Something in the way of letting Kurt Cobain go forever

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2024 (912 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last year, the indie rock supergroup Boygenius — singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus — appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a recreation an iconic cover from nearly three decades earlier: a January 1994 cover in which Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic of the pioneering grunge band Nirvana are posed wearing pinstripe corporate-America suits under the headline “Success doesn’t suck.” (A wink, perhaps, to gen X’s obsession with selling out.)

Kurt Cobain would die by suicide on April 5, 1994, at the age of 27, three months after that issue came out — an issue in which he tragically said he’d never been happier — and his body wouldn’t be discovered until April 8. Bridgers would be born four months after that, in August. Dacus and Baker were born in 1995.

In 2022, Something in the Way, arguably the most brooding — the most Kurt — song on Nirvana’s now-classic 1991 album Nevermind figured prominently in The Batman, which introduced a new Bruce Wayne for a new generation (Robert Pattinson, who was five years old when that album came out).

It’s hard to believe Cobain has been 30 years gone now — dead longer than he was alive. But then, he has never left our cultural consciousness. Cobain’s influence endures in large part, I suspect, because teenagers keep on discovering Nirvana.

Cobain is Forever 27, permanently embedded in youth culture.

He is always and will always be young. Nirvana can rightly be claimed by generation X as peers, but the band and its sensitive, troubled frontman who struggled with addiction and mental illness can also be claimed by generations after.

There’s a certain timelessness about his throat-cracking angst and sorrow, emotions that tend to be felt keenly by teenagers, a demographic that also knows all too well what it’s like to feel stupid and contagious. (There is also, let’s be honest, a certain timelessness about beautiful, brooding boys with greasy hair, decently progressive politics and good taste in music.)

And if you’re the type of teenager for whom Nirvana might be a favourite band — be it in 1994, in 2004, in 2014, even 2024 — then Nirvana (and Cobain) will likely leave a particularly lasting imprint on you.

Some of this is just how our brains work. Research suggests that the music we hear as teenagers quite literally sticks to our developing brains differently than music we hear later in our lives, which is why many people joke about their musical tastes not evolving much after that point.

Of course, the music you listened to when you were young isn’t necessarily music precisely from your youth. I was technically alive when it was still possible to see Nirvana live, but I was also a child; I didn’t discover Nirvana until I was a teenager and Cobain had already been gone for five years.

Listening to Nirvana now is a nostalgic portal to the past; it reminds me of what it was like to be a music-obsessed teenager and not a 39-year-old woman concerned about eating enough fibre.

So it surprises me not at all that Gen Zs — the oldest of which, by the way, will be turning 27 this year — have fallen for Cobain, though now they can buy their Nirvana T-shirts at H&M (I have one too, oh well, whatever, never mind).

In a Guardian piece about Cobain’s hold over a generation born after he died, many of those interviewed expressed a disbelief that their timelines didn’t overlap, “… a feeling that Nirvana are so big in their lives, so modern a cultural reference point that it’s odd their existences never crossed over,” Hannah Ewans writes. “Their experiences with Nirvana are too big to have been posthumous.”

Cobain and Nirvana are too big to really die, in other words. The things they love about Cobain are the things people have always loved about him — or, perhaps more accurately, romanticized about him.

His subversion of gender norms by wearing dresses. His sensitivity (he is, rather famously, a Pisces). His ability to write so vividly about the beauty in decay. And, of course, the intrigue, the sadness, the lore, the legend. Gen Zs might be nostalgic for an era they didn’t live through, and that I didn’t live through either, not really. But we’re all still able to be nostalgic for Nirvana because Nirvana is the soundtrack of our youths in some shape or form.

In the letter he left behind, Cobain quoted a Neil Young lyric, writing, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

It’s been 30 years. He may have burned out, in the end, but it’s hard to imagine him ever fading away.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com