Having accomplished that setting, Cobain then did something else that very few rock acts care to do: He told his audience something it didn't want to hear. Did the moshing kids -- and the moshpit at a Nirvana concert had a churning ferocity -- see themselves in the chant: "With the lights out, it's less dangerous/Here we are now, entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious"? It's one of the most bruising critiques of the rock mass audience since "Like a Rolling Stone." Did the dancers feel the sting of his mocking words: "Our little group has always been/And always will until the end"?
And yet, much more than Bob Dylan, Cobain plainly includes himself in his indictment. Not yet a star, he still seemed horrified by that audience; it was something he plainly saw himself part of as well, as stupid and contagious as his fellows, in the song's closing litany of "A mulatto/ An albino/ A mosquito/ My libido/ A denial/ A denial/ A denial ..."
In the end, Cobain used his uncommon charisma and neck-snapping command of a rock riff to become a star. The story would be only mildly interesting if that's all that had happened. But because he was a peculiarly uncompromising, particularly arresting star who happened to make a very good record at the end of a decade in which an odd unprecedented cultural pressure had been building, something else happened as well. Nirvana and Cobain ended up effectively yanking an entire industry leftward and opened up '90s rock into a dazzling kaleidoscope of unconventional artists.
Their influence has only something to do with grunge, which has become more or less a footnote in the history of rock. Nirvana was bigger than grunge rock. The word "epochal" is misused a lot when it comes to rock 'n' roll, and particularly rock 'n' roll albums. But remember that, when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" hit radio, many major radio stations wouldn't play it. It was too loud, too aggressive and too confrontational for the average AOR station's sound.
It seems almost implausible now, but many stations were actively hostile to the new "alternative" bands. Through an odd chain of circumstances I was interviewed on a big St. Louis AOR station the morning after the 1992 Lollapalooza show, which featured the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. It took me a while to realize that the morning zoo gang on the station considered the show a massive punch line.
Yet the force of "Teen Spirit," and "Nevermind," was unrelenting. The album sold 100,000 copies a week for much of the year. Sure -- Garth Brooks or Shania Twain do that too, but they're not purveying confrontational music. Radio began to crack under the pressure -- and soon, some of those hostile radio stations didn't exist anymore. In many cities, conservative AOR outlets were supplanted, and in some cases handily replaced, by a new crop of alternative stations; within a year or two after the release of "Nevermind," even bellwether AOR stations were wounded, as, punch line or no, the Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden became staples of AOR programming for the rest of the decade.
You can sneer at a movement that puts J. Mascis on the charts, and sure, in the end, a couple of media conglomerates merely had to do a few format revisions. I'm with you on both points. But there was one twist: That thirst those bands could sense. It wasn't for something in particular. It was for something different. The stations, and the record companies, had to accept that odd was selling, and so they went looking for odd. A lot of bad bands got record contracts, but a lot of good ones did as well; and this openness brightened the pop palette of the '90s in all sorts of ways. To pick an obvious one, consider whether the Breeders, Liz Phair, Hole or Belly would have received airplay or MTV attention before 1992.
In other words, the band forced the industry to institutionalize openness. Nirvana didn't do it alone, of course; besides the 10 years of experimentation that came before them, the architects of rap, too, had strikingly pushed the boundaries of pop; and so, of course, had R.E.M., who by the time of "Nevermind" were a refreshing, if not sonically daring, presence on radio. But for the decade of what is now known as the post-"Nevermind" era, the record companies, and radio, were forced to look for the next new thing.
This unaccustomed state of affairs created new outrages, of course -- with industry people and too many journalists running around declaring that the next Big Rock Thing was, say, "electronica," whatever that was, or "post-rock," whatever that was. And from today's perspective, 10 years on, we can see rap was the truly revolutionary cultural form, that boy bands will always be with us, and that crossover country can still generate more record sales than just about anything.
And let's even stipulate that at least part of what Nirvana represented was merely a great resentful roar of masculine rawk, and who cares about that anyway?
But that is to overlook the metaphor that Nirvana, to this day, represents: The assault can be made, and that revolution in pop can be accomplished. There's a case to be made that this battle, this ongoing reinvention and revitalization, is one of the things that makes rock 'n' roll what it is. The Clash wrote a song, "Hitsville U.K.," about this phenomenon: "The mutants, creeps and muscle men/ Are shaking like a leaf/ It blows a hole in the radio/ When it hasn't sounded good all week."
In songs like that, rock imagines its future. Today, things are calmer, and even the adventurous acts -- Beck and Moby come to mind -- have perfected the art of industry game-playing without really seeming to. But now we know that in the background there are always some new rough beasts running around, and not even Kurt Loder is going to stop them from coming.
In this way, Cobain is an odd rock martyr. The indie rock world that spawned him was in almost all its practices charmingly innocent; it worked as long as it did because, in the end, few people cared for the anti-pop music so many of them purveyed. When a few people with that dream of pop entered the equation, it heightened a few of the contradictions of the world, but it still stood.
But Kurt Cobain was fated to discover that the train he'd gotten on couldn't be stopped. The corporate rock world, which he joined voluntarily, simply has no reason to halt it once it's going; there's not even really a way to describe such an act. And Cobain was ambivalent about it anyway. One day he was enraptured with his success; the next night he was horrified. It's not clear if his images of how stardom should be simply didn't connect with the realities of it, or if in the end he did understand what was happening but felt guilty about it.
If the band Nirvana can be a metaphor for a victory that transcends its time, Cobain's life is a metaphor for the one key theoretical weakness in the indie rock ethos: You can't be semi public. There was a patina of falsity in the rock world at the time. To a young and overearnest would-be rock star, it's pathetic to repeat, night after night, a shtick that begins "Hello, Seattle/Dubuque/Tallahassee!" and ends with your biggest hit, just before the encore. A lot of professional musicians do that, night after night, and, after they become famous, they take the next step, and the step after that. And soon the star is smiling for the talk shows, telling People magazine that it was time to get back to his roots for the new album, and, no, he and Jennifer Aniston are just close friends. Then you hook up with a beer company for tour sponsorship, bringing in a few outside songwriters at the suggestion of your label and all of a sudden you're Aerosmith, or Mick Jagger.
Cobain never could deal with the compromises. He never was able to grow up to understand that even if you're sick of playing your hit, it's even more pathetic to go out and collect people's money and not play it. And to have contempt for that uncomplicated desire, which of course is a species of the one he himself had as a kid, is to have contempt for oneself.
Cobain had made the decision to put himself in a position to go large, but never, apparently, figured out what that meant. He was perhaps the frailest star ever to face such intense public interest. Cross' book is spotted with more than enough examples of Cobain being something, one suspects, he didn't want to be. He learned to smile and lie in public, and he knew, deep inside, he had become a different person.
He said so in his suicide note: "The worst crime I could think of would be faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100 percent fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should punch a time clock before I go out on stage." Later he wrote of "the hateful death rocker I have become."
Did Cobain die of shame? Has ever such a star surrendered in this way? You want to point, feebly, at what Cobain had going for him. Besides the talent, the wife, the kid, the fans, he seemed to have something rare -- the capability to transcend himself and his origins, first by wrenching himself out of his dismal upbringing and then by facing down the elements in the subculture that spawned him who didn't share his dream about pop. We expected everything of him in the future. We just didn't expect the one unthinkable thing, something the 27-year-old suspected and then convinced himself of -- that a future was the one thing Kurt Cobain didn't have.
About the writer
Bill Wyman is the editor of Salon Arts & Entertainment.
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