Kurt Cobain, who passed
away on 5 April 1994, Seattle, Washington, aged 27, was an American rock
musician who rose to fame as the lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter
for the seminal grunge band Nirvana.
Cobain had
a generally happy childhood until his parents divorced when he was nine years
old. After that event, he was frequently troubled and angry, and his emotional
pain became a subject of, and catalyst for, much of his later music.
As a teenager, he moved between various relatives’ houses, stayed with friends’
parents, and occasionally slept under bridges while he began to use drugs and
take part in petty vandalism as forms of teenage rebellion. Cobain was
musically inclined from an early age, and in the mid-1980s he began to play
with members of the local “sludge rock” band the Melvins (who would
themselves go on to earn a measure of national fame in the 1990s). In 1985 he
created a homemade tape of some songs with the drummer of the Melvins that
later caught the attention of local bassist Krist Novoselic. Cobain and
Novoselic formed Nirvana in 1987 and thereafter recruited a series of
drummers to record demo tapes with them and play small shows throughout
the Northwest.
One of
the group’s demo tapes found its way to Jonathan Poneman of the Seattle
independent record label Sub Pop, which signed the band to produce its
first single, “Love Buzz”, in 1988 and its first album, Bleach, in 1989. The
album had a unique (and soon-to-be signature) sound that mixed the rawness
of punk rock with pop hooks, and the group soon became a target of major
record labels. With new drummer Dave Grohl (who joined the band in 1990)
Nirvana released its major-label debut, Nevermind (1991), which featured
the hit single “Smells like Teen Spirit”; it became the first alternative-rock
album to achieve widespread popularity with a mainstream audience. Nevermind catapulted
Nirvana to worldwide fame, and Cobain came to be hailed as the voice of his
generation, a title that he was never comfortable with.
In 1992
Cobain married Courtney Love, then the leader of the band Hole, and the
couple had a daughter that same year. The following year Nirvana released its
final studio album, In Utero, in which Cobain railed against his fame.
Cobain had long suffered from depression and chronic stomach pain. He treated
his issues with drugs: Cobain was a frequent user of heroin in the years after
Nirvana’s breakthrough, and he took a variety of painkillers in an attempt to
numb his constant stomach agony. In March 1994 he was hospitalized in Rome
after overdosing and slipping into a coma in what was later characterized as
a failed suicide attempt. One month later he snuck out of a Los Angeles-area
drug treatment centre and returned to his Seattle home, where he shot and
killed himself.
Cobain’s
death marked, in many ways, the end of the brief grunge movement and was a
signature event for many music fans of Generation X. He remained an icon
of the era after his death and was the subject of a number of posthumous works,
including the book Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (2001)
by Charles R. Cross and the documentaries Kurt & Courtney (1998)
and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). In addition, a
collection of his journals was published in 2002. In 2014 Nirvana was inducted
to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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