Many people I grew up with had at one time or another a version of
the crazy uncle of rock and roll Neil Young’s lyric at the ready, like
an old man’s YOLO: “Better to burn out / than to fade away,”
but most of us let go of our superficial embrace of the sentiment near
the end of high school, realizing that too many of our heroes were dead
or dying, and that we wanted to live.
Sadly this was not the case for
Kurt Cobain, who quoted Young’s line in his suicide note. Cobain died at
age twenty-seven, but at the emotional age of a fragile, self-absorbed
teenager, stunted by his addiction to heroin and a preternatural shyness
he could not overcome. I was a senior in high school and although not
much of a fan, I remember recoiling in horror from the almost religious
devotion paid to Cobain after his suicide (not to mention the
marketing). The perversity of the Kurt Cobain death cult lay precisely
in the fact that his status as an icon at the end forced him deeper into
a kind of shadow life. Cobain was constitutionally an anti-rock star
who was somehow made to believe he was supposed to be Freddie Mercury.
Cobain mentions Mercury in his handwritten suicide note (top). It’s a
disturbing text, disjointed but cogent, swinging wildly in tone but in
theme mostly a note of painful, awkward self-consciousness, addressed
not to his wife or daughter, but to his childhood imaginary friend,
“Boddah.” The “manic roar of the crowds,” Cobain writes, “doesn’t affect
me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury,” whose “relish in the
love and adoration” Cobain “totally admire[s].” He complains that
performing feels like punching a clock, calls himself a “narcissist” and
“too sensitive”: “The sad little, sensitive, unappreciative, Pisces.”
Only later does he mention his daughter Frances, and only at the end by
name, in a postscript that reads:
Frances and Courtney, I’ll be at your altar. Please keep going Courtney, for Frances for her life which will be so much happier without me.
Read a full transcript of the letter on reddit. Courtney has indeed kept going, though accused of cashing in on Kurt’s legacy, and even of planning his death in a number of conspiracy theories (many
involving that postscript). Above, you can hear her mourning Cobain
with fans and reading his final note. It’s difficult listening, without a
doubt.
Whatever anyone inclines to think about the circumstances of
Cobain’s death, there’s no question he was burned out—deeply depressed
and heavily addicted—and getting on stage night after night didn’t help.
Neil Young wrote of Cobain’s death in his recent autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace.
“I, coincidentally, had been trying to reach him. I wanted to talk to
him. Tell him only to play when he felt like it.” Despite previously avoiding the question, Young admits that was haunted by Cobain’s reference to the burn out, fade away lyric from “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).” Like many people, it’s hard for me to hear that song and not think of Cobain’s far too literal embodiment of the words.
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