Some simple facts. Nirvana were a punk band with sharply ingrained anti-Establishment attitudes, shaped by their upbringing during the right-wing Reaganomic '80s in the depressed lumber town of Aberdeen on America's Pacific northwest coast. As pissed-off youths have been wont to do since the birth of rock'n'roll, Kurt Cobain chose to amplify his discontent at the world - and, no less, at himself - in the most literal fashion: by plugging in an electric guitar and screaming. Where Cobain differed from the rest of his generation was he had a unique voice with which to articulate his vague disaffection with virtually everything. He was also blessed with an acute ear for the most direct way to touch the human soul: a tune. Finally, he had in Chris (as was) Novoselic and David Grohl the perfect accomplices to realise his quest to "debase every rock'n'roll form that ever existed".
Kurt Cobain uttered those words with a smile on his face at the end of 1989. Barely more than two years later, Nirvana were the biggest-selling popular music act in the world, thanks largely to an ambiguous anthem to alienation, boredom and despair. Cobain had struck a chord, one that echoed far beyond his own nihilistic peer group. Their live shows during this period were celebratory riots of pure energy and destruction. Angry, moving, funny, bitter, affirmative, negative, fucked-up and uplifting all at once, and you could sing along to it, Nirvana's virtually perfect second album 'Nevermind' demonstrated that, providing it moved them enough, the masses would buy into punk - and this was real punk, not the Carnaby Street variety show; Cobain's guitar carried a sticker reading: 'Vandalism - Beautiful As A Rock In A Cop's Face' - with as much fervour as they had previously bought into dumb heavy metal or superficial pop. Nirvana had produced the most powerful rock'n'roll statement since 'Never Mind The Bollocks'. Naturally, they were doomed.
Anyone would have been disoriented by the swiftness and magnitude of Nirvana's ascendancy. For it to happen to a character so chronically ill-suited to cope as Cobain was dreadful to witness. To him, fame and fortune did not bring happiness, just more confusion and self-loathing.
The end of this story is all too well known. The overdose in Rome that was almost certainly a failed suicide attempt. The failed 'tough love' session instigated by Courtney Love. The purchase by the proxy Dylan Carlson of a brand new shotgun ("for protection"). The last abortive attempt at rehab, during which he had one last meeting with his daughter and one last conversation with his wife. The last, lost few days.
"It's a goddamn shame. Why wasn't anybody there? Where was the wife, where were the friends?" - Henry Rollins, May 1994.
By the end, Kurt Cobain was utterly alone. So alone, in fact, that although his body was found by electrician Gary Smith at Cobain and Love's Seattle home on the morning of April 8, 1994, it had lain there undiscovered for at least 24 hours, probably longer. The King County Medical Examiner estimated the time of death as the evening of April 5. It seems the ultimate tragedy that those who choose to mark the anniversary of Kurt's passing can do so only approximately.
He found it hard, it was hard to find. In success, he failed - and in taking his leave of this world, Kurt Cobain destroyed the myth that is rock'n'roll.