Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide.
In a dark studio in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, on an autumn evening in 1993, a pivotal moment in ’90s music lore unfolded within the course of an hour. Bathed in electric purple hues and crimson curtains, Nirvana, alongside guests cellist Lori Goldston, guitarist Pat Smear and rock band the Meat Puppets, performed eight originals and six covers. The members of Nirvana balanced their dark fantastical style by going off on comedic monologues, musing about “Davey and Goliath” and jokingly playing “Sweet Home Alabama” during a lull in the show. While introducing the first song of the evening, Kurt Cobain made it clear that this would not be a greatest hits crowd-pleaser.
“This (song) is off our first record. Most people don’t own it.”
The band performed new material and protested against MTV’s mainstream edge by opting to cover artists they genuinely enjoyed, like the indie pop group The Vaselines and early 20th-century bluesman Lead Belly. Never abandoning their DIY punk roots, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York set is earnest, joyous and comforting. The ensemble sounds like a warm sunset bleeding onto an antique carpet. As they perform against a backdrop of white lilies and candles emitting a piercing light throughout the darkness of the studio, the subdued yet collaborative energy is the live album’s greatest strength. The moments with Cobain soloing are stark and raw, proving that he could command a stage with both quiet intensity and roars of emotion.
Of course, I am far from the first person to praise this iconic performance. The concert has long been hailed as one of the greatest live performances of all time, and certainly the best of MTV’s Unplugged concert series. But I noticed this praise usually comes with an asterisk — and an unfair reliance on hindsight.
Just five months after the concert was recorded, Cobain would be gone, making Unplugged in New York one of his last major public performances. His death catapulted the world into a frenzied state of loss and marked an immediate musical shift that could never be undone. The grunge era (a term Cobain loathed and did not identify with, yet had been irreversibly linked to) would wane out within the year in favor of pop punk and nu metal. This is largely because, although Cobain was far from the only frontman of his era to die, he was the first high-profile one to pass away. Gone were the lighthearted tales of the band’s antics and studio experimentation, or Cobain’s passionate feminist activism. Instead, the media emphasis was heavily redirected toward his lifelong battle with addiction as well as his tumultuous marriage with Courtney Love to better fit a tale of suicidal demise. Cobain had also left behind his infant daughter, leading to many feeling unsympathetic toward his death (an article published a few months after his death includes a radio DJ saying that, because of this, “He died a coward”). Pictures of his death scene were made publicly available primarily to deny accusations that the police were hiding information. His journals were also published for public consumption. Although the most personal content was edited out, it cannot be denied that its publication turned Cobain’s life into a worldwide zoo exhibit, one that the public could pick apart without his consent.
Between the disgusting murder conspiracies, the harassment of his family and friends and the obsessive hyper-analyzation of his lyrics, a bizarre veil was quickly and silently placed over the entire Nirvana story, a veil of inevitable tragedy and the lampooning of Cobain as an untouchable mythic figure instead of just a man. As the memory of Cobain slowly morphed into that of a martyr who could do no wrong — as long as there was a cigarette hanging from his mouth and he hid from the world behind his hair — it became hard to tell what was legend and what was truly him. A man of few words had suddenly become the “voice of a generation,” and people could not handle that he would be silent forever.
The Unplugged concert was almost exclusively referred to as a funeral, an omen and a warning — it’s worth mentioning that Cobain wanted the set to look funerary in nature, but this was likely a reflection of his preexisting aesthetic preferences rather than a deliberate calling card. Regardless, the concert’s cozy atmosphere was somberly injected with the distortion of a posthumous release. Now that the public had learned the unpleasant details of Cobain’s personal life, or even how troubled the band’s last six months were, it couldn’t just be a good performance; it had to be a swan song, too. Critics seem to love a moment during the last song where Cobain merely opens his eyes during a big breath. This 2007 retrospective insists he “(seems) to stare at something no one else can see.” Perhaps it’s because I wasn’t alive when this all went down — Cobain died over a decade before I was born — but I simply don’t see a grief-stricken death march.
When I first heard the album as a middle schooler, I didn’t know what transpired afterward. I saw a band having fun with its audience, celebrating music they loved while being immensely talented at their craft. I still view the concert this way and believe the tragic veil is not fueled by the performance, but by its context. To say there isn’t joy within the show, or to paint this performance as one big elaborate suicide note, is indicative of a much bigger problem with how we address mental illness in both life and death.
I myself have struggled with intense depression for much of my life. It’s probably why I’m a writer. Being able to carefully articulate things through words when I’m otherwise unable has been a saving grace time and time again. That said, my disorder does not infiltrate everything I create, say or do; if all anybody remembered about me was that I was unwell, ignoring how I had actually lived, I would be incensed at how much of me they had missed. It is a factor in my life, but my life is still mine. To have everything about me viewed through a label wouldn’t be right. And yet, the legacy of Cobain seems eclipsed by his final days. Of course, I am nothing like Kurt Cobain, and I don’t claim to be. We’ve never met, and our life experiences do not intersect very much. But I am frightened at the picture that has been painted not just of him, but of anybody that has been lost to themselves. He was not a mastermind. He was not mythology. He was a man, and a deeply imperfect, contradictory one at that. Despite years of progress and attempts at understanding the psychology behind our suffering, the humanity of the mentally ill is still undermined and often ignored, especially toward creatives.
It is easy for the public to mythologize suicide. From Marilyn Monroe to Robin Williams, suicide is a common stomping ground for projecting grief-driven canonizations onto these real human beings who we have grown parasocially dependent upon, Cobain being chief among them. But viewing everything Cobain did through his suicide, with a tone of damnation, minimizes the vibrancy of his world, perpetuating the idea that people with mental illnesses have no other traits aside from being mentally ill. His roles as an artist, a husband, a father and a friend are traded for a romanticized, grossly simplified version of events that are inaccurate to his complicated circumstances.
Kurt Cobain wrote plenty of happy and inconsequential songs, creating projects that were not autobiographical tableaus of his own pain. In December 1993, only a month after Unplugged, he began work on a full spoken word poetry album with William S. Burroughs, and there were rumors of a potential project with close friend Michael Stipe of REM. His library of home recordings (another nonconsensual posthumous release) illustrates his plans for future projects right up to the end: an obvious contrast to the idea that his death was a grand scheme months in the making that he signaled at an MTV concert. It is unmistakable that Cobain endured addiction and abuse from a young age — which, in addition to his disorders, meant he could be a difficult mess — but refusing to acknowledge the positive aspects of his life as well is refusing to accept the reality of his story, trading truth in exchange for what the public expects to hear about an unwell individual.
Those unfamiliar with Cobain only know about his darkest moments, but perhaps not that Cobain created endless original comics to show to his friends. The band was close with RuPaul and recorded a Christmas message for his talk show, in addition to championing gay rights at a time when mainstream groups rarely did so. He was an avid doll collector who was especially interested in anatomy and monkeys, as well as a lover of cats and turtles. He stuck up a middle finger to gender roles and toxic masculinity by wearing dresses and makeup around his house and at his shows. The fact that these acts receive less fanfare than the ominous “I swear I don’t have a gun” lyric proves that our world still has a problem with fetishizing mental illness and demonizing suicide without considering that both are only part of the story.
To assume a label is the whole story, and to assume the end of said story can override its beginning, is to remove the whole human from their narrative. This dehumanization and romanticization is why there are still pervasive stigmas surrounding mental illness. It’s easy to feel like getting help won’t matter when it is clear you run the risk of not being correctly perceived as yourself, or that you might be devalued as a person. The parasocial culture surrounding figures like Cobain has led to a blind admiration that transforms him into a holy pariah and contributes to denial-fueled conspiracies about his suicide, muddying the waters for those seeking to understand a human being who cannot respond.
The truth is this: Kurt Cobain did not need to die. He could have found peace had he lived to see it. Yet this story of doom that surrounds him suggests it was always meant to happen, that people like him are always meant to die. And in this chaos, we are left wondering:
Do people like Kurt Cobain ever truly rest in peace?
Do we remember him for who he was, or what we wanted him to be?
These are hard questions to ask, and even harder questions to answer. On one hand, as the initial shock has faded over time, the legacy of Nirvana has shifted away from its volatile end and toward a celebration of what they created. In doing so, the discourse has begun to honor Cobain as a mortal, multifaceted human being who contributed to a fantastic body of work while he was here. On the other hand, critical conversations surrounding Nirvana, and this concert in particular, still echo the mournful cries of yesteryear. Apple Music’s album description, despite being largely well written, refers to the concert as “a living funeral,” and Cobain’s performance as “chilling” even though he did not deviate from what he typically did in live shows. It concludes: “This was not meant to be goodbye, but something else.” Yes, Apple Music, it was intended to be a good concert!
The album is also included in Rolling Stone’s 2023 edition of “500 Greatest Albums Of All Time,” with its entry consisting of just three sentences, one of which is about how Cobain was going through heroin withdrawal at the time — in a weirdly backhanded compliment that he was able to perform well as an addict. Is it so impossible to cherish this piece of work without it being linked to what was to come? That strikes me as an unfair, incomplete assessment, one that I think simultaneously inflates and reduces Cobain’s story. It’s impossible to truly appreciate someone’s life if we only view it through the way they died.
The Nirvana discourse has improved over time, especially as younger listeners, who don’t carry the painful memory of his death, focus on the quality of the art itself. But we still have some work to do in order to make sure the actual art remains at the forefront. It’s useless to pry into the behind-the-scenes drama of people we will never meet for a situation we were not there for. There’s a lesson we can learn from any suicide, that a tragic ending does not mean the road there was paved with tragic intentions. A death is not meant to be dissected and understood, but rather to serve as a reminder for us to appreciate what we still have. In the case of Nirvana, we even have timeless recordings like this one.
It’s now been 32 years since that evening in Hell’s Kitchen, and the album still receives the accolades and acclaim it deserves. But as we continue to enjoy it for decades to come, we must make an effort to reframe the perception we might have associated with it. After all, the least we can do to honor the departed is to celebrate what they did when they were alive.
This is not a suicide note.
This is just a damn good show.
Daily Arts Writer Isabella Casagranda can be reached at ijcasa@umich.edu.
