Suicide Snark: Kurt Cobain, Cynicism and Twee

Twenty years ago, the most important rock and roll singer of his time was found dead from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. The shock of the Nirvana story has been worn out by the passage of time, and perhaps even more so by a commercial industry built on retelling that story. It's the same thing with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - we've all heard that song so many times now that it can be hard to hear it as meaningful or even fun anymore.

I don't want to add to that effect. I want that band and that music to continue to mean something. But for me to explain why, I have to write something about the story again, and I guess this anniversary is the time to do it.

News of Kurt Cobain's death broke on Friday, April 8, 1994. He had apparently been dead for a couple of days before his body was found by an electrician who came to the house. I always found that detail of the story incredibly sad: Millions of music fans around the world wanted to see him, his wife had hired a private detective to find him, and yet his dead body lay in his own house for a couple of days before a stranger found it by accident. 

But you know all that story.

For what it's worth, I was the person who first alerted the San Francisco Chronicle to the news. I was an editorial assistant at the paper, and I took a minute to look on the AP wires. We didn't have the Web in those days, but sometimes I'd look up my favorite subjects on the wires by typing the subject in all caps. That day I happened to look up "NIRVANA" and saw a two-sentence AP report that a body had been found in Cobain's house in Seattle. I passed it on to the editor of the entertainment section, who must have ignored me. Later that day, when the younger of two rock critics at the paper got the job of writing an obit/news story, I wanted to ask him about it, but he was working for a tight deadline and didn't have time to talk. He wasn't rude about it, but still I thought, "Maybe you would have time if any of you people had listened to me when I told you about the story this morning."

From K Records to the Cow Palace

I tell you this because I want to convey that I felt a certain investment in the story. Indeed, I felt a certain investment in the band. I've told this story many times, so if  you've heard me tell it before, just go ahead and skip the next couple of paragraphs.

Less than three years before, I had seen Nirvana steal the show as the opening act for Dinosaur Jr. at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz. I had never heard of them, and I thought they were great. I noticed that Dinosaur Jr. T-shirts were selling slowly at the merch table, but Nirvana shirts were going fast and I thought something was going to happen for this band. As I found out more about the band, I read about how they started in a West Coast mill town and moved to a politically left-wing college town and I thought they just seemed like friends of mine I had met in college. My roommate, who is still one of my closest friends, was from a Northern California mill town and we met in Santa Cruz, which was in a lot of ways a lot like Olympia. (Many people don't realize this, but the guys in Nirvana didn't move to Seattle until they were already getting famous. Before that, they lived in Olympia, where they ran with the same crowd as the twee K Records and the Bikini Kill riot grrls and art-sludge-metal pioneers the Melvins. Kurt, of course, was a big fan of indie pop acts such as the Vaselines.) 

I wrote a couple of brief mentions of the band in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, including a review of that Dinosaur Jr. show and, a few months later, a review of the just-released "Nevermind." Within days, I was hearing those drums from the opening of "Teen Spirit" coming out of the open windows of passing redneck trucks.

I spent most of 1992 backpacking around the world, and while I was away Nirvana became seemingly the biggest band in America - and much of the rest of the world. The next time I saw them play, Nirvana were headlining a concert at the Cow Palace, a giant stadium in San Francisco. The show was organized by Krist Novoselic as a benefit for rape victims in the then-raging war in Bosnia, but it felt like a big, ugly stadium show. (Other than, say, the Clash, can you think of any other band that would hold a benefit for victims of rape in another country AND sell enough tickets to fill an American stadium?)

So, back to April 1994: I had covered this story when it was just beginning to gather national and international attention, and I felt frustrated as I watched the media cover the end of it. That weekend, the Chronicle sent someone out to write a dumb story about how Generation X was taking the news of the suicide; the reporter researched it by going up to young people in line to see a Mazzy Star concert (!) and asking them what they thought. Most of those quoted tried to sound cool or even flippant about it. The opening line of the story was something like, "If Kurt Cobain committed suicide in order to make an impact on a generation, he must have picked the wrong generation." For their part, the national media took the same tack: They wrote from the perspective that Young People Today were a problem that needed to be solved. They seemed obsessed with the idea that Nirvana's young fans were going to kill themselves in copycat suicides. Newsweek came out the following week with a cover that put a picture of Kurt next to a picture of the late Clinton aide Vince Foster, who had killed himself several years earlier.

I thought, No one is getting this story right.

Upstairs from Paradise

Other people must have been feeling the same way as I did. That Sunday, I went to the spoken word night they did every week upstairs at the Paradise Lounge. Several people recited things about Kurt or suicide. 

A young, bespectacled white guy, probably roughly my age (and Kurt's) read from a piece of paper as he delivered a nasty, sneering diatribe against Kurt. He filled it with allusions to Nirvana lyrics: "negative creep," "load up on guns," "I guess Frances Farmer did have her revenge on Seattle." Every time he dropped another reference, he nervously giggled at himself. At times, he was almost doubled over, because he was nervously laughing so hard at himself, so impressed with his own wit and his daring to mock a pop culture figure whom so many people loved. 

There may have been some people laughing in the audience. Mostly, I think we were groaning out of a mixture of "Too soon!" and a deeper kind of offense. 

After that guy, host Jennifer Joseph got up and spoke. Whenever I attended the Paradise spoken word events, she always closed the night. I don't know if she prepared beforehand: It seemed like she was improvising, but it had the sound of poetry. I don't mean she used that pretentious '90s poetry-slam cadence ("Singy-songy-ratatat-singy-GENOCIDE"). I mean it sounded like she was writing a prose-poem as she spoke. That night it was a simple story about going on a road trip with a friend, who brought along a new copy of "Nevermind" on cassette. They rocked out to those riffs and that screaming voice and it felt so right. She missed that feeling.

Her message may have been as simple as that, and maybe the simple way is the best way to tell the story. Still, I had the distinct impression that Joseph was improvising something in response to the sneering, proud-of-himself guy - and maybe those smartasses in the Chronicle story, too. Behind her little reminiscence, she was saying to them, Go ahead and pretend you're smarter, tougher and less sentimental than the rest of us. We know better. Your cynicism is a fraud.

I still picture that sneering guy when I read snarky online posts making fun of some famous person's divorce or nervous breakdown or other seriously f-ed up s-. Sometimes these writers and commenters make me laugh. Sometimes, I'm tempted to join them. Sometimes I slip up and do join in with my own snark. But I don't want to be that sneering guy. Ever.

Kurt Cobain's Cardigan

There have been a lot of songs about Kurt Cobain. Even Patti Smith wrote one. Nick Hornby took its title for his novel "About a Boy." But my favorite song tribute is "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan," by the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I like that band, but they are often overly reverent of their indie pop influences. They can sound like they're playing a mashup of their favorite records rather than creating their own sound. In the case of this song however, it works.

The song sounds like the Vaselines. Specifically, it sounds like "Molly's Lips," which Nirvana covered. The lyrics don't really have anything to do with Kurt or cardigans, but you see that title and you hear that two-chord riff and you think of Kurt the Vaselines fan, wearing a cardigan just like Eugene and Frances. And you sit with him and, together, you listen to the music you love.