I can't tell you where I was when I learned Kurt Cobain had died. Maybe I was watching TV and heard some female voice teasing out a promo for Hard Copy: "Death of a Rock Star," or maybe I overheard an MTV news clip. Anyway, it wasn't immediately surprising.
Only a month earlier, news reports out of Rome announced that Cobain had slipped briefly into an alcohol- and drug-induced coma. The accompanying footage showed his wife Courtney Love, a gaunt figure in black, moving briskly through a stark hospital corridor as flashbulbs popped all around her. The story had a sordid kind of glamour, as overdose stories sometimes do, implying excess in the pursuit of pleasure.
So I figured Cobain had checked out like Belushi, or joined the illustrious club of 27-year-old rock stars-Jimi, Janis, and Jim-whose deaths had been somehow drug-related. But no. Cobain, I later learned, had gone out like Hemingway, that other supposed voice of a lost generation: He propped a shotgun against his temple and pulled the trigger.
I don't know why I cared. I liked but didn't love his music and had become annoyed (though it wasn't his fault) with the trite tag some had placed on him as the spokesman of his (and my) age group. At the same time, I understood the appeal. Whatever else he was, Cobain was genuine. And if it's too easy to call him a spokesman (as the mythmakers would have it), it's clear at least that he hit a nerve somewhere, that he was on to something, if only because so many of us seemed to see, reflected in his music, something of ourselves.
Ray Manzarek, who has some experience with rock mythology, having been a bandmate of Jim Morrison, was right of course when he said, "Kurt didn't speak for his generation. He spoke for himself. That's what poets do." But that statement ignores something important.
Stars don't rise on their own, because of some undeniable brilliance. They are selected. Ten years ago, in the heyday of hair bands like Motley Crue and Ratt, Cobain might never have made it out of Aberdeen, Washington. That he did, and in such a big way in the early 1990s, is testament to the fact that, as tortured as his songs were, people were ready to hear them.
It should be noted that Kurt Cobain wasn't really one of us. Poets almost never are. It's a clichˇ perhaps, but probably true, that whatever their posturing, they possess a deeper sensitivity than most, and tend more toward depression. The danger is that, in acknowledging that difference, sometimes we romanticize tragic outcomes, making martyrs of the merely disturbed.
Cobain, a man who reportedly talked often about death ("the way some people chat about the weather," according to one article), was from a family that had already experienced two suicides. Clearly, his problems went beyond a simple inability to deal with success or cope with modern society.
But if he wasn't actually like us, then at least he seemed to represent a part of us, articulating concerns that previously had not been articulated, being if not the voice then at least a voice for a generation that so far has been pandered too and targeted but rarely heard.
Coverage of the suicide has been telling, from the initial somber news reports (almost worth it just to hear Dan Rather say "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), to Hard Copy's lurid and clueless tale of "a life spinning out of control," to the River Phoenix-like accounts of The Star's Last Days in People and Entertainment Weekly to the more literary eulogies in The Village Voice and The New Yorker. Even Rush Limbaugh had his say, lambasting Cobain as a scruffy delinquent who had fooled everybody and offed himself out of weakness.
What has been going on, perhaps even in this article, is a process of mythmaking, of fashioning a coherent story from a private tragedy in order to make sense of the loss so many people feel. Even Limbaugh, as much as he missed the point, recognized something was up. Cobain's suicide seemed to mean something, although even now, no clear consensus has emerged as to what that something is.
And inevitably, it has become important for people to come to terms with the violent suicide of a man who lived the dream of so many desperate kids who thought they would be OK if only they could have what he had. He embodied people's aspirations in a time of diminishing opportunities and, almost appropriately, he self-destructed. Maybe he really was what everyone had been calling him for too long: the representative of his generation. But it took his death to prove it.
The disturbing thing is, Cobain's success was a symptom of his own destruction. He never would have touched such a chord in kids if he hadn't been so fucking out there, if he hadn't been writing suicide notes all along.
I'm not sure you can be successful in America right now without there being something really very wrong with you, because let's face it, there's something really very wrong with US, collectively speaking. How natural that our heroes take lithium when the rest of us act as though we ought to?