Illustration by Lusco y Fusco
With his trademark sky-blue Fender Mustang guitar and godforsaken, angst-ridden scream of a voice, Kurt Cobain mobilized a generation of freaks and geeks in the early ‘90s, knocking Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard charts and chaperoning the mainstream into a new age of enlightenment fueled by punk and alternative rock.
For Generation X, Cobain and his band Nirvana’s music was the soundtrack to our adolescence, a calling card for the ostracized and the left-behind. The so-called “grunge” band from Seattle shouted a rallying cry for those of us who felt marginalized, taunted, or picked-on at school.
But Kurt Cobain didn’t want to be the spokesman for a generation. He didn’t even want to be famous. He just wanted to create great art. And that is what he did for a short time.
The band’s creative output spanned from 1989, with their scruffy debut Bleach, up until 1994’s apocalyptic diatribe In Utero. The whole of their catalog from their active years is comprised of three albums, a B-sides collection, and MTV’s Unplugged. Posthumous live albums and a box set of rarities complete the discography. That’s all we’ve gotten from Cobain. Each of those stepping-stones was different from the next, and each outstanding in its own special way.
But it was 1991’s Nevermind that solidified Nirvana’s fame.
Leading up to my discovery of Nirvana, in ‘91, I was listening to a lot of crappy dance music from the local pop radio station. It was the music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that first captured my attention. In it, Nirvana flew a flag of anarchy at full mast — and I listened up.
Everything changed with that chaos-filled video featuring kids slam-dancing to the music in a high school gym and Cobain shattering the fourth wall and intermingling with the audience while thrashing around like a carnivorous animal. It was primal, a complete 180 from the hair-metal- and bubblegum-pop-dominated ‘80s. Rock ‘n’ roll was dangerous again. I was in love with the music.
Nirvana is still my favorite band. They were my first foray into punk, a genre and philosophy that informs my ethos to this day. Their fog of distortion and feedback and loud-quiet-loud song motif always makes me feel tingly all over.
But the newly minted rock god’s career wasn’t full of kittens and rainbows like that of an ambitious, squeaky-clean pop star. There was a dark side hidden beneath the music: an addiction to heroin, and a painful, chronic upset-stomach condition. He was on the downslide from the very beginning, a tortured artist with a death wish.
And like the assassination of JFK for the baby boomers, I remember vividly where I was when I found out about Cobain’s suicide: hanging out in my high school bedroom reading a Rolling Stone cover story on Smashing Pumpkins while listening to Sonic Youth’s Dirty on my boombox and occasionally catching a glimpse of MTV, which played on my small TV, volume off.
I looked up to see Kurt Loder on the screen, stone-cold serious as he spoke straight to camera. There were no chyrons. When I looked up five minutes later, he was still there, so I knew something important must’ve happened, so I turned off my music and turned up the television. And that’s when I learned.
It was as if our “Pisces Jesus man” — to quote Cobain’s suicide note — had been crucified. I watched MTV intently, devastated at the day’s events.
April 5, 1994 — exactly 25 years ago today — Cobain was found dead in the Seattle home he shared with wife Courtney Love and his infant daughter, Frances Bean. Five days later, Love read Cobain’s suicide note via recording for all in the public to hear. The note ended with thankful language and was signed “Peace, Love, Empathy — Kurt Cobain.”
The weekend after Cobain’s death, MTV showed Nirvana’s Unplugged: Live In New York on a loop. I must’ve watched it eight times in the span of 48 hours. I was grieving.
Death was not something I had experienced yet in my life. I’ve been lucky to have healthy relatives, with no one dying until my grandmother passed a couple years later. But Cobain’s death was like a stain on my youthful naiveté, a reality check and a rite of passage. Death was real. And I took it personally.
Thirty to 70 percent of people who die by suicide have experienced depression, a hallmark of bipolar disorder, according to WebMD. In the years since his death, psychiatric nurse Bev Cobain has said in interviews that her cousin had bipolar disorder.
I have always felt a special connection to Kurt, as if he would have understood me more than anyone else could. He exercised empathy in a way that I strive to as well. Both of us have bipolar, both have struggled with addiction, and both are obviously obsessed with music. My bipolar brain also understands his seemingly nonsensical lyrics.
Maybe it was an early symptom of hypomania, but I felt that he alone truly got me. That his lyrics were speaking directly to me. Although I wasn’t diagnosed with bipolar until I was in my late 20s, even during my teen years, my bipolar brain was drawn to Kurt Cobain. He was an outsider who sang honestly about his feelings and strife, even if he was misunderstood. He stressed that it was OK to be not OK. For a young, gay geek who felt out of place in high school, his lyrics resonated with me radically.
The lyrics are poignantly bipolar. There is the depressive: “I miss the comfort in being sad” on “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” and “I think I’m dumb” in the song “Dumb.”
And there‘s the manic “Lithium”: “I’m so happy, ‘cause today I found my friends / they’re in my head.” Lithium refers to the most common drug used to treat bipolar disorder.
There’s the manic innuendo of “Pennyroyal Tea”: “I’m so tired I can’t sleep… I’m a liar and a thief.” Because in a manic state, there’s often a feeling of exhaustion but the ironic inability to sleep.
And, of course, more allusions to mania can be found on the iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in which odd word associations abound “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido.” Because when you’re manic you think everything you say, everthing your brain summons is genius no matter how bizarre it is.
On top of those, there is “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” whose lyrics allude to the irritability of bipolar, when he sings, “Bipolar opposites attract” and as he screams, “What is wrong with me?” over and over in the chorus like a mantra.
Esoteric lyrics and oxymorons abound in Nirvana’s catalog. Consider these lines from “Milk It”:
Look on the bright side suicide
Locked outside I’m on your side
Angel left wing, right wing, broken wing
Lack of iron and/or sleeping
Obituary birthday
Your scent is still here in my place of recovery
And Kurt Cobain was known to prefer being a private person even though his fame shot the moon. On “Scentless Apprentice” off In Utero, he yells “Ahhhhhhhhh! Get away!… Get away!… Get away!” Obviously communicating the need to be left alone, alone-time being an important need among us bipolar people.
A few years ago on this blog, I posed the question: Did Bipolar Disorder Kill Kurt Cobain? We know the weapon that caused his actual death and that he was severely addicted to heroin, which, as a downer, may have contributed to his depression. But did the cause of his death have deeper roots? While we can only speculate, greater circumstances may have been at work in the death of Kurt Cobain. And those who have bipolar are more likely than the general population to die by suicide.
Cobain left behind a massive legacy, having defined the ‘90s and remaining one of the biggest stars in rock ‘n’ roll history. I miss him. And millions of others do too.
In honor of Cobain and all that he gave us, I invite you to share your memories of Kurt and Nirvana in the comments.
Great post. Just finished reading Heavier Than Heaven. I’ll never forget the first time I heard a Nirvana song: I was in a car with a friend who was playing Lithium in our freshman year at college. Haven’t stopped listening since.