Kurt Cobain wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in twenty minutes — and that riff split the world into before and after. Grunge seized the pop charts, Nirvana became the voice of a generation, and that last honour was Cobain's great curse.
He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1967. His parents divorced when he was eight, and he was shunted between one of them, then the other, then other relatives. He drew, listened to the Beatles and the Clash, and wanted to be a rock star.
Nevermind came out in 1991 and sold in the tens of millions. Cobain hated the success — not from ingratitude, but because he could see his music being heard wrongly. Fans with exactly the macho swagger he despised were bellowing his songs in the clubs.
He suffered from chronic stomach pain and took heroin — not self-destruction so much as an attempt to quiet the pain. In April 1994 he was found dead. He was twenty-seven. His note ended with a line from Neil Young: "It's better to burn out than to fade away."