OC HIGH / STUDENT NEWS & VIEWS : Time Will Tell How He’s Recalled, but Today We Miss Him

Kurt Cobain is now a member of “the club.” The club, as his mother referred to it, is a select group of stars and idols such as Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Janis Joplin who met (intentional or accidental) untimely deaths.

Now, as the world remembers Kurt Cobain, I wonder if his suicide will glorify him further. Will he be remembered as a pioneer, a leader of the alternative breakthrough on the Seattle music scene and the unwilling voice for a troubled youth society, or as a manic depressive who gave up on life and took the weak man’s way out?

I am a major Nirvana fan, along with millions of other teen-agers throughout the world. Cobain’s meaty lyrics--explicit tales of anger, depression and emotional Angst --brought him to the heights of stardom immediately after Nirvana’s first release, “Nevermind,” in 1991. Cobain became the unwilling voice of an anguished teen-age generation of the ‘90s. Unfortunately, his goal was never to become a star. He was never comfortable as the voice of a troubled generation.

“If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me,” Cobain said in an interview earlier this year.

His suicide was accepted as a tragedy, but not as a shock. Nirvana’s latest release, “In Utero,” displayed Cobain’s anguished lyrics, which told a story of anger and depression. For example, one of the first lines on the album explained his discomfort with fame: “Teen-age Angst has paid off well. Now I’m bored and old.” It was also rumored that “Rape Me,” one of the more popular songs from the new album, was intended as a shot against a reporter who claimed that Cobain and wife (Hole front woman Courtney Love) were using heroin while Love was pregnant with their daughter, 2-year-old Francis Bean.

Anthony DeCurtis, an editor at Rolling Stone magazine, said, “If Kurt was going to go, you just kind of assumed it would be drugs. The thing that is very disturbing is the destructive determination that was involved.”

The world has lost a great artist. Cobain, looking past his multitude of problems and his suicide, was a man who had so much promise, youth, and was so influential to so many. No matter how his death occurred, his missing presence will leave a great void within the music scene, and a generation of teens searching for their new voice.