Kurt Cobain, Working-Class Hero
Class rage informs the anger found across Nirvana’s studio albums. Thirty years after Kurt Cobain’s death, we should remember his critique of the corporate mainstream — a political stance shaped by his working-class background.
Kurt Cobain of Nirvana during the taping of MTV Unpluggedat Sony Studios in New York City, November 18, 1993. (Frank Micelotta / Getty Images)
In 1991, Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who died thirty years ago this month, wrote a letter to Rolling Stone, expressing what he thought about the magazine’s audience and political pedigree. “At this point in our, uh, career, before hair loss treatment and bad credit, I’ve decided I have no desire to do an interview,” Cobain wrote. “We wouldn’t benefit from an interview because the average Rolling Stone reader is a middle-aged ex-hippie turned hippiecrite, who embraces the past as ‘the glory days’ and has a kinder, gentler, more adult approach toward the new liberal conservatism. The average Rolling Stone reader has always gathered moss.”
Cobain’s letter was never sent. He and the other members of Nirvana — Krist Novoselic (bass) and Dave Grohl (drums) — eventually agreed to appear in Rolling Stone, albeit with Cobain famously wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” on the cover. Nevertheless, this letter, which is excerpted in Charles R. Cross’s excellent biography of Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven (2001), captures the acerbic political sensibility of the singer-songwriter — a spirit that has often been minimized by critics and lost among listeners of his music.
Class rage is, fundamentally, the rage found across Nirvana’s studio albums. From their debut, Bleach (1989), to their swansong, In Utero (1993), the sound and attitude of Cobain’s music was deeply rooted in his working-class background, which centered on the logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, where he lived for most of his abbreviated life. His lyrics rarely addressed this context directly. But his worldview and critical perspective were vitally shaped by the lumber economy, wealth inequality, and subsequent lack of middle-class opportunities he experienced growing up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest.
Steep Odds
Cobain was born in February 1967 to a twenty-one-year-old father, who worked as a mechanic at a Chevron station, and a mother who was only nineteen. As described by Cross, money was a constant issue, both for the Cobain family and for locals generally. Aberdeen’s timber economy had peaked by the early 1970s, and many of its nearly twenty thousand residents were opting to leave for employment elsewhere. Financial pressures overwhelmed Cobain’s parents, ultimately contributing to their divorce — an experience that damaged Cobain emotionally at a young age and from which he never entirely recovered.
Public schools, especially art classes, offered some reprieve, though he bounced around ten different homes, both foster and family, while in high school. Cobain also experienced homelessness, rejecting his parents in favor of being alone. He mythologized this period of approximately four months in the song “Something in the Way” from Nirvana’s breakthrough LP, Nevermind (1991), in which he mentions sleeping underneath a bridge in Aberdeen — a claim disputed by Novoselic, among others. Nonetheless, Cobain did sleep regularly in vacant buildings and even in the waiting room of Grays Harbor Community Hospital, at times charging food from the cafeteria to invented room numbers.
Cobain also reconnected with his childhood interest in music during this period. Notably, Buzz Osborne of the Melvins was a few years ahead of him in school and became a mentor, introducing him to punk rock. After another period of homelessness, during which Cobain received food stamps and worked as a janitor at the high school he had attended — a job he would later mock in the video for Nirvana’s hit song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — he committed himself more fully to music through the model provided by Osborne and by meeting Novoselic, who went to high school in Aberdeen. Though money remained a constant issue, Cobain had found a sense of purpose.
The years that followed from roughly 1987 to 1991 — the year Nevermind was released — were a mix of strident ambition and steep odds. Cobain and Novoselic paid their dues by living out various rock-band cliches, whether playing fraternity parties, rotating through drummers, or sleeping on floors while on regional tours. Sub Pop, Nirvana’s first label, provided validation for Cobain but also shortchanged the band due to its own financial difficulties: it paid for recording costs but also took the profits.
By this point, the Pacific Northwest was quickly establishing itself as a hub for the alternative music scene. Bands like Green River, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden had been defining the genre of grunge, while acts like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and 7 Year Bitch jump-started the riot grrrl scene. Cobain had gravitated toward Olympia, the home of Evergreen State College, and its role in fostering these trends through labels like K Records and Kill Rock Stars. He dated Tobi Vail, the drummer for Bikini Kill, at the time — a relationship that inspired “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from an offhand graffito by Kathleen Hanna, the lead vocalist of Bikini Kill. Grohl, who had joined Nirvana by then, was also dating Hanna. Yet, despite these close associations, Cobain felt a class insecurity hanging around with this college-educated crowd. He felt he had something to prove to them.
Nevermind, recorded in Los Angeles in the spring of 1991, was that proof. Nirvana had gained attention through its first album Bleach, constant touring, and the recognition of more senior acts like Sonic Youth. Cobain, Novoselic, and Grohl signed with DGC, an imprint of Geffen Records, a major label. Despite this lucrative contract, Cobain returned to Olympia from a trip to Los Angeles in July only to discover that he had been evicted from his apartment. For several weeks, he lived in his car, as he had done before, just a few months before Nevermind would go platinum. Its success would seemingly solve Cobain’s life circumstances, financial and otherwise. But ultimately, it didn’t.
Expression, and Escape
There is no single explanation for Cobain’s suicide in April 1994. A key role was undoubtedly played by his serious heroin addiction, which friends, family, and his wife, Courtney Love, tried to end. But the pressures of sudden and extreme fame, and lingering emotional trauma from childhood, must also be accounted for. Lifelong anxieties, including class anxiety, likely shaped his sense of limitation as well.
In February 1991, prior to the recording sessions in Los Angeles, Cobain began an unfinished autobiographical essay, which is briefly excerpted in Cross’s book. “Hi, I’m 24 years old,” Cobain begins. “I was born a white, lower-middle-class male off the coast of Washington State. . . . My parents got a divorce so I moved in with my dad into a trailer park in an even smaller logging community. My dad’s friends talked him into joining the Columbia Record Club and soon records showed up at my trailer once a week, accumulating quite a large collection.”
Music provided an escape for Cobain, and like his heroes, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who came from similar working-class backgrounds, it provided a means of expression, including a class-driven anger. Cobain would voice an appreciation for hip-hop along the same lines, though he was critical of its misogyny, with rap artists like Jay-Z later paying respect in turn. Indeed, Cobain was outspoken against the sexism, homophobia, and racism he encountered on the rock scene, especially by other white male musicians, including esteemed figures like Eddie Van Halen.
In different ways, throughout his life, Cobain sought to work against a system — artistic, social, and economic — that had disadvantaged him from the start. He also sought to create a space for other voices, whether female-led bands like Shonen Knife or marginalized outsider artists like Daniel Johnston.
Thirty years later, it is important to remember Cobain not just for his music or for his tragic passing but for the progressive politics, based on his own experiences, that he attempted to articulate and bring into the foreground during his lifetime.