10 Years After Nevermind

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.

Of course, as with so many literary figures, his suicide has also made Cobain a romantic figure. His death can be naively read as a rejection of fame or popularity, or even of the world itself, with all its unbearable affronts, slights and insults, all its inevitable, wearying compromises. No doubt, there are young kids now who hear Nirvana's music only in this way.

But, finally, it was a personal decision. Cobain simply couldn't live inside his own skin any longer; the suicide genes that he half-seriously believed were part of his family's legacy exerted too powerful a hold on him. And is it necessary to mention all the drugs? He took the only exit he believed was available to him. He wanted to erase himself, and to an unfortunate extent he succeeded in that goal.

Nevermind has sold more than 10 million copies. It's an acknowledged masterpiece, and it appears on all the official and unofficial lists of the most important albums in the history of popular music. But through his death, Cobain achieved what may possibly have been one of his goals: making Nirvana a cult band once again. Among Nirvana's contemporaries, Cobain's death made ambition unseemly, and to that degree abandoned the charts to the pop and hip-hop kids who don't share his reluctance about fame and success.

Even among current rock bands, where is Nirvana's influence? Those bands would certainly say respectful things about Nirvana, if asked, but they're far more likely to have been genuinely influenced by Dr. Dre, Jane's Addiction or even Guns N' Roses (a band, ironically, that Cobain despised) than Nirvana. A band setting out to emulate Nirvana must feel as if it's heading for a dead-end. Or worse.

That will change over time. As the shadow of Cobain's dark final act recedes, Nirvana's music will once again come to the fore. Even now, it is quietly finding the listeners who need to hear it, the fans who can find release and succor in the bands brutal roar and soothing melodies, in the cryptic beauty of Cobain's lyrics and the howling intimacy of his singing. Eventually the feuds -- so Beatle-like that one only hopes Cobain is getting a perverse kick out of them, wherever he is -- that have prevented Courtney Love and the surviving members of Nirvana, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, from agreeing to release the long-awaited Nirvana box set will be settled, and the band's music will have another important opportunity to assert itself in the world.

For now, though, anything having to do with Nirvana must stir up complicated, contradictory feelings in anyone who cared at all about the band -- and who is honest enough not to turn away from the darkness. Every anniversary, good or bad, will be, at least in part, a memorial service, and every celebration of a triumph will also be haunted by an event that everyone knows occurred and that, in its anger and absolute conviction, just can't be put to rest.