What is the legacy of Kurt Cobain?
Whenever I’m asked who my favourite band is, without fail, I answer, “Nirvana“, though it’s admittedly difficult for me to narrow down an exact explanation of why.
To consider where Nirvana’s leader, Kurt Cobain, rests today in the wider cultural consciousness is a difficult feat. Speaking personally, I was not alive at the same time that Cobain was, and am nowhere near an expert on the band’s discography or lore. Still, I can go on for ages about the reasons why Nirvana remains at the top of my list: the adrenaline of their sound, the brilliance of Cobain’s writing, key moments like their MTV Unplugged performance that persist, in my mind, as some of the most impactful live performances to date.
Maybe such adoration persists with age, in a bittersweet realisation: for instance, I am now the same age that Cobain was when Nevermind was released in 1991. To even try and conceptualise the amount of fame that he had to reckon with, the burden of expectation placed upon him, and the assumed trepidation he felt at such a young age, is something that sticks with me and, I think, begs a certain empathy that only comes with age.
Across generations, Cobain, in particular, remains the type of artist who resonated so deeply with each individual listener that to attempt to surmise his character’s memory would surely miss key elements of who he was. In Nirvana’s music, he is remembered for encapsulating the imperfect charm of grunge’s sound, a student of his classic rock and punk favourites that strived to harness a similar tone, while allowing the emotions that coursed through his lyrics to do the same in his guitar chords.
With this, to many people he was, without exaggeration, the so-called “voice of his generation” (however disdained such a label would come to be, by both himself and critics alike), communicating the darker aspects – including apathy, loneliness, anger, and physical and mental anguish – that defined Gen X with a painstaking glare.
On a more surface level, Cobain continues to be remembered in his literal image. Somewhat accidentally, he established an unofficial uniform of knitwear, torn denim and unruly hair that, over three decades later, is consistently repeated in both high fashion and everyday wear. From my vision, as someone two generations younger than him, his very being is synonymous with his era; it is nearly impossible to think of the 1990s without the blond-haired, blue-eyed singer with an unforgettable rasp of a voice coming to mind.
It is also difficult to ignore the likely fact that Cobain would be displeased with all that I have just mentioned. In the few years that Nirvana skyrocketed to fame, Cobain’s disdain for fame and the subsequent perceptions of him were made evident. “They’ll take every ounce of blood out of you until you’re exhausted,” he said of the public eye, to Flipside in 1992.
We hear Cobain’s scepticism and all-consuming discomfort in Nirvana’s final album, 1993’s In Utero, crafted as a sort of anti-Nevermind to remove from the “bore” of grunge that began to be felt within the band. Nevermind may have made Nirvana reluctant heroes of their time, but as a result, In Utero would seek to reclaim their story, wherever possible.
“Teenage angst has paid off well,” Cobain snarls in the opening line of the first track, ‘Serve The Servants’, “Now I’m bored and old.”
Across the album, Cobain dives into unforeseen depths of himself: ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ mourns the physical ailments that had plagued him for years and gone largely ignored. ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ invokes the morbid image of an “umbilical noose,” while ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ admits, “I love you for what I am not / I do not want what I have got.” ‘All Apologies’ and ‘Dumb’ are perhaps the two most tragic, as they outline Cobain’s discontents with himself and his perception, and his fears of the unknown.
With this, Cobain’s legacy may be remembered and solidified, most importantly, in his lyrics. Crucially, Cobain wanted to be remembered as a songwriter, before all else: no musicianship nor image weighed in comparison to the sentiments he wished to communicate through his lyrics.
In a way, Cobain’s wishes came true: in crafting songs that were vulnerable and unashamedly so, challenging traditional masculinity in the process. When we listen to any given Nirvana record, we have no question of Cobain’s sensitivity, both in an introverted sense and for the world around him. And, whether communicated in angered moments or ones more melodic, that very sensitivity was channelled.
Grunge harnessed an intrinsic, delicate tone in its lyrics that differed from, say, the hair metal of the decade of rock music that came before, and Cobain was one of the most pivotal in such a shift. With his words, then, and his signature screams that punctuated them, Nirvana’s music made space for rock music to hold a new kind of emotional depth.
“I’m such a nihilistic jerk half the time. I’m so fucking sarcastic at times, and then at other times I’m still vulnerable and so sincere,” Cobain once expressed, quoted by Michael Azerrad in Nirvana’s biography, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. “That’s pretty much how every song comes out – it’s like a mixture of both of them, and that’s pretty much how people my age are. I’m just as pissed off about the things that made me pissed off a few years ago. I’m pissed off about everything in general, so all these songs are pretty much about my battle with the things that piss me off.”
Alongside his customary anger that coursed through his lyrics, Cobain openly condemned racism, sexism and homophobia while rejecting the aforementioned tropes of masculinity that ran – and continue to run – dominant in rock culture, an imperative factor of his legacy that should be remembered. As he famously declared in the liner notes to Nirvana’s 1992 compilation album, Incesticide: “At this point, I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different colour, or women, please do this one favour for us – leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”
With this, Cobain’s legacy is defined by an overarching sense of authenticity, shown in the ways in which he remained outspoken and uncompromising in what he believed in. He may have written songs that he self-described as both sarcastic and sincere, but in all of the possible contradictory emotions, he showed them with an intense honesty that continues to resonate as deeply and hold as much weight as they did decades ago.
