When I was a teenager, between the late nineties and early 2000s, many of my peers were obsessed with Nirvana. They sported T-shirts with the cover of Nevermind and Kurt Cobain’s face. I struggled a bit to get passionate about the Seattle band, which sounded too dark for my tastes at the time. I preferred listening to those who sang about wanting to live forever to those who repeatedly asked to be raped (in reality Rape me it was a piece of denunciation of violence against women, but what did I know) or it manifested suicidal instincts (it was much more complex than that but, again, what did I know). So yes, nice Nevermind, but I preferred something else. And then I liked to take sides a bit on principle against the most inflated musical icons, from Bob Marley to Jim Morrison. And Cobain, superficially, seemed like one of those to me.
It took me a few years to better understand Kurt Cobain, who committed suicide thirty years ago (on April 5, 1994). And, as always, the insights come from songs rather than from documentaries and books. In my case, in particular, from Pollysixth song of Nevermind. I had also strummed that simple riff as a kid but, not being used to reading the lyrics well, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Polly that, how Rape meis a piece about rape.
Polly remember something that actually happened. In 1987, a 14-year-old girl was returning from a concert in Tacoma, Washington. She was captured by Gerald Friend, a man who had already served years in prison for a sexual assault case and had lured her into his car by pretending to want to give her a lift. Friend took her to her mobile home, tortured her and raped her. The girl managed to escape and report Friend, who ended up back in prison, where she still is today. That “Polly wants a cracker” at the beginning suddenly appeared to me in all its brutality. And Cobain’s choice to take on the perspective of the executioner makes the message against violence even stronger, albeit disturbing.
Nirvana, to confirm this, made several performances at charity concerts for rape victims and the defense of women’s rights. And the fact that Cobain was able to touch on such deep and difficult themes with a handful of chords, with a few words as sharp as knives, was certainly not common. It was a subject for adults. Bob Dylan, after hearing the song for the first time at a concert, declared: “That boy has a heart”. In short, the obvious dawned on me almost suddenly only after years of delay. Better late than never.
I find instead that, thirty years later, there is not much else to say about the human side of Cobain, a trap into which we continue to fall, pulled by the jacket by the spectacularization that has always accompanied the cult of rock stars and has accompanied the death of the American artist in a morbid way.
I just feel like reiterating something already said several times, and better, by others: Cobain, through his songs, had shown us before others that the new millennium imagined by us wealthy Westerners would be much less rosy than it seemed. Today I find in Something in the way (what an immense song), in Heart-shaped box or in You know you’re right the same restlessness as Radiohead’s Kid A. Today Cobain, The national anthem, No logo by Naomi Klein, the G8, all seem like small, at-the-time underestimated pieces of the end of my innocence. And that of many others.
