Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain (born February 20, 1967, Aberdeen, Washington, U.S.—died April 5, 1994, Seattle, Washington) was an American rock musician who rose to fame as the lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter for the seminal grunge band Nirvana.

Cobain had a generally happy childhood until his parents divorced when he was nine years old. After that event, he was frequently troubled and angry, and his emotional pain became a subject of, and catalyst for, much of his later music. As a teenager, he moved between various relatives’ houses, stayed with friends’ parents, and occasionally slept under bridges while he began to use drugs and take part in petty vandalism as forms of teenage rebellion. Cobain was musically inclined from an early age, and in the mid-1980s he began to play with members of the local “sludge rock” band the Melvins (who would themselves go on to earn a measure of national fame in the 1990s). In 1985 he created a homemade tape of some songs with the drummer of the Melvins that later caught the attention of local bassist Krist Novoselic. Cobain and Novoselic formed Nirvana in 1987 and thereafter recruited a series of drummers to record demo tapes with them and play small shows throughout the Northwest.

One of the group’s demo tapes found its way to Jonathan Poneman of the Seattle independent record label Sub Pop, which signed the band to produce its first single, “Love Buzz”, in 1988 and its first album, Bleach, in 1989. The album had a unique (and soon-to-be signature) sound that mixed the rawness of punk rock with pop hooks, and the group soon became a target of major record labels. With new drummer Dave Grohl (who joined the band in 1990) Nirvana released its major-label debut, Nevermind (1991), which featured the hit single “Smells like Teen Spirit”; it became the first alternative-rock album to achieve widespread popularity with a mainstream audience. Nevermind catapulted Nirvana to worldwide fame, and Cobain came to be hailed as the voice of his generation, a title that he was never comfortable with.

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In 1992 Cobain married Courtney Love, then the leader of the band Hole, and the couple had a daughter that same year. The following year Nirvana released its final studio album, In Utero, in which Cobain railed against his fame. Cobain had long suffered from depression and chronic stomach pain. He treated his issues with drugs: Cobain was a frequent user of heroin in the years after Nirvana’s breakthrough, and he took a variety of painkillers in an attempt to numb his constant stomach agony. In March 1994 he was hospitalized in Rome after overdosing and slipping into a coma in what was later characterized as a failed suicide attempt. One month later he snuck out of a Los Angeles-area drug treatment centre and returned to his Seattle home, where he shot and killed himself.

Cobain’s death marked, in many ways, the end of the brief grunge movement and was a signature event for many music fans of Generation X. He remained an icon of the era after his death and was the subject of a number of posthumous works, including the book Heavier than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (2001) by Charles R. Cross and the documentaries Kurt & Courtney (1998) and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). In addition, a collection of his journals was published in 2002. In 2014 Nirvana was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.