RIP Kurt Cobain 19 Years Today

Kurt Cobain has been dead 19 years today. I don't normally write about music here at I Love That Film but with all the music videos I've been posting about recently, I thought I should stop and take a moment to write a short post about a rock music icon. Kurt Cobain is the guy who covered my walls for most of my teenage years.

I was 12 when he died so I never got to see Nirvana live. I've had to make do with seeing Foo Fighters a few times live instead and forcing myself to remember that Dave Grohl may not have been here if it wasn't for Kurt Cobain and Nirvana.

At 12, I was just getting into Nirvana when my Mum told me that Kurt Cobain had been found dead. She hurried me to the TV and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'd only known about Lithium, Smells Like Teen Spirit and Heart Shaped Box for the shortest of time and Kurt was already gone and Nirvana finished. Like many other teenagers I got a bit obsessed with Kurt after that.

I bought all the Nirvana albums, got myself a t-shirt or two and some posters and sat comfortably on the Nirvana bandwagon, cursing Courtney Love and becoming endlessly fascinated with the guy who appeared to have everything and threw it all away with a veins full of heroin and a shot gun.

Kurt taught me that no matter how good your life seems, you can still be depressed and suicidal. It was a horrible way to look at life through my early teens and I worry about the impact his suicide had on my psyche. I now look at him in a slightly different light. His daughter has grown up fatherless and I can't imagine what that has been like.

Anyway Nirvana made some great music. They are still one of my all time favourite bands and in a way, I'm sure Kurt was right about it being better to burn out than to fade away. I wonder how many more great albums they had left in them. Would Dave Grohl have got to write more for Nirvana? Would the Foo Fighters had ever existed? Who knows?

RIP Kurt Cobain.