On April 8, 1994, rock star Kurt Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, Washington, with new injection marks on both arms and a fatal head wound from the 20 gauge shotgun found between his knees. . Cobain’s suicide ended a life marked by far more suffering than is commonly associated with the rock superstar. But rock stardom has never sat down well with Kurt Cobain, a committed social underdog who has been reluctantly dubbed the spokesperson for his generation. “Success seemed like, I think, a brick wall to him,” said friend Greg Sage, a Cobain musical hero from the local 1980s punk rock scene. “There was nowhere to go except below.”
Kurt Cobain rose to fame as the leader and chief songwriter of Seattle-based band Nirvana, the group primarily responsible for transforming a thriving regional music scene in the Pacific Northwest into a global pop-cultural phenomenon. often referred to as “grunge”. As hugely popular as Nirvana became as a result of their single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991), it’s easy to forget how far removed the band really was from the mainstream and how ill-suited the band was to. pop celebrity. Kurt Cobain, misanthropist and heroin addict, was. In his suicide note, Cobain wrote: “I have it, very well, and I’m grateful, but since I was seven I have become hateful towards all humans in general … Thank you all. from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach for your letters and worry over the past few years. I’m too an erratic and brooding baby! I don’t have the passion anymore, so remember it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
Cobain’s suicide note was found stabbed on a pile of potting soil with a ballpoint pen, near his body in the greenhouse at his Lake Washington property. It was probably written on or around April 5, 1994 – the estimated date Cobain committed suicide and a day after Cobain’s rock star wife Courtney Love filed a missing person report stating that Cobain may have been suicidal and in possession of a gun. It was not Seattle Police, however, but a worker inspecting the lighting on Cobain’s property who first discovered Cobain’s body that day in 1994.
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