“He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he don’t know what it means…”
I’m not sure any episode of the podcast will ever be as difficult as this one.
As you can tell when you listen to the episode, talking about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana results in an endless stream of contradictions and conundrums. We talked about him for well over two hours (mercifully edited down for you people) and easily could have gone on for a few hours more. We barely scratched the surface.
Many efforts have been made over the years to get to know Kurt Cobain, the man, like the documentary Montage Of Heck and countless other films, books, articles, and so on. It is impossible to determine where, exactly, the human being ends and the legend begins. So much about his life seems so predestined, so written, that it is easy to get carried away in grandeur and mythology and forget that, for Cobain, the experience of his life was present tense, as it was unfolding. He couldn’t have known what Nirvana’s music would become, even it feels like, at some level, he always had some idea. He especially couldn’t have known how the world would respond to his untimely (but, strangely, also seemingly inevitable) death. And yet it all feels like it only could have gone this way if it were all planned.
As far as I can tell, my own history with Kurt Cobain begins on April 8, 1994. The first time I was aware of him by name, he was already a tragic figure, a legend whose pain and suffering seemed outside the scope of what most can imagine. (Whether or not they really were is another story.)
There is something unreachable about the music of Nevermind. No matter what meaning you apply to the lyrics, there is always something intangible you can’t quite grasp, like you’re only getting half the story. They mean so many things to so many people that it feels entirely wrong to apply a singular definition to any single word of this music. Many other artists are esoteric, with enigmatic lyrics that are open to interpretation, but that feels intentional on the part of the artist. With Cobain, it is as if he intended to deliver his message with concrete clarity, and yet we fall short of truly grasping what he meant.
It’s here that I run up against my problem in cogently speaking about Kurt Cobain as a human being. I know he was one. Yet for me (and many in my generation) he is an icon of near-biblical status. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a living, breathing Jesus Christ. Had I been born a few years earlier, I might have experienced him as many did in the moment — as a musician. A great artist, sure, but one who still had to live and breathe in this world. Had I been born a few years later, I would’ve been too young to pay any attention to the news of April 8, 1994, I wouldn’t have wondered who this man was, why everyone mourned him so, or what caused him to do such a thing. I would have come to his story too late to be a part of it, the way I experienced Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. As it is, my personal history with Kurt Cobain began at the exact moment his personal history had ended, the day he died.
In the coming years, I would hear a lot of Nirvana growing up. My chosen radio station (you could really only have one back then) was 107.7 The End, which played rock, grunge, and alternative from the 90s. Nirvana songs were about as popular as anything else ever was throughout this period, and still. “Come As You Are,” “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Dumb,” “Lithium,” “Polly,” “On A Plain,” “In Bloom,” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were always in that rotation, even though I wouldn’t have been able to identify them by name. Most, I probably couldn’t have said with any certainty were Nirvana. Moreso, there were many other songs by bands I hadn’t familiarized myself with, like Metallica and Pearl Jam, that all went into the same box. I kept up with the who’s who of new singles, but any music released before I started listening to the radio didn’t generally get called out by name. I suppose pretty much everyone else would have thought, “Well, of course that’s Nirvana.” I imagine the DJs at The End didn’t think there could possibly be some 15-year-old boy from Seattle out there who liked all of Nirvana’s music but needed someone to tell him what it was. (This is where Shazam could have saved me years of uncertainty.) 
In late 2002, the Nirvana compilation album was released. At this point, I was living in Los Angeles and listening to my own CDs and MP3s more than any radio station — I was also having a rather poppy moment in my history of musical appreciation. (Hey, this is when Britney and Christina were both really good! Don’t judge me.) I knew I liked Nirvana enough to enjoy a compilation album, so I purchased the CD and was able to parse out which songs from my youth actually were and were not Nirvana. Cutting out songs like “Alive” and “Black Hole Sun,” which are fine in their own right but don’t hold a candle to Cobain’s (in my humble opinion), allowed me to hone in on Cobain’s singular talent. It is perhaps because Cobain was such a chameleon in his subject matter that I hadn’t been able to pin down which tracks were his earlier. Listening to his music all together for the first time, I finally got a sense of his artistry and what people found so special about him.
At this point, I still didn’t care to dive into Cobain’s personal story. I knew the basics from my childhood — heroin and a shotgun. I enjoyed Nirvana’s music more or less apart from any appreciation of Cobain himself, much as I might listen to The Doors and enjoy the music without getting too caught up in the story behind any of it. I don’t generally like exploring music as an extension of an artist’s personal life, with few exceptions. I like to find my own meaning, and experience it as it relates to me.
But that doesn’t make for a very solid podcast episode. So for the first time, leading up to Episode 16, I had to do my Nirvana homework. I listened to Nevermind and In Utero, watched Montage Of Heck, and read up a bit on Cobain. The more I learned, the more I wondered: how does this inspired but deeply flawed drug addict reconcile with the esteemed artist who loomed over so much of my childhood?
The answers never exactly arrive, but discussing these questions with Becky and Seth made for a fascinating conversation, and one of my personal favorites in When We Were Young’s run. Cobain and his music are conundrums we’ll never get concrete answers to. As much as any one man can be, he was the voice of a generation. He probably changed the shape of music in the 90s, maybe even still. The fact that guns are mentioned in the first three tracks of his massive hit, Nevermind — all major singles — feels almost too convenient, given how he died. Somehow, the idea that he died “for our sins” has seeped into his legacy, even though he committed suicide. On some level, perhaps, he thought that’s why he was dying — he was rightfully fed up with a lot of this world. He suffered greatly, but he also seemed to prefer suffering to making an effort to get better. He wanted his music to be adored while he himself was ignored — or something like that. Cobain needed and craved admiration, but was too insecure to deal with the level of scrutiny it takes to be so recognized. A part of him is very vulnerable, relatable, and child-like, while another aspect feels ethereal and wise beyond words.
I don’t know what to make of Kurt Cobain, who in some ways is very much like me — sensitive, moody, an artist who grew up in the Seattle area — and in some ways is very much not. The fact that he became a heroin addict after an unstable, difficult childhood is not a surprise, but how did he come to be so ahead of his time on issues like gay equality or sexual assault? His lyrics are obscure enough that it’s difficult to paint him as an “LGBT ally” or an “advocate for women’s rights,” especially given that he died before either issue would be identified that way. Something about what he stood for feels less than innate — handed down to him, or predestined. Even though we’ve pored over his lyrics, drawings, and journals, we still don’t really have a solid grasp of what he was thinking. For some reason, he’s harder to pin down than just about anyone else.
Perhaps that’s all greatness is — being unclassifiable. Not fitting into any box, and instead forcing one to be built around you.
Nirvana is, of course, the sound of the 90s, feeling like an underline to all the angsty, Gen X art that appeared before and since. Previous podcast topics Seinfeld, Jagged Little Pill, and Trainspotting all captured this in some way — a reaction to the masculine, greed-is-good, middle class materialism of the 1980s. Seinfeld examined the petty problems of well-enough-off white people absent of any meaningful self-reflection; Jagged Little Pill was a woman speaking up against the “good girl” expectations placed upon her; Trainspotting, like Cobain, wondered if the antidote to capitalist mundanity was heroin and explored the price paid for such an escape.
But none of these works was quite as seismic at summing up the better half of the decade than Nirvana’s Nevermind, in part because its lyrics are obscure enough that they seem to be about everything all at once. I’ve previously struggled to understand exactly where Generation X’s rejection of mainstream Reagan-era values came from — it’s much easier to grasp the youthful unrest of the late 1960s in my mind, perhaps because I wasn’t alive yet. Yes, the 1980s wrought very bad things like the mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic and a crackdown on “crime” (AKA, minorities who committed even the most minor of crimes). But is this really what the largely white youth of the grunge movement was pushing back against? It’s hard to find much evidence to support this.
Cobain was born in 1967 and thus grew up in the 1970s, as part of the “latchkey generation” whose parents were supposedly too busy giving in to the temptations of the era to parent attentively. Certainly, an absence of familial love seems to be at least one driving factor of Cobain’s angst.
If I had to truly pick out just one overarching theme from Nevermind, though, it would be the selfishness of survival — and how much that disappointed Cobain, in others and then, ultimately, himself. That the act of living itself is destructive to the world around us, and at least some of the people around us. Getting ahead ourselves means others must be left behind. Cobain was, I think, disappointed in the selfishness he saw in the people around him, and unable to live with it in himself. Using heroin is self-destructive, but generally pretty harmless to everyone else, and it allowed him an escape.
In “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the titular teens (presumably) demand to be entertained. In “In Bloom,” the song’s subject likes Nirvana’s music without ever considering its intent (and also sells his kids for food?). In “Come As You Are,” the speaker urges you to be yourself… but only if it’s “as I want you to be.” “Lithium” is all about a character’s mutable moods and contradictory internal workings. “Polly” takes on the persona of a rapist and kidnapper who dispassionately uses a young girl for his own gratification. “Drain You” is all about the yucky, leech-like aspects of romantic relationships. “On A Plain” chorus contains the lyrics, “Love myself better than you.” In “Something in the Way,” the song that first clued me in to these theme, Cobain says, “It’s okay to eat fish ’cause they don’t have any feelings.”
These may be slightly reductive looks at the meaning behind these songs — there are many more layers of depth in each — but it’s the one truly unifying theme I was able to draw between songs that otherwise take on some many subjects, moods, and styles. Cobain seems to be more often criticizing his peers than the older generation his parents belonged to. In a way, we look at Nirvana as having kicked off the grunge movement with Nevermind — and yet, in Nevermind, Cobain is already seemingly criticizing the grunge movement. Again, Cobain seems to be writing lyrics based on a future he couldn’t possibly have known about yet.
As the story goes, Jesus Christ died for our sins — to make us all feel better about ourselves, I guess. He took on that burden rather graciously. Kurt Cobain also died as a result of the selfishness of man — the selfishness in others he couldn’t accept, and the selfishness in himself he couldn’t accept while judging everyone else. I think most of us feel some of what Cobain felt — guilt at merely being alive. If you’re reading my blog, you probably live in a first world country and have it pretty good. We know that there are thousands or millions across the globe suffering in various ways, without even some of the basic comforts we take for granted… and yet we live on without thinking too much about that, mostly. We can’t solve this problem ourselves, so maybe we do what little we can and move on, or maybe we don’t do anything and still move on. Either way, we don’t exhaust our mental and physical resources worrying about the pain everyone else is feeling.
This is all conjecture, of course; I can’t say with any certainty that this is what haunted Kurt Cobain, but it is the message I personally take away from his music. Nevermind is outwardly focused, giving it that anthemic, “voice of a generation” feel; many songs are about people who have little in common with Cobain. Often, he’s critiquing them by becoming them, imagining what they’re thinking and exposing how selfish or careless or petty they are, allowing us to be the judges. In In Utero, he was already focusing more on his own suffering, the way most artists do. In Utero is a terrific album with some great songs, including some of the most provocative and haunting singles of the 1990s. But for me, it falls short of the reach of Nevermind, which manages to be about everybody all at once. It seemed like Cobain was going out of his way to step into our shoes, see through our eyes, and understand us — and then, to his dismay, didn’t much like what he found.
The title of the album itself clues us in to what Cobain was getting at — the human instinct to shrug off the more hypocritical, destructive aspects of our quest for survival. When an unpleasant thought about our own inherent selfishness strikes up, most people immediately push it out of their heads, with an: “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This, itself, is a survival technique — we couldn’t move forward otherwise.
Kurt Cobain didn’t. He made art of out it.
We reap the benefits.
Make of that what you will.
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