As is so often the case, the music itself says it all. Nevermind, the Nirvana album that altered the landscape of popular music in the early Nineties, kicks off with the full-on assault of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and (not counting the buried track at the end, "Endless Nameless") closes with the unsettling, free-floating dread of "Something in the Way." That emotional arc traces the journey the band itself traveled between Nevermind's release on September 13, 1991 and Kurt Cobain's soul-ravaging suicide in April 1994. As Dave Grohl put it in a recent interview with Rolling Stone's David Fricke, "From the time Nevermind came out to the time that Kurt died, that's not even three years. That's not enough time to get used to something that life-altering."

Somehow the ten years that have passed since Nevermind's release isn't enough time either. The album has certainly lost none of its force — it is simply extraordinary to listen to it from start to finish. In a way that seems true of so few albums these days, each song on Nevermind feels essential. The album famously knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts, ended the reign of the metal hair bands and, for one brief, shining moment, made the world safe again for rock & roll.

But it takes nothing away from Nevermind's achievement to admit that it is impossible to listen to it — or to any of Nirvanas music, really, at this point — without thinking of Kurt Cobain's suicide. Maybe at some time in the future that won't be true, at least for people who weren't alive when it happened and didn't experience that sickening feeling in their stomachs when they heard the news. But it is true now.

That is not the case with the other artists — Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, 2pac, the Notorious B.I.G., among them — who died violent or untimely deaths. And the reason for the difference has to do with the nature of suicide. The truly frightening degree of intent in Cobain's death — its ferocious "fuck you" quality — makes his dying different, more fearsome and disturbing.