Ten years ago today, the world learned that the lead singer of one of history's biggest rock bands and the proverbial messiah of grunge rock, Kurt Cobain, had put a gun to his head and ended his own life, leaving behind a piece of paper on which he predicted, "This note should be pretty easy to understand."
For millions of teenagers and 20-somethings, understanding wasn't so easy. For today's college students, though, the influence of Kurt Cobain's music has lingered more than his celebrity. When asked what they remembered about Cobain's suicide, some Dartmouth students recalled where they were when they heard the news, but few took it personally. For many of us it was a secondhand tragedy, affecting only older siblings.
Instead, Generation Y has latched onto Cobain's musical legacy. Bands from Limp Bizkit to Dashboard Confessional have appropriated the angst Cobain helped to bring back into popular music and turned themselves into platinum-selling artists. The legions of kids who listen to them often say they identify with the anger and alienation in the lyrics and the music. After punk rock's rise and fall, Nirvana led the first batch of bands to harness that anger so successfully.
Other college-age music fans identify more with Nirvana's fiercely independent spirit.
"I took it as an entry point into the indie world," said Matt Fujisawa '06, a guitarist and avid music fan who says he didn't start listening to Nirvana seriously until he was 12 -- several years after Cobain's death. Now Fujisawa has a hard drive full of obscure Nirvana tracks and can talk at length about his awe for the band's influence.
Mat Brown '05, a member of the Dartmouth band Fashion Fashion!, said he once had a Kurt Cobain poster on the wall of his bedroom and set out to emulate his long, ragged hairstyle -- with disastrous results. But it was Cobain's genre-defining songwriting that stuck with him much longer.
"His ethic really influenced me as well -- that you could write songs that were really bare-bones," Brown said. "I'd try and focus on basic stuff in my songwriting and make that stuff really good."
Steve Swayne, an assistant professor of music, included "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the syllabus for his American Music course. He sees the release of the song and its parent album, 1991's "Nevermind," as an explosive moment in rock history.
"The sound basically changes the ground for rock music in the first half of the '90s," Swayne said.
"The effect of music is not strictly in the notes or the lyrics; it's in the way you view the culture," he said. "In many respects Kurt Cobain stands as a generational icon like John Lennon or Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby."
But maybe Kurt Cobain the Rock Star -- the alter ego who Cobain himself called Kurdt Kobain -- had nothing to do with it at all.
There's a moment during Nirvana's legendary "MTV Unplugged" performance, during the last line of the last song -- a heartbreaking rendition of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" -- when Cobain raises his head, lowered in private pain throughout the entire concert, and opens his eyes, providing a split-second gaze straight into his soul.
Or maybe it's just tempting to see it that way. Even before his suicide, fans struggled to piece together the "real" Kurt. These days, fans can pore over his journals or download dozens of rare unreleased tracks in hopes of coming to know something deeper about the enigmatic frontman, but at some point it's easy to come to the conclusion that anything you say about Cobain's motivations can be second-guessed.
At that point, only one thing remains certain: that Nirvana's legacy really has nothing to do with Kurt Cobain's fame and everything to do with the music.
