Iggy Pop once explained the heartbreaking reason Kurt Cobain “had to die”
Throughout his lengthy career, Iggy Pop has flirted with the perils of rock ‘n’ roll superstardom and faced the dangerous side of the industry head-on. Thankfully, he’s survived the adversity thrown his way, but not everybody has been so lucky, and The Stooges frontman has witnessed enough horror stories to be scarred for life.
The tale of Kurt Cobain is one of the darkest moments in the history of contemporary music. Within a few years, he’d gone from being an obscure figure in the Seattle grunge scene to becoming a household name with Nirvana. Fame is profoundly unnatural, and it’s normal for artists like Cobain to feel uncomfortable with life in the public eye.
While many set out to see their name in lights, that was never on the agenda for Cobain, who made music because it was the only thing he knew how. He never wanted adoration from the masses, and when his level of popularity reached the stage where he could not leave his house without being mobbed.
Iggy was introduced to Nirvana before they were famous, and the first time he saw them in concert was a mind-blowing experience which lasted long in his memory. During an interview on MTV’s Actitud Punk Weekend in 2006, the former Stooges singer recalled: “In 1990, I was living in New York, and a guy told me about a really good band I better see. It was Nirvana.”
“They didn’t have any of the songs yet that made them famous later, not even anything that was on Bleach,” he added. “But they had a vibe, and the guy had something in his voice, something in the voice like a little devil troll and he played his guitar all hunched over like this, and I thought that guy’s got something that’s talking to me”.
Not soon later, as Iggy remembered: “They had his face all over the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and everybody was bowing down.” The rock icon also examined how the initial reaction to Nirvana was starkly different, but that all changed when they were suddenly thrown into the limelight and became reluctant megastars.
As Iggy knows all too well, the music industry has historically been full of parasites who cling to the success of others, which he believes was responsible for the death of Cobain.
He added: “It’s a terrible thing that this guy didn’t get to live his life and enjoy his time on earth more. And I think that’s because of the people around him, and I don’t mean just his wife, all of the people around him. He made too much money for too many people and became too valuable too soon. He had to die, and that’s how it works, and it’s not nice.”
While the comment stating Cobain “had to die” makes for uncomfortable reading, Iggy was speaking from experience. Unfortunately, the former Nirvana frontman wasn’t the first to collapse under the unfair demands of the music industry.
