Two or Three Things I Know About Kurt Cobain
A friend of mine wrote an article for the Italian Rolling Stone magazine declaring I had known and interviewed Kurt Cobain. This information is only partially true. I did interview Cobain in the 1989 for the magazine Rockerilla at the time of the launch of “Bleach” (by mistake I wrote his first name as Kobain… sorry). It was a phone interview hence I did not meet him personally.
The closest I came to meeting with him was in September 1991 when I was invited by Geffen to participate at one of their showcases, a concert marking the inaugural presentation of “Nevermind.” Besides the press and numerous fans, the concert was attended by the most illustrious representations of the New York alternative scene, including Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, for whom Nirvana have been the opening act during their recent English tour. Prior to the gig, Moore told me: “they are amazing!”. He was right.
So I never met Cobain, but I have known many musician drug addicts. Some of them became my friends. Through knowing them and mingling with them, it is inevitable that I have begun to question myself regarding their troubles. Since every human being - and their life story - is unique hence it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to deeply understand the root of each individual suffering. But as much as we know that all humans share some common experiences - for instance, each one is conceived by a woman, created by the union of two gametes of different sex and belong to the world of mortals - I believe it isn’t absurd to deduct some common trigger among drug addicts. I do not want to impose any further psychological, neuro-scientific, sociological or whatever other theories formulated across the years. Each one of them, I am certain, has its fundamental reasons to exist.
In an attempt to express something personal and possibly sensible on Cobain and drug addiction, I prefer to quote two short reading I recently encountered. They’re the best I can offer to the memory of Kurt Cobain who sadly I never did meet.
Freedom and Isolation
The first is the Damon Albarn’s testimony (ex-Blur, Gorillaz), another excellent musician and former drug addict: “The heroin made me free. I hate to talk about it due to my daughter and family… But with it I could be immensely creative. Still, it’s a cruel substance. The heroin makes you isolated — and by the way, an addiction is always wrong.”
In every heroin story I have ever heard, there is always a double-bind. On one side, heroin promotes freedom and creativity while making you feel better. Furthermore, it expands conscious perception as Allen Ginsberg wrote and, using the words of the American poet, you have the sensation that God is about to show you his face. On the other side, each drug addict comes to experience isolation, loneliness and abandonment.
The same feelings of a neglected child, a child that hasn't met some sort of love.
The Last Words
On the 5th of April 1994 Kurt Cobain consumed some drugs and shot himself. I’m not interested in analyzing the usual backstage plots such as the “suicide or homicide” theory or the role wife Courtney Love played and so on given it would not anyhow add or subtract any value from the indisputable despair of Cobain’s existence. I am leaving it to others to resolve the hypothesis and solve any puzzle.
What counts for me is: he was suffering, tried several times to commit suicide and he was in despair. In his final message, Cobain compares himself to “an emasculated, infantile complain-ee”; he claims his need to anesthetize himself to “regain the enthusiasms I once had as a child”; he says his daughter reminds of him as a child, “full of love and joy”; he writes that the age of seven he started to hate “all humans in general.”
Do we need more to understand that something went wrong with Kurt Cobain’s childhood?