Kurt Cobain would have been 50 today. His music mattered.

My daughter takes online math tutoring and her instructor sounds just like Kurt Cobain. Unless the late Nirvana singer cheated death and found a second career teaching kids about fractions, it’s not him. The math guy’s name is Duane and he has a beard with a shaved head, but his speaking voice sounds exactly like Kurt Cobain’s.

I should pay Duane an extra $50 to see if he can sing a line of Lithium.

Instead, I hopped on the Internet to be reminded that today was Cobain’s birthday. The Nirvana lead singer would have been 50 today if he had lived. His life was cut tragically short by his suicide at age 27 in 1994, meaning that the world has been without him for almost as long as he lived.

Cobain playing with Nirvana. Spin.

Nirvana produced only 102 songs. As Cobain once explained, "I wanted to be totally Led Zeppelin in a way and then be totally extreme punk rock and then do real wimpy pop songs". He achieved those things and pioneered a whole new sound in such a short time. How many more songs would Cobain have sung if he had lived longer? Bands like the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, and Aerosmith started much earlier, but have kept on ticking. They look like zombies, but they haven’t stopped making music.

If Cobain had lived, would he have taken the band in a different direction? Would he have resisted the urge to go pop? Would he have wasted away on heroin? Would he and Courtney Love have stayed together? Would he have lived to see his daughter become a noted model and visual artist? Would Nirvana have stayed together for more than a few years? Would bandmate Dave Grohl ever have gone out on his own and formed the Foo Fighters?

Frances Bean Cobain, daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. Billboard.

It was better to burn out than to fade away, so we’ll never know. I was watching MTV in 1994 when they announced his death. While I always liked Nirvana’s music, I never truly appreciated Cobain’s impact on American music until after his death. All of the tributes and retrospectives for the next few days made that quite clear. Before Cobain, it had been many years since someone from such a modest background (he had been homeless at one point) had succeeded in music on their own terms (bursting out of the Seattle music scene rather than having to go through the recording industry's machinery in LA or New York).

The next few years made it even clearer. Nirvana had busted the grunge door wide open for others like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, and Pearl Jam. These bands were contemporaries, and some started earlier than Nirvana did, but after Nirvana’s success, each one of them (and several others) became household names on the music scene.

After the 90’s, I moved on from the Seattle sound, which seemed like a dead end after a while. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve begun listening to more grunge music again. In 2010, Rolling Stone Magazine ranked Nirvana as # 30 on its list of history’s most influential bands, so I’m not the only one who remembers. Most of all, Kurt Cobain was real, and perhaps he knew that would have been difficult to sustain. His songs will always hold a place in the music of my life.

Here is one of his best, the MTV Unplugged version of Come As You Are. Enjoy.

Kurt Cobain Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Cobain

Grunge Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge

Rolling Stone Most Influential: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/nirvana-20110926

Thumbnail: Rolling Stone Magazine cover.