and that sells, a denial of rebelling, of not being able to rebel, of denial itself. Is this nihilism? Possibly, but nihilism typically breeds passivity and ennui — Nirvana were fired-up; emotion poured out of Cobain like blood from a gaping wound.

Cobain faced a problem young people are still trying to solve: how can you be rebellious in a world where the system you are rebelling against swallows up your rebellion, feeds off of it, and turns it into the sort of commodity you are raging against? (See: Black Mirror episode ‘Fifteen Million Merits’.) Punk is no longer rebellion, punk is a fashion style, an attitude, an industry of posters and merchandise, a marketing label bandied out to any corporate rock band who have even remotely ‘out there’ haircuts. Cobain was aware of this, even if he never found a way to escape it. For a Rolling Stone cover-shoot he wore a T-shirt that said, ‘Corporate magazines still suck’. Rolling Stone was the bestselling music mag in the world.

Years later, Iggy Pop wrote (of Cobain), ‘He was Johnny B. Goode. The last example I can think of within rock’n’roll where […] somebody who is truly nobody from nowhere reached out and touched the world.’ And here one of the many ironies that would engulf Cobain comes into view. He spoke to the nobodies from nowhere, being one himself, and yet he became one of those rare few who live out the American Dream, or at least something like it: small-town kid, no support from parents, weathers poverty and — by sheer talent and ambition — finds money, acclaim and success as the sort of rockstar he grew up dreaming of becoming. It’s rare, and seemingly getting rarer, that someone born without a slither of money or privilege finds a wide audience, and so no wonder young, struggling artists of each new generation feel an affinity for Cobain.

It’d probably be an exaggeration to call anyone a ‘rebel without a cause’, the world being so full of causes, but Cobain speaks to the feeling familiar in many people that — to steal Fisher’s wording — our rage is ‘objectless’. It is the anger of knowing things aren’t right but not knowing why, of not having a clue where to direct your anger but knowing it will have to be released somewhere. Or being told you have no right to be angry. Cobain’s music is built around this tension: the most common structure of a Nirvana song is a bipolar contrast between loud, fierce choruses and slower, quieter, sombre verses, an oscillation between violent outburst and wearying repression.

Cobain proposed calling Nirvana’s third album ‘Verse Chorus Verse’. He longed to leave the obviousness of this formula behind — but probably not too much, knowing how well it paid the bills. Nirvana’s music has an ‘obvious’ quality to it — their albums are unassuming and their worldview never doubts that punk rock is the answer — as if Nevermind and In Utero were the inevitable, deterministic conclusion of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones lighting the ’60s on fire. This obviousness can give Nirvana’s music a static, formulaic feeling, as if it were made out of plastic. Which, rather than being a flaw, might be the crucial element that draws so many people in. Let me explain.

In Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, another defining piece of ’90s culture, Vincent Vega (played by John Travolta) sits in a restaurant practically glued together out of pop culture: he admires the waitresses who are all impersonating dead Hollywood starlets, one is Marilyn Monroe, and he says, ‘It’s like a wax museum with a pulse’. He seems very at home there, because he himself feels like a wax imitation of a ‘real’ person, being a hitman whose profession ousts him from regular society and being a self-knowing meta-character in the Tarantinoverse. This restaurant scene is an on-the-nose exemplar of how all of Tarantino’s movies work: he moulds them out of the past, taking characters, scenes, camera angles, plotlines, lines of dialogue, from other movies, not hiding that he is doing it, championing these older works, going past the point of homage into being a patchworked Frankenstein’s monster, albeit a good-looking one, remixed into something new. But their newness seems to insist that it is impossible now to make something that is actually new.

In an entry included in his posthumously published journals Cobain writes, ‘I think there is a universal sense amongst our generation that everything has been said and done. True, but who cares, it could still be fun to pretend.’ (Earlier in the same entry, more cryptically but seemingly on the same theme, and without context, he writes, ‘An infrared light will simulate the sun in times of winter’.) Nirvana shows the struggle to feel and express things when you suspect that even your most deeply-felt emotions are made of plastic, fed into your system by an endless bombardment of advertising and schlock television.

Charles R. Cross’s book Cobain Unseen collects some of Cobain’s personal photographs and visual art. In one picture, taken from the passenger seat of a car being driven by his girlfriend-at-the-time Tracy, Cobain holds a wooden crucified Christ figure up to a McDonald’s. That was the world he was born into, where the sacredness and worship once reserved for religion had been transposed onto fast-food materialism. He looked at it all with a cynical yet absurdist gallows humour. (The line ‘Sell the kids for food’ from ‘In Bloom’ comes to mind.) Cobain also made collages, often out of cut-out images from magazines and newspapers. In one (also collected in Cross’s book) pictures of meat, lots of steaks, and a skeleton with the fleshy innards of its stomach on display, are mixed spasmodically with a batman figurine, cut-outs of pristine ’80s popstars, and a wall of dollar bills. Cobain was seemingly obsessed, or obsessively troubled, with the contrast between the real (expressed here in the mulchy innards of the body) and superficiality — unsurprising considering he spent the last few years of his life at the epicentre of a money-obsessed MTV-led music business. Nirvana’s music provides no answer as to escaping this bind. I no longer believe in art that provides answers, and I’m deeply suspicious of those that claim to. But Nirvana’s music is an expression of the problem itself, it helps us see that there is a problem; it is a playing out of Cobain’s struggle to create a gooey realness within the borders of commercial artificiality.

And it wasn’t just the music that seemed like a paean to the past, it was naturally occurring: can you imagine a more archetypally rock’n’roll existence than Cobain’s? He had a prodigiously voracious artistic drive from early childhood, he was kicked out by his mum at 17, among other dire circumstances (Cobain was living out of his car when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ released, sometimes sleeping in hospital waiting rooms), then came the generation-defining hit, the whirlwind media controversy, the marriage to a fellow rocker — a troubled diva at that — heroin addiction, dead at 27. No wonder he is the recipient of such a feral sort of idolisation, or that he is so easily romanticised: he was the fantasy-image of the rockstar come to life.

But, to backtrack a little, Cobain’s biggest influence was The Beatles. He grew up a Beatlemaniac, collecting and listening to everything they recorded by the time he was a teenager. Grunge might seem like anathema to the squeaky-clean, jack-the-lads pop of The Beatles but once the link has been pointed out it’s impossible not to hear it everywhere in Nirvana. A dark cloud hangs over Nirvana’s music due to Cobain’s suicide, allowing them to be mistaken for nihilistic death rockers, but the music is always catchy, melodic, fun. Their live albums are some of the best ever. Live in Leeds and Unplugged in New York are testament. They put on a show. (At least when they didn’t fall apart: there is a video on YouTube of Cobain being carried offstage by Krist Novelistic after collapsing, presumably from the toll of heroin addiction, and this was hardly a one-time occurence…) They were crowd-pleasers at heart. The anti-corporate, anti-commercial Slacker image that was constructed around them, and which they wilfully played along with, can’t hide the fact that Nevermind is one of the great works of pop-rock, as catchy and pumped-up as anything you’ll find on the charts.

Maybe that’s why they hit into the teenage zeitgeist. Young people deeply want to be understood, craving a connection raw enough to break through their adolescent bubble of ennui — and yet at the same time they don’t want be understood at all, they’d much rather have the walls up and the bedroom door closed, that way there’s no chance of being unwittingly coerced into being somebody else’s boring idea of what a person should be. Nevermind is filled with that same contradiction. There is darkness there. In the foreboding opening chords of ‘Come As You Are’, or Cobain’s singing in ‘Lounge Act’ which devolves into barely decipherable shrieking, or ‘Something in the Way’ ending the album on a sad, aching note. But it’s all so energetic and catchy. It is music that betrays its own intentions. The lyrics are often blatant contradictions, purposefully nonsensical. (‘We could plant a house, we could build a tree, I don’t even care, we could have all three’ from ‘Breed’.) Rock’n’roll songwriting has traditionally been a domain of storytellers, but Cobain’s writing is fractured and impressionistic, recalling Beat poets like Jack Kerouac or Willy Burroughs (who Cobain became friends with towards the end of his life). The lyrics keep the listener at a distance, where they can never be understood fully, not literally, but they make sense through mood and imagery.

How sad Cobain found ways to profit from his troubles but no way to extinguish them.

* * *

In the days after Cobain died reporters searched out his mother Wendy for comment. She said to one, ‘Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club.’ She meant ‘The 27 Club’, a long list of rock musicians who died at that age. It goes back to the pioneering blues artist Robert Johnson who legend says traded his soul to the devil on a country crossroads one night in exchange for his musical gifts. Cobain joined Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones, and later Amy Winehouse, among others.

The limited amount of music left behind by these artists (other than Jimi Hendrix who is still somehow releasing albums from the grave) doesn’t make them harder to love, it has the opposite effect: making you savour what is there all-the-more. Finding an obscure track that somehow passed you by is a momentous occasion. Fans of most artists never have to ration their love in this way, and so they spread it out thinly. But a Nirvana album, like an album by Joy Division or Amy Winehouse, isn’t just one in a seemingly endless line; the fact it is one of a small few gives it a heaviness it wouldn’t have otherwise, and fans will scrutinize it to a much greater degree.

If you see The 27 Club as a curse of coincidence then technically Cobain cheated on his entry. Most members died in the ’60s and ’70s and Cobain grew up a fan, not just of the artists but of the club itself. As a kid walking the streets with a schoolfriend Cobain said he would grow up to become a famous rockstar and die at 27. He turned 27 on February 20th and his body was found April 8th having possibly lay undiscovered for days. In between these dates, almost immediately after his birthday, he attempted suicide by overdosing on pills, putting him in a brief coma. Depression and addiction were undoubtedly the catalysts of his choice to end his life but his childhood comments, and the fact his mum knew about ‘that club’, imply he held an active desire to die at 27 and be the sort of ‘rock’n’roll suicide’ David Bowie sang about.

The allure of this sort of death is that you are (in the eyes of others) preserved in youthful form, and you get to die knowing your fame has been made brighter and given mystique by its too-soon end. It’s this, or watching your flame fizzle into zilch. Cobain’s suicide note contains these two haunting lines: ‘The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long,’ and ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away’. The latter is from a Neil Young song. There’s a telling anecdote in Charles R. Cross’ Cobain biography Heavier than Heaven describing one night before a Nirvana gig when Eddie Van Halen came to meet the band backstage. He was loaded on drugs and hardly making sense and before long he was on the floor, unable to get back up, shouting at everybody. It must have been a harrowing sight to see a man who’d once stood atop the music world looking like this and it made a lasting impression on everybody there. Cobain included. Don’t end up like that!

Cobain must have looked at his idols and saw they were either dead, wrinkled, selling-out making music their younger selves would have been ashamed of, or lying on the floor in front of him close to overdosing. Cobain’s suicide note hardly mentions personal problems, it talks mostly about his inability to find enjoyment in making music anymore. Some have pointed out that the note could have just as easily been Cobain’s resignation from Nirvana, or music in general, as from life. (Although most people pushing this idea tend to use it while making the case that Courtney Love killed Kurt, or at least concocted his killing.)

I’m aware the question most people will ask is, why would anybody want this? Why didn’t Cobain retire, live on royalties, do something, anything else? Is it not absurd to kill yourself to leave a good-looking corpse? You don’t get to look down on the candle-lit vigils, don’t get to watch your own funeral. I idolised Cobain’s death for years — for the majority of years I’ve been alive actually. I wanted the life of the tortured artist, struggling for years as a sort of penance, dying young. Fame is crucial to this formula because it gives wings to a death that would otherwise occur in miserable obscurity. It seems paradoxical but while we might not want to exist we do want to leave behind proof we existed. (The inverse of fame being notoriety — which is much easier to obtain — it’s unsurprising (but no less sickening) that some people choose to self-annihilate with an act — a mass shooting, a murder — that will have them remembered in infamy.)

I no longer want to die young and famous and I no longer find romance in The 27 Club or similar myths of self-destruction. At least not most days. But I understand the urge. 27 isn’t arbitrary, despite most members’ deaths being accidental (drugs were the main killer). It’s not an accepted milestone like 18 or 21 but psychologically 27 sits at the threshold between being young and being an adult. You won’t wake up on your 28th birthday feeling like everything is different but the continuum between adolescence and adulthood is a blurry one and 27 provides a common marker for many people.

There’s a podcast somewhere where Russell Brand says he was depressed and uninterested in staying alive most his life but at 27 he decided he would live. Maybe he felt he’d reached the age when if he was going to die he’d die now, and if not he’d choose definitely to live, rather than remaining stuck in a purgatorial state between wanting to live and wanting to die. And so desiring the artist’s death, the rock’n’roll suicide, is about denying adulthood, choosing to live in memory rather than in the world, and about holding onto these romantic images til death, rather than accepting we are to settle into ordinary, unsexy lives of ‘quiet desperation’ as we become slower, less animated versions of ourselves.

Here is something Cobain said, included in the documentary About a Son. ‘I kind of envy people at times who are blissfully happy, and a lot of those people aren’t bothered with complications of knowledge and everything else life has to offer. I know a lot of people who are simpletons you know. They’re very simple that they can enjoy their lives and be totally happy and secure with just watching sports on television and having a beer once in a while. So… and I’ve always felt too complicated so I kind of envy those people. I’m not saying that I’m smarter than most people. It’s just, I’m too sensitive. I wish sometimes I could just enjoy the simple things in life you know. And just forget about everything else’. (This is there in ‘All Apologies’ when he sings, ‘I wish I was like you, easily amused’.) People who feel the same recognise it in Nirvana’s music straight away, unconsciously. His problems weren’t greed or indulgence, you can hear people sing about those on the radio every day, his problems were too much empathy, too sensitive, expecting too much from the world. (He signs the suicide note, ‘Peace, love, empathy. Kurt Cobain.’)

And so the main allure of dying young and famous is that you get to be remembered and revered as a thing without having to actually do the whole living part of it. It is wrapped up in the desire to minimize life down into an outline, a Wikipedia entry, ticking off life’s contents like a checklist, rather than something you have to get through day in day out. To want that you’d have to think of life as never good enough, always painful, and have no doubts that it will stay that way.

I was going to suffer these sorts of thoughts and desires regardless of Nirvana, but they were what I associated them with. Our beliefs are never only abstract, they’re tied to people, events, places etc. and to change our beliefs we must severe ourselves from these things. That is why we find it so hard to let go of our beliefs, because they take parts of us with them when they go.

This isn’t an essay about recovering from mental illness; I’ve not recovered, I’m still figuring it out. But I’ve recovered from a lot of unhealthy ways of thinking. Which is big, and hardly talked about: how can you ever escape your demons if you’re still inhabiting the headspace they put you in? I’ll never have the fame or money that Cobain had, or the artistic credibility. But I can have a life, I can choose to, which he didn’t, thinking he couldn’t. Part of recovery is deciding that that is better.