Kurt Cobain, Hipster Christ

Kurt's Sacrifice

Ultimately, though, besides being a rock star, Kurt Cobain was primarily a tortured artist, whose very public suffering and righteous struggle against the mainstream allowed him to become the martyr for the modern hipster movement. The fact that Cobain killed himself is retrospectively unsurprising: his journals and song lyrics frequently contemplate suicide and clearly portray severe mental illness, and his heavily publicized drug addiction (which was also prominent in his death, as his heroin kit lay beside his body) combined to create a man that was struggling with life. Though suicide is never the best solution to mental suffering, Kurt decided that ending his life prematurely was better than becoming some pathetic adult who could never regain control over his life; after all, he did quote Neil Young to end his suicide note in stating that “it's better to burn out than to fade away.” Rather than passively “fade away” and lose his power, his influence, his dignity, Kurt did at least use his suicide to declare the importance of artistic integrity alongside commercial success, viewing death as the only way to preserve quality without the corruption of capitalism. Again, to clarify, Kurt Cobain committed suicide for the same reason that anyone commits suicide: mental illness. However, because he was mentally ill, he could not cope with the conflict between authenticity and commercialism that plagued him as a breakout alternative artist (and that he managed with great effort on In Utero and MTV Unplugged in New York). Instead, in his suicide note read by Courtney Love, Kurt declares that he had not “felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now,” which created an immense sense of guilt as he felt he could not be a genuine artist without artistic passion and vision. Though his wife, Courtney Love, interjects on the tape that he could have just stopped being a rock star rather than dying, Kurt apparently would rather have died than become a sellout, and he wanted the world to know.

Staging the note prominently in a greenhouse planter and addressing the note to his fans, Kurt killed himself in order to make an apparent statement to the masses about the importance of balancing authenticity with monetary success. Able to enjoy capitalistic, mainstream success only until he lost his passion and artistic integrity, Kurt Cobain sacrificed his life – comparable to how Jesus Christ sacrificed his own – to validate his ideals, in this case, to preserve artistic authenticity and not sell out, codifying the religion of the modern hipster.

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