Kurt

Not quite 20 years ago, Kurt Cobain, frontman and primary songwriter in the popular American rock band Nirvana, died. His death wasn’t heroic. It was terrifically ugly. And it was, inarguably, avoidable. To what extent nobody will ever know because Kurt isn’t around to offer anyone the opportunity to find out. He committed suicide, with a shotgun. He was 27.

What Cobain left behind was a broken family, a daughter who’d never know her father separated from an ever-expanding mythology, a riddle of questions unanswerable, three complete studio albums with Nirvana, and that’s about it. Those are the facts. Romanticising his death is ridiculous. NME realises as much, ostensibly at least, with its cover this week – a cartoon realisation of Kurt based on a popular poster of the man and band from the early 1990s, with the singer sporting thick-white-rimmed shades (I had the same poster on my wall as a teenager) – stating that it was “always about the music”. Forget the drugs, and the gun, it proclaims. Except, you can’t. The drugs and the gun are so tied up with the music that they’re impossible to ignore.

“And I swear that I don’t have a gun / No I don’t have a gun.”

‘Come As You Are’, 1991

“Come on over, and shoot the shit.”

‘Aneursym’, 1991

“My heart is broke / But I have some glue.”

‘Dumb’, 1993

And so on.

Kerrang! also features Kurt on this week’s cover. “Kurt speaks,” it claims. Well, he hasn’t for 20 years, but go on. “His life in his own words.” His life, towards the end, was one of pain: of agonising stomach cramps, chronic bronchitis and scoliosis. Kurt was a tiny man, just five-feet-seven. He weighed under nine stone. Type these details into the NHS’s BMI calculator and it’ll tell you Kurt was at the low end of the healthy range for an adult male of 27 – close to underweight, but just shy enough to sit in the green. Of course, such an assessment doesn’t factor the man’s steady diet of heroin. Large quantities of the drug were in his blood at the time of his death: sometime on April 5th, 1994.

Nothing above is unknown. Kurt Cobain took drugs. He might have done so to curb a pain he felt that he’d carried for years prior to realising he could self-medicate with illegal substances. He might have done so for other reasons. But drugs didn’t kill him. A conspiracy didn’t kill him. Courtney Love didn’t kill him. Myriad factors, consistently unhappy ones, combined to convince him that death was the solution to his ills. He tried rehab, and left. He married, and had a child. He left them. He worked beside two of the best friends he’d ever made in a band adored the world over, a band that achieved a resonance with a public in a way that so few do. He turned his back on that, locked himself away, and took himself away.

The only things that can be written, anew, on the life and death of Kurt Cobain are the memories you hold within yourself.

Personally, Nirvana meant a lot to me when I was 12, when I was 13. I taped copies of ‘Nevermind’ and ‘In Utero’, ‘Bleach’ and the ‘Incesticide’ collection, from my friend, who himself had

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