Kurt Cobain was born on 20 February 1967. There is nothing really remarkable in the formative years of his life and no doubt the kind of life he experienced was no different to many others. Around the age of seven his parents decided to seek a divorce, and though this experience too is shared by many young children, with Cobain it seems to have created a schismatic void from which he drew enormous artistic endeavor and creativity but this went hand in hand with a "death wish" that only increased the depths of the artistic expression till the ideal had to be consumed by the submission of the artist to the inevitability of his vision. *
From around the time of his parent's break up he begun to indulge in forceful fantasies where he enabled himself to predict the outcome of his existence. This was fostered on a world view that indicated that creativity with its genius also had a penchant for madness. The self defeating talent of Cobain is testimony to this truth. His desire to "make it" is always kept in time with a desire to destroy the ego. His first notable self-fulfilling prediction is when he reckoned he would become a big rock star and kill himself so that his fame could only increase with his sudden demise. This foresight, obviously engendered by an internal mechanism that blamed himself for his parent's marriage failure, is such a deep seated rut that as time wore on, and Cobain wandered from one disaster to another, in a subconscious attempt to not fulfill the prophecy, it became more entrenched in the inescapable of the fact.
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Any reading of Cobain would need an understanding of the nature of human contradictions. The rush to be famous and the constant hate of that fame is registered clearly in his poetry and lyrics. His creativity is shadowed by dark images that he intends to shock and appal the observers in a desperate attempt to be loathed by the world, and to be condemned for his crimes. This self-contained hate could often coalesce into a mighty outrage, not unlike the mass shootings at Columbine and other places, as the wishes and misunderstood motives of the assailant decides it is payback time. Cobain was incapable of this. His creativity had succeeded, he had fulfilled his promise to enrapture and capture people with his art, and that is the problem.
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The art is a desire to escape from the trauma of a boring life, or one that should have been. Cobain's strange drift into the low-life, even whilst wealthy, is a chase after an illusion that the world is a terrible place and should be lived terribly. His constant attempts at obliteration through the use of heroin and those failures could only have secured in his misbalanced mind how a failure he really was. Unable to attack society, except through his art, Cobain, who at heart is a good kid, develops a superego, which generates an internalised emphatic structure towards those he loves, his wife, kid and family, but the struggle to live up to what he perceives to be the true societal mores only leads to him withdrawing into a world where he feels safe from defeat and destruction - himself.
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There are those who hyperventilate when Cobain is declared a genius, vowing he is nothing but a punk rocker, an epitaph he would have smiled at. But a closer study of his lyrics reveals a true artist in the technical sense of the word. He was forever trying to reach that point of self content with the image/sound he wanted others to hear or see that his ultimate failure as the artist was like many others, and I include van Gogh here, to fail to see his own creative spark as given. The suppression of the ego over the ideal will always lead to this and it is a shame, but without the destructive completion to this misunderstanding, the ego would reign over the art and this only ever leads to mediocrity and vanity. Kurt Cobain died c. April 5, 1994.
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