Cobain never wanted to be the spokesman for a generation that doesn't mean much. In essence Nirvana transformed the 80's into the 90's.
"Smells like teen spirit" a political song that never mentions politics, an anthem whose lyrics can't be understood, a hugely popular hit that denounces commercialism, a collective shout of alienation, it was "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" for a new time and a new tribe of disaffected youth. It was a giant fuck-you, an immensely satisfying statement about the inability to be satisfied.
"I haven't felt the excitement...for too many years now."
"I must be one of those narcissists who only appreciate things when they're gone."
Suicide is an unanswerable act. It is said to be the one unforgivable sin, though our age has sought to forgive it by explaining it away in psychological or chemical terms. But suicide sends its own remorseless message. True, it is the ultimate cry of desperation, more harrowing than any scream Cobain unleashed in any of Nirvana's songs.
At 27, Kurt Cobain wanted to disappear, to erase himself, to become nothing.
Anger truly can be power.
Integrity is a heavy burden for those trying to scale the charts.
He never had a childhood friend and steadily developed a hatred for the macho, guns-and-booze posturing around him.
More than sounding like us vs. them, Nevermind sounds like me vs. you.
Nirvana has taken fans to an edge they seldom inch toward.
"No one wants to be under someone else's control."
VANDALISM: AS BEAUTIFUL AS A ROCK IN A COP'S FACE.
If there is a glimmer of hope in anything, you should support it.
The pinned pupils, sunken cheeks and scabbed sallow skin suggested something more serious than mere fatigue.
All drugs are a waste of time.
People are treating him like a god, and that pisses him off.
Like Lennon, he's using his music to scream out an unhappy childhood.
"I don't want to be a fucking spokesperson!"
There's no glamour in Nirvana, no glamour at all, in fact.
"I definitely have a problem with the average macho man."
Cobain was the sensitive sort, small for his age and uninterested in sports.
"I felt more and more alienated."
Everybody is watching everyone and judging, and they have their little slots they like everyone to stay in -- and he didn't.
He had life figured out really young. He knew life wasn't always fair.
He changed completely. I think he was ashamed. And he became very inward -- he just held everything in.
He is really a very angry person.
But Cobain is also sensitive, and sensitive people are often the angriest.
We thought he'd get over it. I wish we would have helped him out alittle more. He owes us nothing.
Either Kurt is going to create something that is an ornate masterpiece, or he is going to create something angey and filled with rage and confusion.
Listeners may not get the irony at all.
Overblown? Possibly. Over with? Definitely not.
"The two i's: isolation and inbreeding."
In Seattle, where no one honks his horn, to make noise is to make a statement.
And I am left with a final memory of Kurt, a pale, unshaven wraith in pajamas at a PJ Harvey show.
The members of Nirvana did not set out to become superstars, didn't expect to move millions of units, had no way to know that an entire generation was equally tired of being lied to -- by their parents, by their government and by the music on the radio. They set out simply to write songs that spoke of their experience of the world and that felt good when played. Loud.
Hindsight is like one of those original apples from the tree of knowledge: once you've tasted it, it stays in your gut and changes your vision forever.
To find the comfort in being sad, the strength in sometimes being weak, the messages in incoherence. His attempts to avoid the norm led Kurt toward a disappointingly common tragedy. But in his music, we can still find some new energy incubating, a hint of what kind of yes might have come after the no.
This is the way Nirvana's Kurt Cobain spells success: s-u-c-k-s-e-g-g-s.
If Generation Hex is ever going to have its own Lennon- Cobain is damn near it.
I remember thinking how incongruous it was that someone who seemed so passive and retiring could inspire so many people to walk on tacks around him.
There was an air of childlike compliance about him, as if he simply allowed himself to be swept along in whatever direction the current might take him.
I'll always think of Cobain the way he appeared to me that night -- as a lost Pisces who somehow, tragically, got caught in the undertow.
"I'm a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am."
But the roots of his angst, public and personal, go much deeper.
"Lennon was obviously disturbed. So I could relate to that."
"Do it once, and you may get away with it. Do it a hundred times. But you're gonna get it in the end."
He was identifiable only by his fingerprints.
Cobain had gone "cuckoo."
He was in full denial.
"Where are my friends when I need them?" "Why are my friends against me?"
Fans never knew the difference.
He was a walking time bomb, and no one could do anything about it.
He died a coward.
Kurt Cobain didn't die, neither was he ever born.
Born into a generation that doesn't want heroes but simply someone who understands, Cobain understood.
Cobain shattered the idea of what a rock star is supposed to be.
Hope is something you trick yourself with to get through the true hopelessness of life.
Suicide, especially one as violent as Cobain's, is the loudest possible invocation of silence; it's a perfectly clear way of turning your life into a mystery. His commitment to contradiction got him in the end, but even as he cut himself off forever, he was trying to make himself speak.
Kurt didn't have any friends anymore.
In the end though silence swallowed him alive.
But just as resilience is not easily measured, not all scars are visible to the naked eye. For some people, like Cobain, they can exist in a place inside the body where screams are born.
I hate to say it, but it was the perfect Aberdonian death.
To save yourself from a dark fate, you have to remove yourself from dark places. Sometimes, though, you might not remove yourself soon enough, and when that happens, the darkness lives with you. -- No matter how far you run or how hard you reach for release, the darkness, sooner or later, will claim you.
You can learn a lot of bad things when you are made to sleep under a bridge in your homeland, and some of those things can stay with you until the day you die.
Like most suicides, Kurt's provided plenty of hints: in retrospect, they were beyond cries for help -- they were announcements.
May we never forget how much we lost -- and how much he gave up -- to find it.
No one person can be an ongoing life-support system for another.
Kurt Cobain was a Pisces, the sign known as the dustbin of the zodiac. Most Pisces waver between extremes.
His suicide was a betrayal: He just walked.
It all comes down to a stillness at the end of a long chaos; a young man sitting alone in a room, looking out a window onto Lake Washington, getting high, writing his good-byes, pulling a trigger.
He was not supposed to commit suicide.