Some essays come out in minutes. Others take three decades.
I have written versions of this one many times in the past 30 years, but my experiences and thoughts kept changing as the world hurled itself past my window, and I would put the pen back down, curious to see what new insights presented themselves.
We all hate to admit it, but on occasion algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. I'm not sure what combination of videos I'd been watching that led YouTube to present me with MTV coverage of the day of Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, but something in me clicked the link instantly.
As that distinctive grainy VHS playback unwound, I thought to myself: where was I while this was airing? Of course I knew immediately. I was working at a record store.
In 1994, news did not arrive via smartphone. If you happened to have your radio or television on as a story was breaking, you might mention it to people the next time you saw one. But you might not.
Thus, the slow but steadily building flow of flanneled slacker kids who filtered into the shop throughout that day was only made explicable when a co-worker noticed that they were all buying Nirvana albums. He asked one about it, and that's how I learned that Kurt Cobain was dead.
And to 1994 Matthew, it didn't really make much of an impact.
To someone who'd experienced a lifetime of unbelonging to the youth culture at large, watching this melancholy parade trudge through the store picking up what bits of the catalog they hadn't yet acquired, it just felt like another way in which I was definitely not GenX. In those years, I made something of a lifestyle opposing that grouping at every opportunity. I didn't like the nihilism, the inflexible factionalism, the categorization of personalities by outfit and record collection, the whole general aesthetic. I didn't belong with these people.
What I failed to consider was that perhaps that unbelonging was, in fact, my membership card. And might also be the thread that ultimately drew me in closer to Nirvana's legacy many years later.
It didn't happen all at once. In the years that followed, when I would hear someone like Michael Stipe, a GenX icon that I very much did identify with, sing Cobain's praises, I paused to think about it. I didn't completely dislike Nirvana's catalog. Kurt’s facility with melody was formidable, and as a songwriter, I had to give him that due. Yet I was still taking umbrage for their inadvertent hijacking of the entire music world right about the time I was trying to do something very different than them. But the tunes themselves were solid, and as eras went by, and they did not fade into the background noise of pop culture nostalgia like so many others from that time, I began to listen anew.
The hijacking I mention was of course going to happen anyway. Hair metal had run its course, and the field was ripe for something fresh. One reason I carried some sour grapes against the Seattle contingent was admittedly because I wanted to be the one to bring the change. Which is hilarious, because in the early '90s, I had nowhere near the skill set to do anything remotely of the sort. Kurt and company did, and any resentment I have towards the seemingly endless sludgy rain that engulfed the music scene for the rest of the decade should more properly be aimed towards the myriad copycats that followed than to the originators.
Alienation is a recurring theme in the music I write and listen to. It's the central theme of seminal albums like The Wall, very near and dear to me. And it's a thread that weaves itself all through the Nirvana songbook.
I've written before about how I wasn't keenly aware of how much I was sheltered. Married parents, relative economic stability, no sexual abuse, no alcoholism in the home. The only landmine was my father's depression, but as he largely kept to himself, this was only an occasional problem.
It was outside the house where the dangers lay. Fellow GenXers whose own trauma urged them to find every weakness in their classmates and exploit it for maximum social capital, at any cost. I didn't know it at the time, but the US divorce rate was at an all-time high in the 1980s, and its effects were as visible on the playground as in the courts.
The turbulence of my cohort led me to identify much more strongly with the Boomers, whose music spoke more to me, and who at the very least were not aiming for my jugular every day. I heard aspiration in there, something I could not find in the works of Kurt and his contemporaries, who from my perspective trafficked only in resignation and doom.
Cobain was also a scholar of the past, cribbing from Bowie and Neil Young as much as from early alternative acts like REM, reaching as far back as Leadbelly. What he was after was less about form than authenticity.
And this, in the cold light of middle age, becomes one of the more obvious reasons Kurt's gravitational pull did not ensnare me in its orbit back then. For all my talk of being unapologetically myself, my younger version did a lot of editing. The uglier parts of my psyche were often covered up in favor of the more presentable ones. And not just publicly. It's an odd game, hiding oneself from oneself. Moving things just out of sight so you don't have to confront them.
Yet confrontation is exactly what Kurt did, and I suspect that scared me. I don't have a specific recollection of that, but I remember the overall darkness cast by the heavy heroin clouds of 1990s rock music. I didn't like the way it made me feel. Some of that was due to the aforementioned sheltered youth. The hopelessness in that onslaught was not first nature to me.
But it was also not entirely foreign. The dimmer corners of my mind did think those things from time to time, though they were quickly evicted, obstacles to the idealistic life I wanted to live. Only as year after year of disappointment and struggle plagued my adulthood did the grim truths Kurt strove to express become more relatable.
I did not know at the time that he suffered from chronic stomach pain. In 1994, at 20, I was plagued by no such ailments, and the dream of a lifelong cast-iron gut hadn't yet been dashed. When gastric issues finally came for me in my 30s, it changed my psychology in ways I wasn't prepared for, and I expect his own struggles affected Kurt as deeply or worse. When you don’t feel good, the world looks ugly.
Especially when it tells you what to do. These were the days of the Moral Majority, of Tipper Gore and warning labels on music. And if there was one thing GenX agreed on, it was that we didn’t want to be told what we couldn’t listen to. All the attempts at censorship simply made us more likely to indulge in explicit lyrics that made the youth pastor grimace. Dubbed cassettes of Carlin and Kinison were traded at lockers alongside NWA and 2 Live Crew like black market diamonds.
It was into this fray that early alternative music stepped, although ambassadors like Pixies and Concrete Blonde were initially relegated to niche audiences. In hindsight, it’s easy to see the inevitability of alternative’s impending rule, but at the time, no one could have imagined the seismic impact that was coming.
I remember distinctly the first time I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. DFW had its own alternative station, The Edge, and I had been using them to explore that ouvre alongside my budding interest in classic prog and nerd rock. In an hour on the Edge, you might hear Peter Murphy, the Cure, They Might Be Giants, Camper Van Beethoven, the Connells, or the Replacements, alongside local acts and names that are long forgotten.
Idling at a stoplight in my little hometown, I heard those scratchy, staccato opening chords, followed by the thunderous wash of drums and distortion, and I thought: Huh, this is different. Then the chorus, with its melodic wail and bizarre lyrics, and I began to wonder who this was. The dynamics between the sections were arresting, as was the aggression, in a form very distinct from the crotch-grabbing swagger of heavy bands I’d heard up until that point. As it faded and the DJ announced it was a band called Nirvana, I thought: Well, that’s an interesting way to make a song. I filed it in my cabinet of curiosities alongside all the other things I’d been hearing.
What I didn’t know was that a huge majority of my fellow Xers, having heard what I just heard, had just decided that it was now the only way to make a song. It happened almost overnight. Local bands who had been jangling along just fine now cranked up the overdrive for every chorus. It quickly became a trope. Okay, here’s the quiet intro verse, and…yep, right on schedule, here’s the angry guitar. The uniformity irritated me, especially since it was supposedly in service of subverting expectation. From my perspective, it was merely creating another norm.
Cobain himself, of course, was just making the music he wanted to make. It wasn’t his fault that over half the people under 30 suddenly wanted to be him. He didn't want to be the voice of a generation. He didn't want anyone to tell him who or what he was. And yet they did, over and over again, on magazine shelves and TV broadcasts and radio shows.
All Kurt wanted to do was express that which could not be expressed any other way. And that doesn't just make him a member of my generation. That makes him my brother, in a way that no one who isn't an artist could fully understand.
And that brotherhood goes farther. Kurt fought to retain his enchantment with music and performance. He lamented the clock-in feeling at gig after gig, and sought fervently to rediscover the spark of magic that had made him start down that path in the first place. Prior to his death, he was making plans to do a collaborative album with Stipe, a project that the world is surely poorer for never hearing. If people wonder why I'm constantly switching between mediums in an effort to express myself, it is that selfsame yearning for the magic, no matter where it may be found.
Life can make this quest difficult. He, too, struggled with the responsibilities of fatherhood, in a way that is all too familiar. Bringing his mind out of the clouds to focus on the ground-level daily needs of an infant put strain on an already burdened psyche. If I'm honest, there were days during the early parenthood period of my life when I truly believed my child was better off without the mess I had become. An inept dad whose focus was always anywhere but in the moment, with a little being who lived entirely in the present. From his writings, I know he often felt that guilt of not being everything he believed he should be for his daughter.
Only now, thirty years hence, do I read these things and attempt to break through the page to try and give comfort. As an older man now, I see the emotional logic loops and traps, and I want to shout out warnings, that it can get better, just hang on, just hang on…
But in the end, despite our similarities, we are different people. And unlike me, Kurt's world was broken at a younger age by all the things that mine wasn't, and his inner resources were thinner. The fact that in later days, he spoke directly to Boddah, an imaginary childhood friend, indicates how thoroughly alone in the world he felt. And that is a sensation I do understand.
I have been luckier than Kurt in some ways. I have found community, love, and a good relationship with my child, now on the cusp of adulthood. But it has been a long and challenging journey, which wobbled on unsteady rails through depression, poverty, and self-doubt, and I could have fallen off the cliff at any moment.
The blinding light of his talent, in some ways, kept him from that slow, steady path to wellness. The incessant voices of fans, critics, industry goons, and the nagging inner turmoil that kept talking even when everyone else had gone home...all of this cacophony ultimately proved too much. And this was before social media. Even had he survived the '90s, the aughts may have taken him out.
You don't have to be famous to get overwhelmed by the world. I've lost many friends to the darkness, and shuddered to consider how little separated my own experience from theirs. For those of us who feel society's brokenness too acutely, it can often be tempting to think about checking out and leaving civilization to its inevitable doom.
Kurt Cobain was only seven years older than me at the time of his death. He would be pushing 60 now, had he stuck around. I like to think he may have found a certain amount of peace in middle age. But perhaps the peace he found in oblivion was the only kind he would ever get. The younger version of me would have rejected such a suggestion. But in the thirty years since Kurt and I shared an existence on this planet, I have seen enough to know that life is not always as we might wish it to be. He knew this much earlier than I.
I come from a family of restless people. We cannot always enjoy the simple beauty of the small things, because we are all caught up with how much better they could be. I think Kurt and I had this in common. Here I am, still trying to hammer reality into a form more appealing than that in which I found it. The demons still visit, but I keep them largely at bay. And of late, I have taken to fighting them with the ghost of Kurt Cobain at my side, letting the music I refused to receive in my youth wash over what remains of my GenX life, and feeling that connection at long last. It turns out that in not belonging, I do belong.
We are older now, that perpetually underestimated and outnumbered generation. The children of fading empire. The ones who rode out the end of the Cold War and the wasted potential of its aftermath. Who haunted black-walled clubs, blared the apocalypse from every screen and speaker, built digital castles made of sand and shook our heads in knowing disappointment when they began to crumble. All our moments in the sun, obscured by rainclouds.
Kurt knew. And we knew he knew. Some of us resisted, and maybe we had to. What gains we did make wouldn't have happened otherwise. Some of us looked at Kurt's final decision and followed it. Others opted to stay in the fight. After all, each of us will get to the same destination eventually. May as well rock out a bit longer en route.
Take your time. Hurry up. The choice is yours, don't be late.
Watching that MTV coverage from my perch in the future, it seems inconceivable that I was living in the same world back then. And in many ways I wasn't. The world is different for all of us, refracted through the lens of our personal experience. Perhaps the reason I can see that bigger world now is that I have finally developed enough cracks to let the light in.
Rest in peace, brother. You did what you could, when you could, for as long as you could, and left a mark. In the end, that is all any of us can hope for. You spoke into the darkness, and it spoke back. That is the life of a true artist, and its price. It’s just taken me a lot longer than you to realize it.
What else could I write? I don’t have the right.
None of us do. But we do what we must. Respect, and safe travels.