Cobain's Music Full Of Anger, Confusion

Kurt Cobain's death was not entirely unexpected. Even the fact that he apparently killed himself could not be called surprising, despite his youth, popularity and spectacular success.

The slight, blond, blue-eyed 27-year-old star was rock's most troubled and fragile idol, whose drug abuse, chronic stomach pains, marital woes, sexual ambiguity, self-doubt and skepticism over stardom were often played out in public.

He talked about his confusion, fear and pain in interviews, and he sang about them in his songs with his band, Nirvana. His seesaw emotional state became familiar to his fans, as he swung from artistic and commercial highs to deep personal lows.

His troubles are perhaps key to Nirvana's popularity among young people. Cobain's music expressed the anger and confusion of contemporary youth.

He rocketed to fame with the 1991 hit single "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which he said had "a teen revolutionary theme to it." The song and the album it came from, "Nevermind," heralded a new style of rock that came to be known as grunge. It touched a nerve with rock fans around the world, as evidenced by international sales of some 18 million Nirvana recordings.

In hindsight, Cobain left many clues in his songs and interviews that may help explain why he might have taken his own life.

"On the bright side is suicide," he sings in a song on "In Utero," an album released by Nirvana last September. "Out of the ground, into the sky, out of the sky, into the dirt," he sings in another of the disc's tunes. Those lyrics can be seen now as tracing the meteoric arc of his short-lived fame. In retrospect, "In Utero" seems filled with clues of his despair and cynicism. The opening lines are a wry comment on his success: "Teenage angst has paid off well."

Cobain was almost always frank about his troubles. He spoke openly about taking heroin, and his wife, Courtney Love, confessed to using the drug while pregnant. The couple, married in Hawaii two years ago, had a volatile relationship, wavering from vocal displays of affection to public squabbling. "I'm married, buried," he drolly sang in "All Apologies," a morose song from "In Utero."

In the same song he intones, "Everyone is gay." He often wore a dress onstage, and talked in interviews of spray-painting gay graffiti on buildings and pickup trucks in his native Aberdeen as a teenager. He often said his goal as a teenager was to move to Seattle and be supported by a "sugar daddy," a term for an older man who trades financial support for sexual favors.

In the May issue of the gay-oriented Out magazine, now on newsstands, Love is quoted as saying of her husband, "He's made out with half the guys in town!" In the same article, she says she has "slept with about 15 women."

Cobain was known as a sensitive, artistic teenager in Aberdeen. Fascinated by rock, he hung out on the fringes of the depressed coastal timber town's small music scene, enamored of a local rock group called the Melvins, still a cult band among punk fans and now based in San Francisco.

A loner, he secretly wrote poetry and devoured books in local libraries. A chance meeting with Krist Novoselic, whose family was from Croatia, brought out his musical abilities. The two formed Nirvana in 1985 with Novoselic on bass, Cobain on guitar.

The bond between Novoselic and Cobain was that both were outcasts. The pain of that rejection played into their music from the beginning, and the anger was expressed not only in the lyrics but in the band's orgies of destruction at the end of their concerts, which remained a trademark throughout the band's career.

After enjoying some success in the Aberdeen area, and later around Olympia, where the band relocated in 1987, the group came to the attention of Sub Pop, a fledgling Seattle label, in 1988. Its first album for the punk and alternative label was released in January 1989, and slowly it became an underground international hit.

Like so many cutting-edge American bands, Nirvana first became a phenomenon in England, in 1989. A writer for Melody Maker, a London rock weekly, coined a term for the band's loud, rough-edged blend of punk and pop: grunge.

The name stuck and has come to represent a whole movement of Seattle music, represented by such bands as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Mudhoney. The success of grunge has made this city the center of the rock world.

While Nirvana's success in Europe was slow and small enough for Cobain and the band to handle, the international popularity explosion of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the fall of 1991 threw Cobain into a tailspin.

Success seemed to paralyze him, and for a time the band ground to a halt. He threatened to quit, or make unlistenable music to short-circuit the band's popularity. It was then that his drug problems emerged - and apparently never quite went away.

His marriage to Love in early 1992, and the birth of their daughter Frances Bean Cobain in August of that year, brought brief respites of peace to Kurt Cobain.

The band had moments of triumph, with TV appearances, tours, hit records and the completion of "In Utero," but he remained troubled.

Earlier this week the organizers of the Lollapalooza summer tour of alternative-rock bands announced that Nirvana, which was to have been the headline act, had withdrawn because of Cobain's health problems.

Cobain's mother, Wendy O'Connor, who still lives in Aberdeen, told the Daily World there she had not been able to reach her son for six days and feared he was dead.