It’s 15 years and counting. It seems that every year or so, I put up a post about Kurt Cobain, either on a birthday or a death anniversary. I’ve already posted countless times about my feelings, what Nirvana and Cobain meant to me, etc. If you really want to know, use the sidebar search and type “Cobain.”

This year, I’d just like to reprint an article I grabbed off of Prodigy, and put up a screenshot of a Prodigy Poll at the time. I guess people were more wrong than they thought.

If you discover one thing in life, I hope it’s that nothing in life is worth taking your life. Giving up should never be an option. Suicide is a very selfish act and a cheap way to go out. Euthynasia and medical interests not withstanding, anything can be overcome.

SEATTLE–The apparent suicide of Kurt Cobain, just 3 years after his emergence as a powerful new force in popular music, left fans and critics comparing the grunge-rock guitarist to other groundbreaking musicians who died too young.

Radio stations around the country broadcast tributes to Cobain, MTV interrupted its usual programming for a career retrospective and fans mourned the star’s death after his body was discovered Friday at his Seattle home.

“It reminds me of Jimi Hendrix. This is a guy who hasn’t even hit his prime,” said fan Steve Kennedy of Pompton Lakes, N.J. “It’s like Jim Morrison–you’ll never know what else he could do.”

Cobain, 27, had become an overnight spokesman for a disaffected generation of young Americans after Nirvana’s 1991 hit single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The flannel-shirted singer’s woes were well documented: heroin addiction, discomfort with celebrity, domestic spats, and the near-fatal ingestion of drugs and alcohol just last month that left him in a coma.

“Kurt’s passions and feelings about his fame overwhelmed him,” said a statement from Gold Mountain Entertainment, Nirvana’s management company.

Cobain expressed those feelings in his music and lyrics. One of Nirvana’s last songs, recorded for “The Beavis and Butt-head Experience” album, was titled “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.”

“There were all the things in the last 2 years,” said Gus Hosseini, owner of a Milwaukee nightclub where the band played twice. “I knew it was coming. I didn’t know when.”
On MTV, the usual pre-taped programming was pulled and replaced with a look back at Cobain’s career–a particularly apropos gesture, since MTV helped boost Nirvana to commercial success.

“He was the closest his generation came to a John Lennon,” Rolling Stone writer David Fricke said on the MTV tribute. “If you don’t see the connection, you’re missing something.”
The tribute first aired Friday and was repeated Saturday. The band’s videos and clips from interviews and live appearances were interspersed with remembrances of Cobain.

Record stores reported increased business for “Nevermind,” the band’s debut album, and “In Utero,” its acclaimed platinum follow-up.

At Tower Records in Los Angeles, the band’s videos played in the store and the mood was somber. “It was upsetting because he was so young,” said shopper Jennifer Chouinard, 23. “His lyrics were different and they touched a lot of people in a lot of different ways.”

The apparent suicide was front-page news across the country, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Music critic Jim Farber of the New York Daily News offered this eulogy for Cobain:

“Having long ago equated failure with credibility, the world’s embrace carried its own kind of rebuke. … [He leaves] a legacy of self-expression as moving and true as his end was tragic.”

(From AP)

Copied from the PRODIGY(R) service 04/10/94 11:42 PM