The Day The Music Died

The Day the Music Died

Rolling Stone magazine called his suicide “the day the music died.” He might not have become a hostile loner who hated authority if his parents hadn’t turned his childhood home into a war zone. Yet this alienated teen found his escape in a cast-off guitar that unlocked his genius. His blistering music, raw lyrics, and angry performances introduced a new word to the pop lexicon: grunge. By 1993 his band had recorded two megahit albums. Its signature song, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” became the anthem of Generation X.

Kurt was now the biggest rock star on the planet. Yet he couldn’t shake the angst of a tortured childhood. While he screamed at the world, painful stomach spasms shrieked back at him. When prescription drugs didn’t work, he shot up heroin to kill the pain. In an attempt to create the family he never knew as a child, he got married. But his rocker wife was also hooked on heroin, and they fought as viciously as his parents had—until the baby came.

Kurt said that his daughter was the only pure thing in his life. Then his wife confessed in a Vanity Fair interview that she used heroin during her pregnancy. Kurt just about lost his mind fighting legal battles to keep authorities from taking his child. His screaming fits with his band, Nirvana, became tabloid fodder. After he almost died of an overdose in Italy, he returned to Seattle and locked himself in a room with loaded guns. His wife called 911, and police raided his estate.

By now his wife was running scared. She flew to Los Angeles to kick her drug habit, and begged Kurt to do the same for their baby’s sake. He checked himself into a clinic where a psychiatrist said that he was a seething volcano, reliving his childhood traumas as if they had just happened. When he got out, he promised to let go of the past. He flew home to Seattle, locked himself in his guesthouse, and took his own life.

When the news hit the media, teens across America locked themselves in their bedrooms. MTV said that Nirvana was to the 90s what the Beatles had been to the 60s, and Kurt Cobain’s suicide was as catastrophic as John Lennon’s murder. Rolling Stone magazine declared him the voice of a lost generation.

Kurt had so much to live for. Within ten years he sold 50 million albums. Nirvana was the flagship of Generation X. Fans worldwide were ready to make its next album another megahit. Rolling Stone ranked him the twelfth best guitarist of all time, and MTV listed him as the seventh greatest singer in pop history. In 2006 he surpassed Elvis as the top-selling deceased celebrity, and in 2014 he was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Weep for the troubled superstar who couldn’t let go of past resentments. As you look to the future, allow this lesson from Kurt’s story to be a springboard for success:

No one ever moved forward while chained to the past.

But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 3:13-14, ESV