Tributes To Kurt Cobain Everywhere Suicide Spawns Flood Of References In Songs

Take out a rock record that was released sometime in the last two years. Look for the following words: boy, heroin, shotgun, depression, angel, stomach, blue, pain. Can you find at least four of them occurring in a single song? If you did, chances are you’ve found a tribute to Kurt Cobain.

It’s been over two years since Cobain, the leader of Nirvana, was found dead in a small room above his garage, and songs influenced by his suicide continue to stream out of songwriters’ pens from Seattle to Dublin.

There are scores of songs known to be about Kurt Cobain - among them ones by Neil Young, Pearl Jam, the Cranberries, R.E.M., Julian Cope, Vernon Reid and the Tragically Hip - and dozens more believed to be about Cobain, though the bands aren’t telling (the Foo Fighters, Filter).

There are also compilation albums like the new “Angels Bleed” on the small Seattle label Reversing Records, in which 20 young bands pay tribute to the grunge martyr.

The latest song about Cobain is by a woman well versed in death, having lost her husband, her brother and several friends in the last few years. In “About a Boy” on Patti Smith’s new album, “Gone Again,” she laments: “From a chaos, rich and sweet/From the deep and dismal streets/Tore another kind of peace/ Tore the great emptiness.”

Why has the rock world taken hold of this event so forcefully - even more so, if subject matter is any barometer, than it did the death of Jerry Garcia?

To begin with, Cobain’s death touched a nerve not just among his fellow musicians and his fans (there were copycat suicides reported from as far away as Turkey and Australia) but also among those who had never heard his music. As Young sings in his Cobain song, “Sleeps With Angels,” “He sleeps with angels; he’s always on someone’s mind.”

Cobain was young; he was talented; he was troubled. It is an oft-told story: the public face of fame hides the private burden of pain. For older musicians like Patti Smith and Neil Young (whose lyric “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” was quoted in Cobain’s suicide note), Cobain represented an alternative path their lives could have followed. It is the route that ends in a dark period and doesn’t continue on to a wiser, mellower maturity.

There are two kinds of songs about Cobain: those by musicians who knew him and those by musicians who didn’t. Songs by Smith, Young and the Cranberries fall into the latter category.

To them he is a symbol, not a person. He is a boy in a void to Smith, an angel in heaven to Young and a cheap means of tugging on the heart strings to the Cranberries.

In another Cobain reverie, “Mighty K.C.,” the Florida band For Squirrels sings about what it would be like preparing to die. Before the album was released, two members of For Squirrels died in a van crash.

In contrast to these songs are those by friends of Cobain, which conjure up a real person, flesh and blood, one with strengths and weaknesses.

His suicide seems to be felt all the more profoundly by these songwriters because to them it is not an abstract event to be mythologized or empathized with but a real loss that leaves behind nagging questions, doubts and anxieties.

“I had a mind to try and stop you, let me in,” Michael Stipe moans in R.E.M.’s “Let Me in.” And in Imperial Teen’s “You’re One,” Roddy Bottum belatedly says, “I’d pump your stomach if I thought it’d stop the pain.” (referring to the stomachaches Cobain said he tried to relieve by using heroin).