How Kurt Cobain found salvation through punk
For thousands of disillusioned kids in the early 1990s, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were a refuge.
A sonic shoulder to cry on; a loudhaler to shout through and a cosmic racket to channel in their efforts to lose themselves, explain their anxieties and grapple with their restless feelings and salvage their souls. It’s a lot of pressure to put on another person, or even a band of people, though. Who did Kurt Cobain have to when he needed salvation? Not his fans, that’s for sure.
But as much as he and his band were the figurehead of a new musical frontier, and the pinnacle of the early ’90s angsty youth movement, at least, amongst all the otherwise-insular white kids of the world, Kurt Cobain was himself just another fan, as well. Indeed, all great musicians start out as fans before finding their own voice.
Just like everyone who bought a ticket to see Nirvana and scream along with ‘Serve The Servants’ or ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in order to put words to the feelings they had but couldn’t fully yet express by themselves, so too had Cobain done the same before them with the musicians and artists who had inspired him to get singing in the first place.
Before he found the music that would go on to define and inspire his own sound so much, though, he first found and fell in love with—as everybody does or at least, should—The Beatles. Other mainstream interests followed, although his tastes began to skew towards the heavier and more far out sounds of groups like Led Zeppelin and even Kiss, but these were bands that everyone in his high school liked. These were bands that every kind of American liked, even.
As he got older, into his teens, as so often happens, Cobain started to feel detached from every other kid in America, or at least his high school, and tried to find music that reflected his feelings, rather than one that shaped the feelings of a nation. Knowing the kind of music that he went on to make, it’s no surprise that he found his refuge in the form of punk.
“The intensity, the aggression, the hatred” he said about the genre in a 1993 interview, “You could hear a singer just scream at the top of his lungs. I felt that way. I wanted to die. I wanted to kill. I wanted to smash things.”
Inspired and influenced by groups like Iggy and the Stooges, Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Slits, Cobain once described the genre’s ethos by saying that “punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.”
You’ve only got to listen to a few moments from any Nirvana live recording from the late 1980s or early ’90s to know that Cobain was practising what he preached, and preaching what he’d practised all those years as a young punk fan, as he sloppily screamed his way through any number of his songs. You can hear the desire to die and the thrill he would feel to kill in his voice on any given night.
Someone else who always played whatever they wanted, however they wanted, with as much sloppy but passionate abandon as you could hope to hear was Buzz Osborne, who became a particular favourite of the young Cobain and would go on to leave more than a passing formative inspiration on the Seattle singer. Osborne, a founding member of the sludge/metal/heavy rock groups Melvins and Fantômas, was the man who introduced Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic to Dave Grohl, and in the process brought the most famous Nirvana line-up into being.
