FRANCES FARMER WILL HAVE HER REVENGE ON THE COMMODITY FORM (part 1)

On Nirvana, Capitalism, and the History of Underground Music

At the end of 2024, I started a brief essay series to observe the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain. In the first essay, I focused on the impact his death had on my fourteen-year-old self and how it reoriented my life. But in this second installment, I’m setting aside personal reflection. Instead, I want to reconstruct a condensed version of his story through the lens of the underground, independent music world of the 1980s and 90s.

The essay that follows is long, and will be posted in two parts. Even if you’re not a fan of Nirvana, I think there is enough cultural history and examination of DIY culture here to make it worth your while. If you are a fan, I’ve tried not to bore you with the usual superficial junk. I hope you get something out of it. <3

Nirvana can’t decide if they want to be punk or R.E.M. Indecision can often at times kill a band, and Nirvana are suicidal.

--from Kurt Cobain’s Journals

THE YEAR IT ALL BROKE

Those who have written at length about Kurt Cobain and Nirvana often draw attention to the many contradictions that shaped them. The band is somehow both original and derivative, melodic yet abrasive, soft-spoken and aggressive; and Kurt himself is at once reclusive and charismatic, compassionate and misanthropic, a cynical defeatist and a champion of the underdog. A classic instance of the cultural polarities Kurt navigated can be seen when he appeared on the cover of corporately owned Rolling Stone wearing a “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” T-shirt—a play on SST Records’ punk slogan, “Corporate Rock Still Sucks.” While some might have seen this as hypocrisy or hollow provocation, it seems more accurate to view it as an artist approaching a real contradiction—between the desire to influence a mass audience and the ethical compromise involved in the platforms that make it possible—rather than seeking to deny it or resolve it. More to the nerve, it shows Kurt inhabiting that contradiction while knowing there may be no safe way out of it.

On the cover of Rolling Stone in 1992.

As Kurt noted, the band’s success was largely a matter of timing, and what was happening to Nirvana and the world of rock music was entangled with a broader explosion of contradictions—most notably, the end of the Cold War. Many authors, including Nick Soulsby and Joshua Clover, have noted the coincidence that Nirvana was actually touring Europe in 1989 and entered Berlin just two days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then, two years later, just as Nirvana broke through into world stardom, the USSR fully collapsed. In writing about these correspondences, Soulsby and Clover both make reference to the “End of History” thesis, which suggests that the driving force of history ended at this moment, with Western capitalism having secured victory¹. But in this breakdown of contradictions, the US had also lost a legitimizing narrative of the Cold War—or, in Soulsby’s words, it had lost “the unifying enemy” (“Victory and the Damage Done”). As such, victory seemed like a kind of defeat, producing exhilaration as well as anxiety, confusion, and doubt. And this same mood colored Nirvana’s unexpected rise to world fame. In particular, by enacting a confrontation between the Mainstream and the Underground, Nirvana had stepped into this destabilized moment in history where wins and losses blurred. And it consumed them.

Kurt actually had a kind of theory of history. He seems to have grasped it largely in terms of popular culture and rock and roll, but he understood these acutely and intuitively. In rock, he had seen that the dialectical forces of artistic imagination and commodification collide in cycles of rebellion and recuperation, break-through and domestication. Above all, Kurt seemed conscious that market forces almost always won: exhaustion, assimilation, and dilution are virtually preordained. In 1989, in one of his first interviews, he was already speaking of the emerging SubPop² sound his band was associated with as “the ultimate rehash” and “the last wave of rock and roll” (qtd. in Soulsby). That is, he was sounding his defeat well before he’d even entered the game. A short while later, in 1992, after the band’s breakthrough, he sounded much the same; to Michael Azerrad, he said:

It's sad to think what the state of rock and roll will be in twenty years. It's already so rehashed and so plagiarized that it's barely alive now. It's disgusting. I don't think it will be important any more. It's just mathematics, that's all rock and roll is. . . . Everything's based on ten. There's no such thing as infinity—it repeats itself after ten and it's over. It starts getting watered down every five years. (CAYA 340-41)

If this cynicism is one side of Kurt, the other side is the idealist that calls his band Nirvana—and these two were continually arguing. Here, we hear the cynic winning out, asserting that the game was rigged. As such, a rock star will end up being the very thing they despise. The question becomes, then, With so much to lose, and so little to gain, why even try? Why not quit? He would struggle with this dilemma all the way to the end.

Against this pervasive defeatism, Kurt long tried to advance a more positive vision. In this vision, punk rock was seen as a liberating art form: it held a spark that let him escape the endless rehash of plagiarized rock and approach the freedom and ecstasy of revolt, something he seems to have held almost sacred. As the last great upheaval in the dialectical game of revolt and commodification that helped structure rock history, punk had created a flourishing underground culture, and Kurt believed ardently in that world³. Fittingly, the year Nirvana became famous, 1991, was deemed “The Year Punk Broke” by Sonic Youth: it was the year punk “broke through” into popularity as well as the year it “broke down/apart.” And sadly, this became a moment of crisis within Kurt’s idea of punk rock as a freedom from the endless rehash.

When Nirvana broke, and punk broke, and history seemed to end, the disorientation of the moment was palpable. As major labels began to sign every underground band around, and as bands seemed eager to cash in, the sense of the underground’s own “unifying enemy” had begun to shift and possibly disappear. Was the underground finally winning, or was it being sold out to the highest bidder? It’s very easy for Kurt’s suicide to become a black hole, a magnet that drives every narrative about this era into the same terrible ending. And for some, including Kurt’s biographer, Charles R. Cross, this ending was inevitable. But I want to avoid this trap of tragic pre-destination. Instead, I want to look at the specific context and of events that led to Nirvana’s cultural moment, and to illuminate how crucial decisions got made, how things easily could have gone otherwise, and how it all went so wrong. I want to show how Kurt’s unique position and contributions show a crucial part of the history of underground musical culture, as well as the contradictions and possibilities that shaped it.

A SHIELD AGAINST THE OGRE

Arguably, the city through which Kurt and Nirvana entered into their most meaningful and consistent relationship with the musical underground was Olympia, WA. Kurt came from Aberdeen, WA, and Nirvana is of course associated with “The Seattle Sound,” but as others have noted, Kurt’s real home, artistically, was Olympia. In Nirvana: the Biography, Everett True quotes Kurt’s one-time friend and founder of Kill Rock Stars, Slim Moon: “If there’s any one city that can claim them, it has to be Olympia . . . The whole career of the band from the time that they recorded their first demo to Nevermind breaking as a number one hit, Kurt lived in Olympia.” Moon also credits the Olympia’s influence for sparking Kurt’s interest in feminism—especially via his connections to Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill—and his more confident embrace of his melodic instincts. Although Kurt would always feel like an outsider, even in Olympia, he did not fully mature as a musician until moving there. Ultimately, this is where he solidified his vision for what he could achieve with music—where he first believed he could actually defeat the market forces dominating youth culture. But as happened with so many things in his life, he would later come to feel intense antagonism toward this artistic home.

The dominant force in Olympia music at the time was K Records, started by Calvin Johnson. Along with his child-like punk aesthetics and disavowal of trained musicianship, Calvin upheld a DIY ethos that found common ground with Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat and later Fugazi and Dischord Records) in Washington DC. Their musical styles could not be more different—though both had un-marketability and dissonance in common—but there was a close connection between the two scenes, whose history went back to the very early 80’s and the very beginnings of a coordinated, underground music culture in America. Further, K Records and Dischord both upheld an egalitarian and community-focused ethos: there were no contracts and both labels and bands split income from record sales fifty-fifty (once cost of production was recouped). Both labels voiced an ardent anti-capitalist stance, and many viewed their roles as musicians and cultural producers in overtly revolutionary terms. (In fact, one of the most overtly revolutionary bands, Bikini Kill, is one Kurt had a very close and formative relationship with⁴.)

Bikini Kill. Tobi Vail, Kathleen Hanna, Kathi Wilcox (L to R)

In this culture, the major antagonist was the corporate world of major record labels, such Sony, EMI, MCA/Universal, BMG, PolyGram, and Warner⁵ —these were, in their way, the unifying enemy. They represented mainstream culture and a popular success that was fundamentally unattainable and undesirable. In Love Rock Revolution: the Story of K Records, Calvin Johnson sums up the attitude:

[T]here were underground bands and then there was the mainstream. In the ’80s, if you were in an underground band, the mainstream was just this other universe. . . . And any band that tries to go from one to the other, it’s like the kiss of death. No one ever thought, ‘I want to be in a band and sell my records.’ They thought, ‘I want to be in a band. Maybe I’ll put out a single. I’ll play some shows with my friends.’ And that was it, that was fine, that was what you did. And you never thought that anything else could happen.” (qtd. Baumgarten)

While this marginal position meant that many bands and scenes didn’t last long, and that some people weren’t very committed, for others it became a way of life. Throughout the eighties, there eventually emerged a loose network of record stores, nightclubs, radio stations, fanzines, newsletters, and record labels, and these constituted an actual infrastructure for the burgeoning underground world. And again, all of this was fired by a spirit of resistance against the mainstream, profit-driven culture and its excesses. While this was true for virtually anyone in the underground, Calvin Johnson was perhaps the most emphatic on this last point, even giving this enemy a name: “The Corporate Ogre.”

This culture and its ethos is a feature of Kurt’s development that really can’t be overstated: its revolutionary spirit and commitment to a cause was the missing ingredient he needed. While Kurt was well-versed in punk culture before Olympia, Calvin’s vision was unique in its understanding of musical politics. And Kurt seems to have fully embraced Calvin’s rhetoric⁶, with numerous references to “the corporate ogre” in his interviews and journals. And beyond just Calvin and K, he drew heavily from Bikini Kill’s feminism and revolutionary politics, channeling Tobi Vail’s arguments in many journal entries. Under this combined influence, in the years falling between 1989 and 1992—the two points cited earlier, where he affirmed the cynical vision of defeatist rockism—Kurt seems to have undergone a kind of conversion, or at least an amplification of his idealistic side. Whereas the cynically “rehashed, plagiarized” rocker was a defeatist figure caught in a losing game, the young, feminist punk of Olympia had begun to see a different world—one in which a commodified youth culture could be strategically combatted.

His journals and interviews documenting this era, roughly 1990-91, are telling. It was actually the tail end of his time in Olympia, but this was when he was dating Tobi Vail and closest with Kathleen Hannah as well. At that time, he begins to write of revolution and social justice, repeatedly voicing anti-racist and feminist slogans, and starts his personal mantra: “Punk rock is freedom.” On one page, he even associates this with the “sacred,” by writing both “punk rock is art” and “art is sacred.” In fact, he claims that his vision of punk is unique in holding room for the sacred, and he describes punk as the freedom to play whatever you want, as sloppily as you want, and to bring it to life through passion. Ultimately, this fusion of passion, freedom, art, and sacredness—unified in the idea of punk—crystallized something very profound within him. To solidify it, he even went so far as to get the K Records logo (a simple K inside a child-like shield) tattooed on his arm as a kind of talisman and reminder of this quasi-religious conversion—not to the K ethos, per se, but to his idiosyncratic vision of punk.⁷

While Charles R. Cross’s famous biography of Kurt seems to gloss over the role Olympia played in his development⁸, I think it’s crucial to emphasize it and, above all, to view it in historical and social terms rather than racing to fixate on Kurt’s personal psychology. In fact, where Cross sees contradictions largely as facets of Kurt’s own unique personality, I see these more as real factors of the social history Kurt was living through and which he intuited and channeled in a singularly powerful and volatile way. And in a true testament to this contradictory approach—one that seems almost perverse at first glance—it seems that Kurt was embracing the values of Olympia and the punk underground wholeheartedly at the very time that he began to consider going against one of its central tenets: by deciding to sign his band to a major label.

POSING AS THE ENEMY

The motivation behind the decision to sign with a major label was complicated and, like most things in his life, overdetermined. At the very least, Kurt believed he could navigate this very complicated path with integrity, and he was developing a vision of how his band could subvert the corporate world. But the most immediate concern was economic. And as such, it reveals some of the problems and limits of DIY musical culture.

In late 1990, at almost three years in, the costs of being a band had become aggravating to all of Nirvana. The reality getting ripped off by shady club owners, sleeping on strangers’ floors, spending countless hours cramped into a van, and being jerked around by a nearly-bankrupt record label (SubPop) had begun to wear on him. As Jim Ruland writes in Corporate Rock Sucks, “The DIY ethos required a tremendous amount of work. Those who chose this path eventually discovered that the satisfaction one took in doing the work was the only reliable reward.” And ultimately, this is one of the unresolvable problems for DIY under capitalism: some simply can’t afford to give that much time and labor away, and their small, autonomous efforts can’t reach enough people to earn a living. As a high-school dropout with no college education and no familial wealth—and with an visceral loathing of wage labor— Kurt saw music as his only real career option.

Sonic Youth played a decisive role in Nirvana’s fate at this moment. As elders of the musical underground, they had enormous credibility and influence—and what’s more, they had just successfully moved to a major label. From this position, they effectively mentored Nirvana, and they confirmed some of their doubts about committing to a small label. For Sonic Youth, the controversial move to a major came not long after an eye-opening and disenchanting experience with SST Records, the legendary independent label run by Greg Ginn of Black Flag. Early on, Thurston Moore had seen the band’s time on SST as the fulfillment of a dream, and he had longed to be a part of the underground community he studied through fanzines. But SST had changed by the late eighties. In fact, as Ruland argues in Corporate Rock Sucks—his history of SST— Ginn had begun shaping the label into a clone of the corporate record labels it had once sought to destroy. Bands were not paid, records were not promoted, and Ginn had become almost perversely litigious. While SST may have been unique in its size and level of dysfunction, the basic complaints about money, promotion, and lack of support were extremely common among bands on independent labels. And these rang true to Kurt in his experience with SubPop’s increasing dysfunction and his concern about future financial security⁹.

It was a crucial moment in Kurt’s life. The decision to go with a major would risk losing some of the band’s supporters. Kathleen Hanna puts the dilemma quite well in her memoir: “Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn’t afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn’t have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie-vs.-major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on.” Kurt obviously agreed, and when Nirvana made the leap, they signed with Sonic Youth’s label and management company, DGC and Gold Mountain. They took a relatively small advance, and so they were still more or less broke, but they now had security for the band’s future. Unlike it had been on SubPop, they would be paid on time, their records would appear in more stores, they would have tour managers and contracts, and they would not have to haggle with shady club owners. Plus, they would actually have lawyers, promoters, and people to do all of the tedious legwork involved in running a band that have nothing to do with making music. Overall, it looked like this may actually give the band more freedom and autonomy than it had before.

Nevertheless, the idealist who claimed “punk is freedom” and tattooed himself with the K shield had not gone away. Beyond his more calculated economic concerns, Kurt was also entertaining a more grandiose idea—and it’s one that expressed his commitment to the independent underground. On more than one occasion, he referred to this idea as the band’s “crusade.” A key document for this is a letter to Tobi Vail from spring 1991, drafted in the journals while the band was in LA recording Nevermind. In it, he writes at length about how he saw Nirvana’s precise moment in cultural history, and he lays out, in an almost prophetic way, how he hopes to put into practice his vision of punk freedom. In particular, he argues for how the band can effect social change—even advance a feminist agenda—by reaching young people before they get “programmed” by patriarchal and racist attitudes, and saving them from psychic death. Further, he felt the time was right—perhaps even perfect—for popular entertainment to achieve this¹⁰:

The corporations are finally allowing supposedly subversive, alternative-thinking bands to have a loan of money to expose their crusade[.] Obviously they aren’t forking out loans for this reason, but more because it looks to be a money-making commodity, but we can use them. We can pose as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system to start its rot from the inside¹¹. Sabotage the empire by pretending to play their game. Compromise just enough to call their bluff.

Whereas, in Kurt’s view, punk bands under Reagan had struggled with a highly restrictive social order that would never permit their values, he had begun to see enough restrictions were opening up in the 90’s that his band could exploit them to enact a kind of insurgency. Upending his cynical side, he argues not only that punk rock can effect change, but that he hopes to make the world better and safer for vulnerable people by challenging sexism, homophobia, and racism with his music. He was twenty-four years old, and he was daring himself to advance an ideal on the biggest stage he could conceive of. For a moment, it seemed he believed not just in what he could do, but in what he could achieve for his community: he believed they could win¹².

A contrary idea that Kurt was actually motivated by a desire for stardom is a matter of some debate¹³—ultimately, this ambivalence is one of the central contradictions in his story. But in this letter, you can see how thoroughly he had considered his own motivations and how prescient he was in his vision of mass culture and how he wanted to affect it on behalf of the underground. It was an extension of his core slogan found in Olympia, “punk rock is freedom,” and the fusion of art, passion, and sacredness he wanted to uphold. Going into the fame that would change his life, Kurt felt—or wanted to feel—that he was on a punk crusade to shift the consciousness of the nation’s youth. He was too guarded to admit this very often¹⁴, but this idea was very much at work in his mind, and Krist Novoselic spoke in these terms in interviews as well. And ultimately, it is very much what he did in fact achieve: he did expose millions of people to subversive politics, feminism and gay rights, and a new world of underground music. The band mattered profoundly to so many people and changed their lives. But he couldn’t see it that way. Instead, in the grip of fame in this destabilized, contradictory moment, everything seemed to turn on him.

Part two will pick up here soon

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Azerrad, Michael. Nirvana: The Amplifications. Harper Collins, ebook, 2023.

--Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Doubleday, 1993.

--Our Band Could Be Your Life. Hachette, ebook, 2012.

Baumgarten, Mark. Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music. Sasquatch Books, 2012.

Browne, David. Goodbye 20^th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth. Da Capo, 2008.

Clover, Joshua. 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About. Univ. of California Press, 2009.

Cross, Charles. C. Heavier Than Heaven. Grand Central Publishing, ebook, 2012.

Goldberg, Danny. Serving the Servants: Remembering Kurt Cobain. Ecco Press, 2020.

Hannah, Kathleen. Rebel Girl. Ecco Press, 2024.

Oakes, Kaya. Slanted and Enchanted. Holt Paperbacks, 2009.

Morgen, Brett and Richard Bienstock. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Insight Editions, 2015.

Ruland, Jim. Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records. Hachette, 2022.

Soulsby, Nick. Cobain on Cobain. Chicago Review Press, 2016.

--"Victory and the Damage Done Part 2: The End of the Rock Star.” Nirvana Legacy. Aug 6, 2013. https://nirvana-legacy.com/category/nicks-philosophies-on-nirvana/page/2/. Retrieved Jan 17, 2025.

True, Everett. Nirvana: the Biography. Omnibus, 2006.

1. This argument was advanced by Francis Fukuyama.

2. SubPop was Nirvana’s first record label. It emerged form an influential fanzine, Subterranean Pop, written by Bruce Pavitt in the early 80s.

3. Of course, what is and isn’t truly and rightfully “punk” is a matter of extreme and often ridiculous contention; but for Kurt, punk was more than a genre: it was an attitude focused on passion, DIY, community, and an oppositional stance to mainstream musical culture—in particular, against the exploitative, profit-driven world of major record labels (what SST deemed “Corporate Rock”).

4. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a title Kurt took from Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill’s singer. There are many other, deeper influences the band had on Kurt, but this partiuclar one captures so much of the link between them. Bikini Kill was there, in spirit, at the very heart of what Nirvana achieved on the public stage.

5. A major label is technically defined by the Association of Independent Music as "a multinational company which (together with the companies in its group) has more than 5% of the world market(s) for the sale of records or music videos” (Wiki). Today there are only three majors—Sony, Universal Music Group, and Warner music Group—which together hold approx. 70% of global market share (ibid.).

6. Kurt’s relationship to Calvin is complex. Calvin seems to have kept him at a distance after Nirvana gained fans in Olympia, seeing a potential threat. For his part, Kurt found himself somewhat put off by the elitism of Calvin’s scene, even though he internalized its ethos and politics. In Olympia as in all other situations, Kurt was a sponge, and he avidly picked up influences, ideas, and information wherever he went. This same tendency made him powerfully susceptible to feeling and internalizing others’ resentment and judgment as well.

7. When asked about the tattoo, Kurt only said it was “a reminder to be a child.” Given his increasingly contentious relationship to Olympia, it’s understandable why he might downplay it. But even taking him at his word, Kurt’s idea of childhood is inextricable from freedom, passion, and joy—it’s what he knew when his parents were still together and The Beatles were his heroes. Childhood was life before rejection, cynicism, and anger were baked into his psyche—a space he sought through music and live performance (and, sadly, heroin).

8. Everett True argues that that Cross’s downplaying of Olympia was essentially the hand of Courtney Love at work. She controlled the estate and access to the materials Cross needed, and she was very hostile to Olympia and its influence on Kurt. I think the demonization of Courtney is vile, but it seems objectively true that she was committed to driving a wedge between Kurt and all of his friends in Olympia. She continued this in the press even after he’d died, at one point calling Kathleen Hanna “Kurt’s biggest enemy”—a claim that is undoubtedly false.

9. In one account of this situation with SubPop (from an interview in Singapore with Patrick Chng in Singapore, Feb. 1992), Kurt states, “The guys who set up Sub-Pop basically wanted to promote the music but it grew too big. The accounting was screwed up and we didn’t get paid for a long time. The distribution was inadequate too. We had kids coming up to us saying they couldn’t find our records anywhere. That’s when we decided that we should leave Sub-Pop. / We wanted to get out of the contract but we had signed a seven-record deal. For another label to sign us up would mean that that label would have to pay Sub Pop some money to get us out. Another independent label would not be able to afford that so we decided to go with a major” (qtd. in Soulsby, Cobain). In this account, it’s almost as if their move to a major was forced, but they likely could have claimed breach of contract. Also, SubPop would almost certainly have gone bankrupt, and soon. In fact, the deal SubPop got in the buyout from DGC absolutely saved the label: they got 2 percent of Nevermind’s sales (Azerrad, CAYA, 163), meaning they likely got more than a million dollars out of it by the end of 1993.

10. Kurt asserts a similar line of thought in an interview with Patrick Chng: “It’s all a matter of timing and social conditioning. It takes a long time for people to develop an open mind. It takes generations and it takes a lot of education to solidify it. . . . I just think the ’90s has a new generation of kids and teenagers who are more aware and they’re generally more intelligent than the last generation of kids about 10 years ago when punk rock had all the right in the world to become really popular because The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Ramones had a big push behind. There’s a lot of attention and promotion and it still didn’t work because socially the public wasn’t ready for it” (qtd. in Soulsby, Cobain).

11. In a later journal entry, well after fame had transformed his life, he had begun to rationalize his relationship to his management and record label by this same logic. Where others saw industry professionals, he claimed to see “honorable and sincere music lovers who were posing as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of empire” (233). Kurt’s relationship to these industry insiders shows a genuine desire just to belong somewhere, to find someone he could trust who also accepted him—just as he had wanted in Olympia. He seems to have overtly looked to Dany Goldberg (of Gold Mountain management) and Gary Gersh (of Geffen Records) as father figures—he seems to have trusted them quite deeply and often confided in them.

12. While the above-sketched plan, the “crusade”, comes very close to describing what did in fact play out—at least in cultural terms—he also told Michael Azzerad of a separate scheme. He claimed he wanted to pull the “Great Rock and Roll Swindle,” a la the Sex Pistols: signing with a major label for a million dollars, collecting payment, and then breaking up to sign somewhere else. In this plan, the band would end up signed to K Records, thereby supporting both his band and Calvin’s label financially with money siphoned from the majors. Krist Novoselic also recalls Kurt bringing this up on more than one occasion.

13. Courtney Love is adamant that, like her, Kurt also wanted to be super-famous: she claims he told her he wanted to be “the biggest rock star in the world.” Charles R. Cross largely accepts this view in Heavier Than Heaven, and Danny Goldberg (Kurt’s manager) also argues that Kurt was defined by “ambition” over and above ethos and that he “had no patience for indie-world guilt trips.” Azzerad seems more mixed about it, understanding that Kurt did not like his celebrity even as it was inevitable that a kid growing up with rock music will be deeply fascinated with fame because it’s just part of the lore. Obviously, he was intrigued by it and wondered what he might get out of it—and what he could do with it. Everett True, who knew both Kurt and Courtney very well, rejects the idea that Kurt was driven largely by personal ambition and positions him more in relationship to underground music culture where community matters more than fame. In the end, I don’t think Kurt himself knew for sure what he was driven by other than a passion for music, a genuine artistic vision, and a sense of desperate, confused need (for acceptance from those he loved and revenge against his enemies—baffled by the ways that these categories could shift and blur). But without doubt, I think the underground was more important to him than Cross’s story allows or than Love and Goldberg are able or willing to acknowledge.

14. As he stated in an interview with Patrick Chng in Singapore, Feb 1992, “We’ve sold lots of records and made some money but there’s nothing wrong in that. We need the money to carry on the crusade, don’t want to sound pretentious, but it’s a crusade to me” (qtd. in Soulsby).