20 years ago today the voice of my generation was silenced by his own hand. I remember it like it was yesterday, like my parents remember where they were when they heard that Kennedy had been assassinated, Lennon had been murdered, and from earlier in my generation the Challenger disaster. I was sitting in the lunch room at Boiling Springs High School in my usual seat with my usual guys, not having any idea that Kurt Cobain had just killed himself on the other side of the continent. When I found out a few days later that he had died, sitting in exactly the same place doing exactly the same thing, I managed to ask myself through the shock and pain one simple question that I still can't answer:
How could a man so beloved, so revered by every alienated young man in the country, the man who gave voice to everything we felt, have gone three days before anybody found his body?
When one speaks of music, you often hear about integrity, that they were what they wrote about. In that context Kurt Cobain had more integrity than any musician of all time. Every alienated rock star writes about depression, anger and sadness, it's their milieu. Not everybody writes a song titled "I Hate Myself And Want To Die" and follows through with it. It came through in his performances, every one of his songs were delivered by someone who sounded like they were breathing their last. Every lick on the guitar sounded like it came from a guy who was trying to destroy the instrument with his bare hands. When I heard this it was a revelation, someone who was as angry and alienated as I was. People like that didn't exist, did they?
And so Nirvana became my favorite band, remaining in the upper echelon to this day. The music still has the same impact every time I hear it. And yet, even as I listened to what amounted to album-length suicide notes, it never occurred to me that he would do it. All the signs were there, why didn't we see it? He was a dopesick, depressed man, and in the end, after all the cries for help he committed to record, he died alone, feeling unloved. He escaped from a rehab and nobody thought to check his home? Nobody?
He and I had more in common than I ever imagined. The difference is that he couldn't listen to himself and find solace in his music, whereas I and everybody like me did. His music affected an entire generation. It changed music forever, took us from the vacuousness of the '80s and set the tone for the '90s. Everybody since has been trying to capture the same lightning in a bottle and can't do it because they lack sincerity, something manifest in Nirvana songs. Who believes a rap star talking about poverty while rolling in a Bentley with half-million dollar earrings and a designer suit?
So, here we are, 20 years later. His death still affects me profoundly. And the lesson he taught me still lingers: there is always someone who cares about you, you need only extend your hand and someone will grab it. The tragedy is that he never learned that, and the world has been a poorer place for it. He was the voice of my generation, and nothing has ever been the same since he died. In a world saturated with Katy Perry/Lady Gaga/boy band vacuousness and hip-hop poseurs, we need someone like him to save us, again put a voice to what we are thinking. We're here, Kurt. We wish you were, too.
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