PART V
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Robert L. Bryant, Daniel Schwartz, and Howard L. Forman
Among the most iconic 1990s rock-and-roll posters was a portrait of Kurt Cobain’s face, a plain white border, and the words, “Kurt Cobain 1967–1994” beneath his face. Viewers could interpret those facts as they chose. Kurt Cobain, the popular, beloved, admired face in the picture, lived until 1994 when he shot himself in the mouth with a shotgun at age 27. The generation’s poet laureate died a death consistent with the painful existence and hopeless future depicted in songs he wrote and performed worldwide. What did it mean that he had killed himself? Was there a lesson? Was there a proper emotional response? Who were Nirvana, and what did they represent?
Nirvana, Popular and Defining Popularity
Nirvana’s breakout album Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as the week’s best-selling album on the Billboard charts,1 yet Nirvana’s cultural significance cannot be conveyed through record sales alone. Nirvana was not only popular but also drastically and abruptly changed the face of music for years to come. It is no accident that, 25 years following the release of Nevermind, Pearl Jam, emerging from the same Seattle music scene as Nirvana, remains one of the most pursued concert tickets in the United States. Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl fronts one of today’s most popular and politically active rock bands, The Foo Fighters. Nirvana’s influence has been cited by a wide variety of artists. Lana Del Rey called them her most important musical inspiration.2 Kanye West has been seen wearing a Nirvana T-shirt,3 and Jay-Z quoted Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” lyrics in his 2013 song “Holy Grail,” rapping the famous chorus lyrics nearly verbatim, when he said, “And we all just entertainers, and we stupid, and we famous!”
Nirvana made most contemporaneous popular rock music sound laughable. It paved the way for stylistically similar musicians to achieve mainstream success with a new genre the media dubbed “grunge.”4 Almost overnight, the blowhard, hypermasculine, skirt-chasing “hair-metal” bands of the 1980s (Poison, Mötley Crüe, Quiet Riot, etc.), could no longer be taken seriously. Hair-metal bands, for all their spandex-leopard print, lipstick, leather pants, and pyrotechnic-fueled debauchery, were not rebels. They weren’t out to change the world in the political or philosophical sense; they just wanted to party as hard as they could. Few were defended by critics as genuine artists, apart from Guns N’ Roses. Musically and visually, the hair-metal sound drew influence from glam rock of the 1970s and highly costumed/choreographed hard rock bands such as KISS. Central to the hair-metal look and sound was theatricality and a competitiveness: Who had the most outrageously poufy long hair? The tightest leather or spandex pants? The biggest stage explosions? The most women? The fiercest/fastest guitar solo? With this summer-blockbuster mentality, most hair metal bands played what many critics considered uninspired, formulaic, shallow songs about sex, drugs, and rock and roll—indifferent to the claims that the 1960s- and 1970s-era sex, drugs, and rock and roll was originally a revolutionary mission, not simply a medium for partying, womanizing, and living out male fantasies. Grunge, by contrast, countered this paradigm by presenting a sound that did not attempt to be flashy at all. Stereotypically, grunge artists performed in drab flannel, thrift-store T-shirts, or whatever they might wear normally on the street. The guitars were still heavy, but the tempo slowed down, and overly flashy musicianship removed. Thematically, songs were more introspective and melancholy. For example, compare the hair-metal song “Girls, Girls, Girls” (1987) by Mötley Crüe and Soundgarden’s popular grunge song “Black Hole Sun” (1994). The video for “Girls, Girls, Girls” shows muscle-bound bandmates in leather vests riding motorcycles to strip clubs, ogling dancers while singing lyrics as, “Trick or treat, sweet to eat … Yankee girls you just can’t be beat / but you’re the best when you’re off your feet.” Compare this to the video for “Black Hole Sun,” where the band wears faded, dingy jeans and T-shirts while playing in a field near a suburban development for deranged, creepily stylized 1950s families. A bizarre burning black orb from outer space slowly engulfs and destroys the planet—band included—as they sing the chorus lyrics, “Black hole sun / won’t you come / and wash away the pain.” In summary, there is a sharp stylistic divide between these genres. Why did Nirvana’s music resonate so widely?
Cobain as Exemplar of a Generation’s Struggle
Teenagers of the early 1990s lived in a different social reality from those before them. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union followed in domino fashion, the specter of nuclear war that hovered over American life during the post–World War II/Cold War years suddenly evaporated into thin air. Especially for teenagers who were constructing their identities, the question of purpose soon set in. With Communism defeated, what was the purpose of this young American generation? What did it mean to be American in a unipolar world?
Other massive changes in the social structure of America, planted in the late 1960s, were coming to fruition in the early 1990s as the children born from this newly liberated society approached adolescence and early adulthood. These children, the generation that followed the baby boomers, came to be known as generation X. Pew Research defines gen X as those born from approximately 1965 to 1980.5 This generation grew up in an era demographically different from the baby boomers in two major ways. First, the family structures in which the children of gen X grew up differed from the family structures common to the baby boomer generation. Second, the fertility rate decreased significantly. Several historic causes for this abrupt change in family structure and fertility rate have been identified. In the late 1960s, more women entered the workforce. For example, the percentage of married women in the workforce rose to 50 percent by 1979.6 Divorce rates reached unprecedented levels.7 Improved contraceptive methods, including birth control pills, became available. Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. The U.S. economy shifted from postwar boom to 1970s stagflation. Because of these and other changes, more children grew up with divorced parents or single parent households. Furthermore, decreased fertility rates meant that fewer children were born each year, compared to the years following World War II’s end. Pew Research estimates that 55 million gen Xers were born, as opposed to 75 million Baby Boomers.8 Thus, in the democratic politics and market-driven culture of the United States, baby boomers had the numbers to call the shots and garner attention in popular culture.9
When the early 1990s arrived, just as the Cold War narrative was ending, the children of gen X were becoming teenagers and arbiters of youth culture. Seemingly overnight, as quickly or quicker than the American family structure changed in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the popular culture 20 years later shifted drastically and abruptly, going from glamorous, glittery, spandex-laden forms of hair metal to gritty, raw, grungy, and real (in the eyes of this new generation). Musicians such as Kurt Cobain, a “regular” guy from a broken home in an obscure part of the country, performed on stage in thrift-store clothes that seemed to say, “no, the life you’ve been showing us is not how we’ve lived it.” The goals of American life were not so clear to this generation.
Cobain’s adolescence, as documented in the HBO documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck10 and in his personal journals,11 was defined by his parents’ divorce, which shattered his worldview. Per his mother’s interview in this documentary, Cobain had been this happy, gregarious, energetic, creative young kid who had an unnatural magnetism and spark that drew people to him. (So energetic, in fact, she admits to taking him to see a doctor to be prescribed a pill for hyperactivity—“something like Ritalin”). After his parents’ divorce, however, he was embarrassed by his family’s transformation, compared to peers’ “normal” families in his typical American small hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. “No one got divorced in those days,” as his mother said. He began to act out at home and school, becoming an increasingly angry and depressive person. His father remarried, which angered him further. His antipathy to authority grew, and his angry, irritable mood became so unmanageable that he was eventually kicked out of his father’s house. He spent years bouncing around between houses of family members and friends. Meanwhile, Aberdeen’s economic fate, like many other small towns, mirrored and validated his decaying worldview. His published journal tells of feeling isolated in high school to the point of an actual suicide attempt. He claims to have decided to sit on the tracks at night and wait for death. As the headlight approached in the dark from the distance, he sat and accepted his fate, but when the train finally arrived, he felt the whoosh of a gust of wind and he realized he had sat on the wrong track of the two tracks. He never graduated high school.
Why Did Nirvana Resonate Psychologically?
Revisiting Cobain’s creative output 25 years later, the first thought to come to mind from the mental health perspective is, “how could music this depressing be so hugely popular?” Could one imagine a contemporary musician coming out with a top-of-the-charts song called, “Rape Me” (a single on Nirvana’s album, In Utero)? Perhaps the dim vision offered by Nirvana’s music gained traction through tapping into the top A. H. Maslow’s famous pyramidal hierarchy of needs, i.e., self-actualization. In brief, Maslow’s “pyramid” explains human motivation to perform one behavior before another. Humans are motivated to perform actions to fulfill needs. The base of the pyramid includes survival needs: food, water, clothing, shelter, etc. If/when these physiologic needs are not met, all behavior focuses on obtaining them. When this basic level of necessity is attained, motivation is directed toward higher and more abstract needs: safety, then love (familial or otherwise), then esteem (feeling of self-worth and competence), and then the highest level, self-actualization, which is the state of a unified psyche, when a person becomes what they believed they could be. If we consider the drive to feel psychologically unified, to feel accepted as we are, whether our baseline mood is euphoric or dysphoric, then perhaps the idea of enjoying angry, sad, even suicidal music might not seem so far-fetched, for the enjoyment of validation may temper the ill effects of dysphoria.12
Like the Maslowian explanation of Nirvana’s rapid embrace by U.S. popular culture, philosophers such as Ortega y Gasset postulated that motivation springs from belief. Much of what motivates us in life springs from the belief that we are unlikely to participate in an activity unless we believe it is worthwhile and true. When the average person boards an airplane, for example, this person boards based on beliefs about what will happen on the trip. This person doesn’t know for a fact that the place will be safe, that the pilot will fly the plane to the correct location, or that the plane won’t be hijacked. The average person simply believes these things based on former experience flying, the reputation of the airline, the number of times this person has personally experienced violent crime, etc. In this view, psyches can be considered as a collection of beliefs about the world, stories we tell ourselves about what is real and what is not real, stories about what the world is like and what the world is not like.13
With the music video for the band’s breakout song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana confronted head-on the myth of what life was supposed to be like versus the actual experience for many adolescents. The video takes place in the dead of the night at a dystopian American high school pep rally, with the band playing in a dimly lit and dingy brown gym. Cheerleaders sport gothic black uniforms with unmistakable red anarchy “A” symbols on their shirts, and they perform in a cloud of dust before a crowd of disheveled, sloppily dressed, and disaffected teenagers. For added effect, a creepy, elderly night janitor gets prominent screen time as he dances to the side of the rally with his pathetic dance partner, a mop handle. This is a pep rally for rebellion, and in this way, the music captures this feeling of defiance-together. It is a collective recognition that this notion that the idyllic American life as presented over and over on television—that high school years are the best years of your life, that America is the most colorful, happy, best place in the world—was far-removed from the firsthand experience of many teenagers. The song ends with a catchy, repetitive hook that has been belted out countless times at parties. Oddly enough, it became the anthemic sing-along line: “A denial! A denial! A denial!”
Nirvana and the grunge sound of Seattle bands, more than any genre of rock and roll before or after, were associated with “teen angst.” Why are teenagers and angst so often associated? Using developmental theorist Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development as a lens, it seems that the adolescent developmental stage is perhaps necessarily comprised of rebellion and discontent as youth enter a shape-shifting, limbo-like stage of identity selection. They take stock of childhood accomplishments and interests, experimenting with new roles and ideologies as they select who they will be as they pass from childhood into the final adult stage. Past roles and assumptions assigned to a person as a child may not correspond with what that person as an adolescent desires to continue as an adult, thus resulting in rebellious behaviors towards adults. Adults have already passed through adolescence and have, in general, already chosen what they believe about themselves and the world. But history marches forward, and thus teenagers always form their identities in a societal context separated in time (and increasingly, space) from the societal context of the preceding generation. Furthermore, especially in the rapidly changing technological and demographic context of the United States, roles that parents envision for their children may not still exist in the current society as they did when the parents were young.14 Thus, as the children of generation X developed into teenagers in the early 1990s, their unique demographic viewpoint coincided with global cultural shifts that occurred at the exact moment in their personal development where they were exploring who they were, who they wanted to be, and what they believed.
Mere Teen Angst?
The problem with explaining the popularity of Nirvana’s depressive music by ascribing it to teen angst is that one can so easily write it off as an expression of mere teen angst, i.e., something not to be taken seriously. It is possible so many have identified with Cobain because, simply, a lot of people, especially the young, experience mental illness. It is somewhat astounding to know that suicide is the 10th most common cause of death of people of all ages in the United States, per a 2013 study of deaths published online by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “Suicide: Facts at a Glance 2015” (www.cdc.gov). Suicide is the third leading cause of death for those between 10 and 14 years, and the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 34.15 Considering the stigma of suicide, it is possible the real rates are even higher. In a National Institutes of Health (NIH) epidemiological study of high school students in grades 9–12, 14.5 percent (more than 1 in 7 people) had experienced suicidal ideation during the past year. Additionally, among that same group of students, 6.9 percent reported at least one suicide attempt during that past year. It is likely that the average high school student knew someone who either attempted or contemplated suicide. To punctuate the findings of this study, considering Cobain’s demise, firearms were the number one method of completed suicide among this group.16 Another study found the 12-month prevalence of suicidal ideation among adolescents to be as high as 17 percent, with 22.4 percent of females and 11.6 percent of males.17
Among adolescents diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD), suicidal thoughts and acts are even higher. Up to 85 percent of adolescents who were clinically followed for MDD or dysthymia presented with suicidal ideation. Of that number, 32 percent would attempt suicide during adolescence or young adulthood, 20 percent would make multiple attempts, and between 2.5 percent and 7.5 percent would complete suicide before or during young adulthood.18
Considering Nirvana’s success among teens and young adults, it is interesting to consider the prevalence of major depressive disorder in the young. Studies from 2010 and 2011 show that 8 percent to 11 percent of teens aged 12 to 17 years and young adults aged 19 to 34 met criteria for MDD during that 12-month interval.19
Intertwined with manifestations of mental pathologies—e.g., generalized anxiety disorder, major depression, mood dysregulation, personality disorders, PTSD, etc.—is self-medication through substance abuse, used as a coping strategy. Such attempts to counter the effects of one mental disorder can lead to an additional mental disorder, specifically, the various substance use disorders. It was well known during his life that Cobain had recurring problems with heroin use. The media coverage even prompted an intervention from Child Protective Services. His wife Courtney Love admitted years later that they used heroin even while she was pregnant with their child, Frances Bean Cobain. The autopsy report after Cobain’s death reported a blood heroin level of 1.52 mg/mL, triple the level that is fatal to some people.20 Heroin users are fourteen times more likely to commit suicide. Heavy alcohol users have a fivefold increased risk.21
Increased suicidal tendencies occur not only with depression or drug use, but also with other mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder22 or schizophrenia. Without attempting to diagnose Cobain with a specific mental illness, we can see that the theme of mental illness in general was prevalent in Cobain’s oeuvre. For example, on Nevermind, the song “Lithium” most likely refers to lithium as a psychiatric medication, a “mood stabilizer” most often used to treat bipolar I or II disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder. When he sings lines such as, “And I’m not scared / … / in a daze ‘cause I found God,” or, likewise, “I’m so excited / I can’t wait to meet you there … I’m so horny,” he arguably is evoking the manic phase of bipolar I disorder. Broadly speaking, bipolar I disorder (the more severe form of the disorder, formerly and colloquially known as manic depression) includes intermittent “manic episodes” that last at least a week, during which the person shows a euphoric mood, increased energy, and goal-directed behavior, starting new projects, with decreased need for sleep (as little as one or two hours per night), delusions of grandeur, hyperreligiosity (e.g., thinking oneself as a deity), hypersexuality, irritability, rapid rate of speech (think of someone speaking much faster than the average person, jumping from one loosely-related subject to another, unable to stop their flow of thoughts), and more. Problematically, this increased energy, productivity, and self-confidence are not necessarily directly toward completion of healthy or reality-based goals and often lead to self-destructive, risky behavior or shirking of one’s work, school, or familial responsibilities (such as suddenly acting on the urge to drive cross-country, without alerting anyone). Other bipolar disorder symptoms include long periods of major depression between manic episodes, as well as emotional lability, i.e., rapidly shifting, intense mood swings.23 The bridge verses of “Lithium” evoke this emotional lability of bipolar disorder; Cobain sings, “I love you, I’m not gonna crack / I killed you, I’m not gonna crack.” Young members of generation X who already felt alienated and misunderstood by the baby-boomer-driven culture found a potent rallying cry in expressions of alienation from society uttered by such a talented popular culture artist. However, when Cobain ultimately committed suicide, the notion of Cobain as spokesman for the generation clashed with reality and implied that he was not simply a national icon but was perhaps an individual with his own personal mental crises. Perhaps this is one reason he was so reticent to accept the label of the voice of a generation.
Peace, Love, and Empathy
When trying to make sense of Cobain’s suicide, Nirvana bassist and friend to Cobain since adolescence Krist Novoselik said, “You see the art, a lot of his messages are as plain as day […]. In 20/20 hindsight you’re like, why didn’t I see that, I should have said something.”24 Cobain sang candidly about his anger, his sadness, and his most disturbing inner thoughts. He became the most famous man in music for a short time, and his words and music have resonated far beyond his rise to fame in the early 1990s. Yet even with near-universal acclaim for his ability to articulate his emotion and vision in ways that connected with so many, he was unable to feel that he was understood. Depression, suicide, mental illness … all remain stigmatized beyond Cobain’s death, and probably will remain so for some time to come. Cobain did leave the world a final letter before his suicide. For all the dark imagery of his music, the closing lines of his farewell to the world are as instructive and succinct as any available approach to attempting to understanding mental illness: “Peace, Love, Empathy. [signed] Kurt Cobain.”25
Notes
1. Billboard, “Billboard 200: 1992 Archive,” accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1992/billboard-200.
2. NME, “Lana Del Rey: ‘I Was Inspired by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain,’” December 9, 2011, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.nme.com/news/music/lana-del-rey-225-1286566.
3. Sarah Jones, “Rap Star Goes Rocker! Kanye West Pays Tribute to Nirvana Wearing a Vintage Sweatshirt from the 90s Grunge Band,” Mail Online, November 19, 2015, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3326321/Rap-star-goes-rocker-Kanye-West-pays-tribute-Nirvana-wearing-vintage-sweatshirt-90s-grunge-band.html.
4. David Fricke, “Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck,” Rolling Stone, January 27, 1994, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/kurt-cobain-the-rolling-stone-interview-19940127.
5. Richard Fry, “Millennials Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Pew Research Center, April 25, 2016, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers/.
6. U.S. Department of Labor, “Facts Over Time,” Women’s Bureau, accessed November 6, 2016, https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/facts_over_time.htm.
7. Patricia H. Shiono and Linda Sandham Quinn, “Epidemiology of Divorce,” The Future of Children, 4, no. 1 (1994): 18–23.
8. Fry, “Millennials Overtake Baby Boomers.”
9. Shiono and Quinn, “Epidemiology of Divorce.”
10. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, dir. Brett Morgen, Hollywood, CA: Universal Pictures, 2015.
11. Kurt Cobain, Journals. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.
12. A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (July 1943): 370–396.
13. Pascual Gargiulo and Humberto Luis Mesones-Arroyo, eds., Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update: Bridging the Divide (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 49–62.
14. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society. New York: Norton, 1964.
15. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Injury Prevention & Control: Data & Statistics (WISQARS™),” last modified May 4, 2016, http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/index.html.
16. Scottye J. Cash and Jeffrey A. Bridge, “Epidemiology of Youth Suicide and Suicidal Behavior,” Current Opinion in Pediatrics, 21, no. 5 (2009): 613–619.
17. CDC, “Understanding Suicide: 2015 Factsheet,” accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/suicide_factsheet-a.pdf.
18. Ibid.
19. Ruth Perou et al., “Mental Health Surveillance Among Children: United States, 2005–2011,” CDC, May 17, 2013, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6202a1.htm; R. C. Kessler et al., “Age Differences in Major Depression: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R),” Psychological Medicine, 40, no. 02 (June 17, 2009): 225–237.
20. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain Was High When He Shot Himself,” Baltimore Sun, April 15, 1994, accessed November 6, 2016. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1994-04-15/features/1994105028_1_kurt-cobain-cobain-suicide-heroin.
21. Holly C. Wilcox, Kenneth R. Conner, and Eric D. Caine, “Association of Alcohol and Drug Use Disorders and Completed Suicide: An Empirical Review of Cohort Studies,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence 76 (December 7, 2004): S11–S19.
22. Ross J. Baldessarini et al., “Decreased Risk of Suicides and Attempts during Long-Term Lithium Treatment: A Meta-analytic Review,” Bipolar Disorders (October 2006): 625–639.
23. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). (Washington, DC): American Psychiatric Association, 2013.
24. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.
25. Isaiah Rendorio, “Kurt Cobain’s Suicide Note,” Seattle Television History, last accessed November 6, 2016, http://depts.washington.edu/sthp/items/show/264.