Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain: The Melody Under the Noise

The note he left in April 1994 was addressed to Boddah, the imaginary friend he had invented as a small boy in Aberdeen, Washington. In it he wrote that he had not "felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing ... for too many years now." He was twenty-seven, three years past the album that had rearranged American rock, and the thing he was mourning was not fame or money. It was the pleasure of hearing a tune.

Aberdeen

He was born on 20 February 1967 to Wendy Fradenburg, a waitress, and Donald Cobain, a mechanic, in a logging town on the Washington coast. His aunt Mari remembered him singing at two. There was music on both sides — an uncle in the Beachcombers, a great-uncle who had been an Irish tenor.

The break came when he was nine and his parents divorced. He talked about it for the rest of his life as the hinge of his character; he said he felt ashamed of his parents and wanted, badly, a typical family and the security that came with one. Those who knew him described the change bluntly: he became defiant and withdrawn. On his fourteenth birthday he was given a guitar.

Novoselic, and Months of Persuasion

He met Krist Novoselic in high school, through the practice space the Melvins used. Novoselic took months of persuading before he agreed to start a band. They ran through drummers — Chad Channing played on the first record — until Dave Grohl arrived in 1990 and the definitive line-up existed.

*Bleach*, recorded for Sub Pop and released in 1989, is sludge and volume: a regional record for a regional scene. Then Cobain fired Channing, hired Grohl, and went to work with the producer Butch Vig.

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Nevermind

*Nevermind* came out in 1991 and did something nobody in the American independent scene had thought possible: it took the aesthetics of hardcore punk — the guitar tone, the refusal, the disgust — and put them on daytime radio, on the back of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nirvana have since sold more than 75 million albums. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's account credits the band with rejecting the bloated commercial production of the late 1980s and replacing it with punk aesthetics and melodic intensity.

The correction was *In Utero* in 1993, abrasive where its predecessor was polished, and largely about what the previous two years had done to him. By then he was, whether he liked it or not, the designated voice of a generation.

He did not like it. "When you're in the public eye," he said, "you have no choice but to be raped over and over again – they'll take every ounce of blood out of you until you're exhausted."

Politics He Actually Held

The convenient version of Cobain is a passive victim of celebrity. The record shows someone with specific and combative positions. He was loudly against sexism, racism, sexual assault and homophobia. He played a gay rights benefit opposing Oregon's Ballot Measure 9 in 1992. Asked in October that year whether he was gay, he answered: "If I wasn't attracted to Courtney, I'd be a bisexual," and he described himself as definitely gay in spirit, wearing a shirt reading "God Is Gay." Nirvana joined the pro-choice Rock for Choice campaign, and Cobain took death threats from anti-abortion activists for it.

The Stomach and the Needle

He had chronic bronchitis and an undiagnosed stomach condition that caused him severe, continuous pain. In 1993 he told the journalist Jon Savage the pain was "psychosomatic, it's all from anger. And screaming." He had first used heroin in 1986 and was addicted by late 1991, describing it as self-medication for the stomach — though his friend Buzz Osborne argued the causation ran the other way, and that the heroin was producing the vomiting Cobain blamed on his gut.

He married Courtney Love on Waikiki Beach on 24 February 1992, wearing green pyjamas because he was, he said, too lazy to put on a tuxedo. Frances Bean was born that August. By March 1994 Love had watched him come close to dying of overdose on more than a dozen occasions.

Unplugged

The last great thing he did was sit down with an acoustic guitar. The *MTV Unplugged* session taped in late 1993 and released after his death is a set of mostly quiet songs and covers — David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World," and Lead Belly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," by the singer Cobain called "my absolute favorite of all time in music." Stripped of the distortion, the songs turn out to be built out of melody all the way down.

Why Kurt Is Called a Genius

The most useful fact about Cobain's writing is one that contradicts his reputation. Dave Grohl, who was in the room, said Cobain "believed that music comes first and lyrics second; he focused primarily on the melodies." The generation that adopted him as a confessional poet had the priority backwards. What he actually possessed was an instinct for tune — hooks of the plainest, most durable kind, of a sort more common in 1960s pop than in hardcore — and then the nerve to bury them under a guitar sound designed to keep anyone from noticing they were hooks. The loud-quiet-loud architecture of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" works because there is something worth waiting for underneath the noise. Take the noise away, as *Unplugged* did, and the songs stand up unaccompanied.

Add to that the voice, which David Fricke's induction essay called "grainy, searing," and a persona that read as unfaked. Lars Ulrich put his finger on the appeal: "With Kurt Cobain you felt you were connecting to the real person, not to a perception of who he was." Billy Corgan called him "the Michael Jordan of our generation."

The counter-case is substantial and should not be waved off. Cobain invented very little. The dynamics came from the Pixies, the guitar textures from Sonic Youth and the Melvins, the songcraft ambition from R.E.M. — all bands the Hall of Fame lists as his influences. He made four albums, one of which is a live acoustic set half-composed of other people's material. And the word "genius" attached to him with a speed that had a great deal to do with how he died: the journalist Paul Lester noted that the death triggered an immediate critical reappraisal and let "the myth-making machinery" go to work. A man who is beatified at twenty-seven never has to release a bad fourth record. The honest claim is narrower and still large: he was the best melodist his scene produced, and he found a way to smuggle pop songwriting past an audience that had sworn off pop.

Legacy

An electrician found his body at his house on Lake Washington Boulevard on 8 April 1994; the coroner put the death at around 5 April. Some seven thousand people gathered in Seattle for a public vigil two days later. Nirvana entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, their first year of eligibility, inducted by Michael Stipe. *Rolling Stone* has placed Cobain on its lists of the hundred greatest songwriters, guitarists and singers — the only person on the list who would have found all three embarrassing. The bands that followed him, from Foo Fighters to Billie Eilish, are still working with what he left.