The struggling identity of an icon: How Kurt Cobain suffered through high school
Despite how it may seem, Kurt Cobain didn’t always epitomise the tortured soul. In fact, his life seemed relatively normal until his parents got divorced, and he embarked on a downward spiral in both his personal and school life. From that moment, the future musician experienced the kind of turbulence that sparked other mental and physical problems, setting him on a path he would never come back from.
Still, Cobain never felt any sense of belonging, which only amplified when he started school. For most children, school is an adjustment that can take months to get used to, but Cobain’s innate vulnerability made the entire experience challenging from start to finish. The overarching feeling of being misunderstood immediately isolated him, making the idea of forming lasting relationships and connections almost impossible.
For most people, the most difficult aspect of school is the newfound sense of structure and authority, which, if this isn’t a natural part of home life, can be intense and hard to keep up with. Coming from a family that once seemed idealistic to one that suddenly had fragments at every corner, attending school became another mirror for Cobain’s imperfect life and how he couldn’t regain control, even in his most secure settings.
“I desperately wanted to have a classic, typical family,” Cobain told Jon Savage in 1993. The divorce left him unsure of how to pick up the pieces elsewhere, which meant that when he finally did grow closer to others at school, it wasn’t what he expected. “Because I had no friends, I ended up hanging out with girls a lot,” he shared, adding, “I always felt they weren’t treating me with respect, especially because women are totally oppressed.”
Revealing how normalised it was for schoolchildren to use derogatory words towards women set him off on a path of his own discovery, especially after listening to music by Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. While he did enjoy their melodies, something beneath the surface irked him, and it took him a while to realise that it was the underlying “sexism” they filtered into the songs, a hunch that started during his last couple of years of school.
Cobain’s outsider persona even once saw him gravitating towards another oppressed group, or rather a person, who was gay, but his mother soon shut down this burgeoning friendship because she viewed it as a bad influence on Cobain. Reflecting on the move to separate them as “homophobic”, Cobain said it was “devastating” because this new friend made him feel like he could “finally” be himself. After all, this was someone he “hugged” and felt “affectionate” towards, but his mother didn’t allow such luxuries.
Faced with an ongoing inability to connect with anybody at school and intelligence only he could understand, Cobain’s experiences were immensely ostracised, leading others to regard him as “weird” or, worse, unpredictable. Therefore, when punk finally emerged as a real force, Cobain felt a spark of belonging for the first time, knowing that others shared the same views as him. “[It said] everything. It was the anger that I felt. The alienation,” he said.
Soon enough, Cobain was able to put his own thoughts into writing, creating music that hinged on the authenticity of the punk ethos with a more sluggish and overtly downbeat demeanour. Grunge wasn’t just an outlet for the singer to platform his thoughts and experiences; it enabled him to feel connected for the first time in ways that perhaps no one will ever understand fully.
