Kurt Cobain at 50 (republished) - Our Geek This Week

I wrote what follows on February 20, 2017, on what would have been Kurt Cobain’s 50th birthday. Obviously Kurt died by suicide at 27, a lifetime ago.

Part of the point of this blog is to preserve some of my writing in a place that is wholly mine, so I am reprinting it here; it originally appeared as a Facebook post.

Kurt Cobain would have been 57 today.

Kurt Cobain at 50

I remember so vividly the very first time I heard Nirvana on the radio. I was in my friend’s car, in the back seat, as the carload of teens I was in drove by the high school. I asked him to turn it up.

The opening riff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a clarion call, the reveille of a generation, the announcement of something…different, and oh so better than that shitty, hair metal that was polluting the air waves.

These were our Beatles/Stones/The Clash, all rolled into one and led by our own tragic anti-Lennon.

THIS was OUR music.

It was raw and powerful, at both times angry and vulnerable, adolescence turned into guitar riffs and crashing drums. It spoke to me, my friends, our entire generation.

It was a mess and it was perfect. Just like us.

Nothing was the same after that.

Of course not.

How could it be?

Every generation gets that one moment. This was ours.

Everything was new and wild and exciting and different and crazy and vivid and endless.

Until, it wasn’t.

Sadly, I also remember the night I heard that Cobain had died. I was at a classmate’s house, surrounded by people I didn’t really know or particularly like because I went there with my girlfriend and a couple of her friends. People were playing pool downstairs, but I was upstairs, just hanging around when Kurt Loader suddenly interrupted whatever video was playing with breaking news of Cobain’s death. The profile of the right side of Kurt’s face is still burned into my memory as it seemed to be the same image every news outlet was broadcasting.

How could this have happened? The shy, weird kid that sat in the back of the classroom that no one talked to had become one of the world’s biggest stars. Underdogs had won!

The world was different now, remember?

That’s not how this was supposed to end, another rock star dead at 27.

I mean, how could the man who had wiped away the spandex-covered clichés of rock become a cliché himself?

Now, I don’t say that as a slam against Kurt Cobain. I didn’t know the man or live with his demons. Suicide and mental illness are not something I can even pretend to understand.

Rather, I say it to illustrate how his death didn’t seem to make any sense. This was not the ending we had anticipated or prepared for. We expected something else. Things had changed, or so we had thought.

That’s not how we’re supposed to lose our heroes, our icons, or even our iconoclasts.

But we did.

And it wasn’t right.

It still isn’t.

We could play the game of, “well, if he were alive today maybe he would have faded into obscurity” or “Maybe if he hadn’t done it Nirvana wouldn’t have reached legendary status.”

Who knows? There’s no way to know.

I just know that personally, his music affected me.

His death affected me.

I would have liked to have seen what he would have done today.

At 50.

Happy birthday, Kurt. Rest in peace.