YEAR ZERO: 1994
On three decades since the death of Kurt Cobain. The first in a series of essays.
There is Nothing I Can Say that I Haven’t Thought Before
It’s risky trying to write about Kurt Cobain. There are just so many ways to go wrong, to derail into mythology and nostalgia. But here at the end of 2024, as we approach the end of the 30th anniversary1 of his death, I feel like I would regret it if I let this moment pass without trying to say something.
Because I have been dwelling on his legacy, off and on, for three decades now, and one of the central facts of my life is that I was decisively and overtly changed by Kurt’s death in 1994. And when I say it “changed me” I don’t mean only that he and Nirvana’s music made me see the world in new ways—I mean that these things led me to make choices that radically altered the course of my life. And even now, as a middle aged man, the signs of that, and the values it instilled, are still apparent to me every day.
So this essay is about how Kurt’s influence completely reoriented my life at age fourteen. However, this is only the first essay, and the larger series—which should be three essays in all—will not all be autobiographical. And even this one is not just about me. Yes, it is largely a memoir, but I want to use it to say something about art and imagination, about masculinity, and politics, and social codes. It’s a about a specific culture (southwest Ohio) in a specific moment in time (mid-90s, pre-internet). And it’s about the mystery of how we keep becoming whatever it is we are.
You’re in High School Again
As teen dramas go, my own story is pretty tame. Much of the drama, in fact, was internal. Still, like anybody, my teenage reality was an all-consuming, drastically magnified experience. Everything counts, every day seems like you’re being defined that much more clearly and relentlessly. You take your stand among the others, and everybody doubles-down on who they are and finds their friends. Those who can’t, those who are left out and alone—they suffer. And this potential for suffering makes public high school a volatile social crucible. It’s where kids first try out social roles and sort themselves out in relationship to power, and that power has strong political valences. As Kurt knew well, that power can destroy people—annihilate their spirit. It was no fluke that, when he first appeared on the public stage, in the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” he was seen holding a guitar in a gymnasium, in a high school pep rally, pushing its tensions into chaos.
The place where all this happened was a small, semi-rural town in southwest Ohio. The population was around 3000 people, and the town itself was about one square mile surrounded by corn- and bean-fields. Major cities like Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton were all an hour’s drive away, so those trips usually only happened on weekends. We had a library, a school, a couple gas stations, a grocery, a used car lot, a pizza place, a small diner, a swimming pool, and a couple video rental stores. Both of my parents had been raised there, and many of the people they grew up with still lived there too. But by the time of my youth, the place was a ghost of whatever it once was. The town was depressed, increasingly vacant, and crumbling: rows of dead storefronts in old brick buildings, cracked display windows, fallen plaster, a dusty film on everything. It was a trashed replica of small-town America. And as it goes in such places, everyone knew everyone else, and everything was judged by a narrow outlook.
My childhood had been very happy. I was an only child, but I had a lot of friends, and I was involved in sports and the church (which was relatively liberal and lax). I biked freely all over town, exploring the creek and ramping over sidewalks. I would race around, cycling over to rent a video game or movie, or buy baseball cards from the gas station. I played baseball and some football, but the center of my life was basketball—in particular, my backyard hoop. From age seven onward, this site was not just where I spent most of my time, practicing, playing, and dreaming—it was also a center of social life. Neighborhood kids lived with me there through endless games, and we formed identities and legends there. In my own mind, and in the eyes of everyone who knew me, basketball was my entire world—it was simply who I was.
But by 1994, at age fourteen, all this had begun to change. I’d begun to feel a distance from everyone around me. On the surface, I was a star basketball player, and I had girlfriends, good grades, and was admired and liked by peers. But something inside me was fading away, growing sad and dim, and I did not understand it. This was partly the onset of a depression that would mark much of my adult life, but I did not know that and no one ever suggested it. All I knew was that the world of my old friends had begun to feel cruel and and ugly, and there was always pressure, and nothing felt free anymore. I experienced intense anxiety, confusion, and sadness. And in this situation, the role I played in the world of my small town and my classmates had begun to feel like a trap. I was miserable, but I kept playing along as well as I could.
On Friday, April 8th , whatever equilibrium I had been trying to maintain finally broke down. The news that Kurt Cobain had violently ended his own life spread through me like a bruise. That evening, MTV began playing the Unplugged performance on repeat, and it lasted all through the weekend. I watched it in a complete fog, barely able to comprehend what I felt. I saw the news stories, on TV and in print. Images, songs, anecdotes, reactions, tributes, commentary, reports. And it kept seeming to grow, as though every part of the world continued to confirm the awfulness of what it was, how it felt. The total effect of all this on me was like a conversion: I now felt, in the deepest core of myself, that there was something more meaningful in the world, bigger than the reality of my small town and the pressures I felt there. The feeling was a place of pure, interior sensitivity that knew something true and absolute. It made me shut up. It made me not want to be talked to or even noticed. And as this feeling bled through me, I felt, as in the Rilke poem, You must change your life.
And so I turned my life upside down: I took the drastic step of quitting playing basketball. And I didn’t just quit playing on the school team: I quit the playground, and I quit the backyard games—I almost quit going outside. And I stopped socializing almost entirely because of the anxiety I felt. As put by my next-door neighbor and friend with whom I’d played thousands of hours of basketball, “He just locked himself in his room and plays guitar. I don’t know what’s going on.” This had a pronounced effect on all of my relationships—friends, family, teachers, coaches. I became a question mark to all of them. I would get questions, remarks, mockery. People seemed to think I’d thrown away something valuable for no reason. My friends acted puzzled, hurt, sometimes angry and incredulous. My parents were deeply confused and upset. In fact, they were scared: they knew how deeply unhappy I really was. They just didn’t know why. All I could offer anybody was “I want to play guitar instead.” To which most responded, “You play guitar2?” or, “Hell, can’t you do both?” But for me, it was about making a break—I felt I simply could not be what I used to be.
I never once regretted my decision, but it badly worsened my social anxiety. As I entered high school that fall, my sense of self-consciousness and disconnection were extremely painful. My high school was small: if you stood out, you really stood out, and you felt it3. Now, a whole new group of kids and upperclassmen began trying to figure me and my decision out. When the high school coach heard about it, he hunted me down in gym class, bursting in to ask if it was true; when I said yes, he could tell I meant it. He just looked at me in a pained way. Then he looked down at the floor, ran a hand through his hair, and walked away. He said nothing, like he’d decided I was dead.
The way I coped with all of this was to stop talking. I ignored virtually everyone, said nothing. I shut everyone out except for my parents and one friend with whom I could still relate—though things grew more and more strained with him as well. My only interest was to get home and listen to music—to play guitar, to explore and learn new songs, to read about Nirvana and the bands they were introducing me to. I treated everything else like a chore or like it didn’t exist. It was, in many ways, cruel—to myself, to others4. But to me, that whole world felt cruel: everything felt small and mean and trapped—in conservatism, in traditionalism, in narrowness, and in aggression. And though I don’t feel it as much now, I really did feel a lot of hatred and disgust. I wanted out of that world, but I was stuck there four more years. So I just became a ghost of myself, pretending to be invisible, trying to hold onto a truth I’d found through Kurt’s music—and his death.
Because Today I Found My Friends…
In the world before the internet, it was difficult to reinvent yourself. There was no other place to escape to discover another community, to find another identity and new connections. My small world mirrored me, and there was no place else to look. The acute phase of loneliness, coldness, and mutual rejection lasted only a couple years—but they were long years, huge years. They left a profound imprint on my psyche—some of it was likely damaging and stunting to my development as a person. But it also opened a clearing for me. And there, although isolated, my inner life became enormously freeing and inspiring. It was, in fact, an education—one in which Kurt Cobain, however lost he had been in life, became my guide.
Now, when you tell someone you were “into Nirvana,” or that “Nirvana changed my life,” they might just picture a kid who really listened to a lot of Nirvana, had shirts and posters, maybe enjoyed other “grunge bands” as well. They see it as something passive or maybe parasocial: consuming CD’s and videos, immersed in fandom, even geekdom—idol worship, imitation, whatever. And there is a cult of exactly these things that lives to this very day. But for me, being into Nirvana meant learning an entirely new history, new values, and a new sense of possibility in the world. They showed me a world of underground music and ideas that enlarged my sense of reality and awakened my imagination. They spoke of DIY art, zines and independent record labels, rejecting conventional ideas of success, and alternative social structures. And crucially, they opened my eyes to the social and political implications of musical cultures.
This education was slow. Before the internet, and living an hour away from everything I needed, it took a long time to identify, hunt down, and purchase the physical documents I needed: books, magazines, CD’s, cassettes. I began by making lists of bands5 Kurt mentioned in interviews (many of which, like Fitz of Depression and Chokebore, were very hard to find). I gathered more information from Michael Azerrad’s book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, and from numerous alternative music magazines. So much of the experience was made up of dreaming and waiting6—imagining what certain music might sound like, and never learning until months later. Eventually, I began to mail letters to Touch and Go Records, K Records, Kill Rock Stars, and they sent catalogs that helped me find new stuff as well. And having sorted through tons of others alongside, I got familiar with a new canon: Sonic Youth, the Melvins, Black Flag, The Raincoats, Flipper, Dinosaur Jr, The Jesus Lizard, Fugazi, Babes in Toyland, The Meat Puppets, Big Black, The Vaselines, Bikini Kill, Beat Happening, Scratch Acid, Butthole Surfers, the Minutemen, Sebadoh, and on and on.
Of course, many of these are just the signature underground bands of the era, some of which had emerged onto MTV and college radio—but for my peers, in that place, at that time, they were not just weird: they actually incited anger in many people. The one friend I’d stayed close to during that time genuinely hated this music and would mock me behind my back about it. Another guy I knew had a rock magazine with a story about the Melvins in it, and my friend reportedly tore out the picture and ripped it to pieces because he hated knowing I listened to it. At my school, in 1994-1996, country music dominated, and the rock music people listened to was expected to confirm something masculine and heteronormative. Ultimately, there was really only one category for somebody who liked “this weirdo shit”—you must be some kind of queer, right?
Kurt was very outspoken about this exact thing. He described in interviews how his sense of difference, as well as his love of punk rock, helped make his own small-town experience utterly miserable. And this meant being singled out by “macho, redneck7 guys” as queer. While I was not gay, I began to identify with this idea of queerness because it marked an important conflict in my world. I only really expressed it in my social affiliations and attitudes, and various T shirts, but this dividing line—Rednecks vs. Queers—eventually became very pronounced in my high school. I knew which side I was on, and everyone else did too. By the time I was 17, there were more kids growing alienated with the stifling norms, and a sort of alternative culture emerged: kids who did not fit in—because of how they dressed, or how they looked, or what they felt and believed, or all of these at once—and found each other and refused to feel weakened by the facts of their difference. We found camaraderie and even comedy in seeing our strangeness and in defying the people who threw slurs in our direction. And this was an essential political education for me. This was the first time I took a stand against the forces of our social world alongside other kids.
Ultimately, Kurt made it possible for me to form a social conscience in a time and place where it was extremely difficult to do that. In 2024, it’s easy to forget that it was a radical provocation when he wore dresses and appeared in The Advocate and spoke out broadly against bigotry and sexism more broadly. The liner notes to Incesticide were profound to me: “At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us— leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records.” Quite simply, there was no other figure in my life who said anything remotely like this. All this told me that art and politics were related: that an artist must stand against the powers that degrade our lives and force people into self-consciousness, conformity, and fear. Because that fear is maintained by violence—whether it is police violence, the violent dispossessions of capital, or the kid barking slurs at you in the hallway. And unlike most rock and roll attitudes one acquires as a teen, these ideas have only seemed more necessary to me as I’ve aged—and as the world has shifted into the third decade of the 21st century.
In the Sun
Eventually, the direct power of Kurt’s influence over me waned. I left my hometown for college, then left Ohio for California, Texas, and Indiana. I found new friends, new parts of myself, of the world. I lived through new crises. But the thread from 1994 to here—to this very sentence, to the fact of my writing anything at all—is nevertheless continuous and direct.
For while I began my alternate education with guitar and music—and I am still an avid guitar player 30 years later—Kurt’s influence was also directly instrumental in my becoming a writer. The first poem I ever wrote was about his death. He was the first person I read about who kept notebooks and journals, sketching poetry and ideas, and this gave me permission to explore it—to think it was OK, connected to the world of rock music. And crucially, Kurt also recommended the writing of both William Burroughs and Samuel Beckett, and these two writers became my original doorways into serious literary art—the key to everything I later became. It all began in this weird clearing Kurt opened up in my life from ages 14 to 16. Ultimately, his influence saved me from the misery of never finding myself.
It's weird to realize you’re old. In age, we think about the shape of our life—what parts seem essential, what seems accidental, and whether there’s any difference. And when we tell stories about our life, we do so to find a meaning, an image—something we recognize, that has a shape that’s ours, livable, true. And that truth is partly an imaginative one—a truth about something deeper, something psychic. While you’re living it, you may think you know what you are doing, the story you are telling, but there’s actually something else happening, some larger change taking place. And it’s not that you’re wrong or mistaken about things—it’s that life is surrounded with dreams and feelings that capture us, and possess us, and change us. Often, you can’t actually know what’s going on until much later, and maybe not even then. But a shape is forged. And you try to learn how to love it.
I came into contact with the pattern that shaped my own life through processing Kurt Cobain’s death. I saw something beyond conscious understanding about myself, about what I wanted and desired, and I pursued it in a way that eventually saved me. But at the time, it often felt like damaging, destroying, shutting myself down. The paradox was blunt: my life’s shape was shown to me through a suicide. How does this affect a fourteen year old kid? Sometimes, his tragedy would become my mirror: Do I hate myself? Do I want to die? Is that what my unhappiness means? These are poisonous questions for a fourteen-year-old to brood on. And looking back, though I blame nobody, I wish someone could have talked to me in a way that got through and helped me deal with this stuff. I wish somebody could have told me that what I was going through was right—that it was not about suicide, or violence, or self-hatred. Ultimately, I was trying to find myself, even to heal myself—to become someone I could love. But it was still so far away, and I had so much more to learn, and I had no one to tell me those things. Instead, I had the music. And I had the books.
It’s sad that Kurt’s death overshadows the positive values he stood for. It may have taken his death to shock me awake into hearing what he was really saying, but what he said can’t be reduced to despair, to death. Yes, it is crucial to acknowledge rage, disturbance, dread, anguish—all of these were part of his art. But they were fuel, things he pushed with and through into something ecstatic, freeing. What he said to us when he most loved himself—when his image shone through fullest within itself and into the world—was that our lives are truer and freer though art and music, and through taking a side in the fight against the reactionaries and bigots. When we really hear that message, we know we owe it to one another not to be afraid. Don’t fear your enemies—don’t even fear death. Find the ones who help you build something that overwhelms these antagonists and lifts you into something bigger and fuller—something that sets you free. On In Utero, the song “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter has a bridge where Kurt sings, “Hate your enemies. / Save your friends. / Find your place. / Speak the truth.” And that’s it. That’s what it’s about. May we all feel the truth and energy of this in our lives.
Thirty years is a very significant anniversary. It is a complete cycle of Saturn around the sun. In astrology and mythology, Saturn is the planet of limits, structures, closures. One of his attributes is a scythe, signifying the harvest when planted seeds have reached full fruition, their stalks are chopped down, and the yield is sorted out. Likewise, Saturn was once thought to be the furthest limit of the cosmos: the end, the border, a line that shows you the edges of your life’s shape—the revealed fact of your finite place in the cosmos. And this can be painful. Approaching the end of the first Saturn cycle in his life, Kurt chose to end things.
Somewhere in 1993, I’d picked up my dad’s old acoustic guitar. It was a kind of diversion or secret hobby, but I was really into it. That Christmas, I got an electric guitar, and it was a huge excitement. By the time I’d quit sports, the guitar was everything—it was all I had with which to chart a new path. I played Nirvana’s songs along with the records, front to back. Playing them was empowering, like you had a hold of a secret formula: something magnetic and enigmatic and yet very simple.
My high school was comprised of students from two different towns. So my freshman class held all the kids I grew up with, plus a whole new group from another town who were mostly unknown. And each year brought in a new mix, and by my junior year, some new social dynamics came into play based on a more varied group. Still, the town we mixed with was actually smaller than my own, and in the end, the “big” high school still meant my graduating class had only 120 people.
Sadly, I think the thing I didn’t understand then about people’s reactions was that so many people cared about me: that it mattered to them what I did, they even admired me—and I basically shit on this. But I had to do it—I didn’t know any other way. I felt it was better to be disliked and rejected by them than be loved as something I was not able to be anymore. And though I didn’t grasp it at the time, I think this was part of why Kurt’s death struck me so powerfully: that this bind—expanded by several orders of magnitude—had been his bind too.
Kurt’s Journals, with lists of favorite albums, would not be published for several more years. So it was a bit more piecemeal to sort everything out.
I cannot say it loudly enough: there was no internet. What took me 2-3 years to learn, discover, hunt down, and listen to would have taken me only a week or two online, if that—and I am certain I would have been much poorer for that. As it was, I lived deeply within an ambience mystery, discovery, and inspiration as I slowly accumulated an archive. This require commitment and it meant you identified and projected yourself into things deeply for long periods.
I hesitate to use this word because of its implicit classism and regionalism. But this was the word Kurt used, and it was the word we used back then. And I don’t mean kids who hunted and fished, or kids who drove trucks, or listened to country music, or dressed a certain way—because that was nearly everybody, including people in my family (plus you might be surprised by how cool such people could be). I mean kids who may have done that stuff but who also spent most of their time alienating women, starting fights, and being racist, homophobic pricks. They looked on many of us with a glaring, sneering attitude, posed a physical threat, and initiated repeated verbal conflict. Fuck those people.
Eventually, my friends and I felt confident enough of to simply laugh off their threats, but there was always that gamble: we couldn’t tell how crazy some of these guys were. There were always rumors and talk about Aryan Nations people, but it wasn’t until several years later that I learned that a national center of AN operated within 10 miles of my high school. This was Turner Diaries shit, and while they were too incompetent to do much of anything, we now know they were planning real political violence. At least a couple of these guy’s kids were in our classes.