Kurt Donald Cobain (pronounced /koʊˈbeɪn/, /kəˈbeɪn/; February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) was an American singer-songwriter and musician, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the rock band Nirvana.
With the lead single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from Nirvana’s second album Nevermind (1991), Nirvana entered into the mainstream, popularizing a subgenre of alternative rock called grunge. Other Seattle grunge bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden also gained wider audiences, and as a result, alternative rock became a dominant genre on radio and music television in the United States during the early-to-middle 1990s. Nirvana was considered the “flagship band of Generation X”, and frontman Cobain found himself anointed by the media as the generation’s “spokesman.” Cobain was uncomfortable with the attention he received, and placed his focus on the band’s music, believing the band’s message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public… read more
Kurt Donald Cobain (pronounced /koʊˈbeɪn/, /kəˈbeɪn/; February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) was an American singer-songwriter and musician, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the rock band Nirvana.
With the lead single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from Nirvana’s second album Nevermind (1991), Nirvana entered into the mainstream, popularizing a subgenre of alternative rock called grunge. Other Seattle grunge bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden also gained wider audiences, and as a result, alternative rock became a dominant genre on radio and music television in the United States during the early-to-middle 1990s. Nirvana was considered the “flagship band of Generation X”, and frontman Cobain found himself anointed by the media as the generation’s “spokesman.” Cobain was uncomfortable with the attention he received, and placed his focus on the band’s music, believing the band’s message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, challenging the band’s audience with its third studio album In Utero (1993).
During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with heroin addiction, illness and depression, his fame and public image, as well as the professional and lifelong personal pressures surrounding himself and his wife, musician Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, the victim of what was officially ruled a suicide by a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. The circumstances of his death have sometimes become a topic of fascination and debate. Since their debut, Nirvana, with Cobain as a songwriter, sold over twenty-five million albums in the United States alone, and over fifty million worldwide.
