Between Nirvana and Hell

The songs, the band, and the fame were mere facets of Kurt Cobain’s complicated story. They were not the essence of it, or even the center of his very brief and twisted life. Cobain’s greatest enduring struggle, before he shot himself in 1994 at 27, was with the person he was, or wanted to be, or more important, wanted not to be. What finally led him to do it, after years, decades, of contemplating it for all sorts of different reasons, might have been the sudden and outrageous insistence of millions of people — many with tape recorders — to constantly ask him how that struggle was going, why it seemed to be so abundant, and how it related to them. Indeed, in the end, it was the music that finally killed him, as least as much as it sustained him. If not for it, he could be a shy schoolteacher living today on a decent prescription drug plan in Aberdeen, Wash.