When Kurt Cobain shot himself, it hurt way worse than the botched tonsilectomy I'd had a few weeks before. As it was, I was laid up on the couch with a stack of plastic Blockbuster shells -- Singles, Reality Bites, Jurassic Park -- and endless orange sherbet. So, my throat was already shot and my head gone on painkillers when Kurt Loder broke my heart and everybody else's April 8, 1994, cutting into whatever MTV programming (music videos!) was underway, to announce that our scruffy hero was dead. What were you doing? Do you remember? (Were you born?)
I don't remember if I was a huge Nirvana fan before all that. I do remember reading Jurassic Park along to the tape of Nevermind that my dad picked up at a truck stop on the long drive from Wisconsin to visit my grandparents in New York. I still think of dinosaurs when I hear "In Bloom." I had Nevermind and Bleach. I thought "Pennyroyal Tea" was the coolest song I'd ever heard.
But before that news broke and the nationwide Nirvana marathon began, Nirvana was just songs. Not to get all Wonder Years on you, but on the day Kurt died and in the weeks following, those songs took on this new meaning, like they were proof that our world was different beyond recognition from the one our parents grew up in.
Of course, that's a little dramatic and not exactly true. But if you didn't live it up close, you might not realize what a moment in history it was, when mainstream fame got so ugly that one of its most gifted recipients chose death, just to get away from it.
Kurt Cobain made an indelible mark on pop culture when he made that terrible and sad mistake. He also added whispery new meanings to his grungy poems, turning them all into go-nowhere clues about the unraveling of a brilliant mind. Flip through his life in photos and watch this video on his musical significance, before watching Nirvana's greatest videos, embedded below.
+ Get Kurt Corbain's story in detail at MTV News.
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