“I couldn’t find any Cobains at all, so I started calling Coburns. He had recently discovered his Irish ancestry, he told Savage, by calling random Americans whose name was similar to his. I wanted that security, so I resented my parents for quite a few years because of that.” Cobain told Savage that he became antisocial as he started to “understand the reality of his surroundings.” Then, Cobain turned the conversation to genealogy. I couldn’t face some of my friends at school anymore, because I desperately wanted to have the classic, you know, typical family. “I remember feeling ashamed, for some reason,” he told journalist Jon Savage in a 1993 interview. Cobain withdrew into himself after that he never felt quite right again. Kurt Cobain liked to remember himself as a happy child in Aberdeen, who lost his joy when his parents divorced. What crisis was there in suburbia, in the innocuous food court of the mall? “Anti-social” and “non-aspirational” were other adjectives used but a better word, perhaps, is “bereft.” What defined grunge most was a longing, a grasping for something essential but inexpressible. Few people could understand how young Americans who lived in relative prosperity and peace could sing about alienation so passionately that it sounded like a crisis. The homeless despair of grunge was born of a generation that felt itself on the fringes of American life. “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” This lyric is far from a battle cry. The image of grunge was, essentially, that of a homeless person. It was the sweater your friend found in a thrift store and annoyingly left on your floor for a month, which you decided to start wearing for lack of initiative to get your own sweater. “Kick over the wall, cause government’s to fall,” sang The Clash. Punk was dyed in brilliant colors, adorned with metal and combat boots.

Punk was shredded, ripped-apart, exploded. But where the full-blown nihilism and shock of punk still had the touch of theatre and play, grunge was all the more desperate for feeling it had nothing really to show. Musically speaking, grunge’s most direct influence was punk. Grunge looked mostly inward, as its war was with and about itself. The grunge generation was said to be internal - in other words, self-absorbed. Grunge had no external wars, no causes that felt immediate enough to be worth fighting for. This sentiment was encapsulated by Kurt Cobain’s famous - and perhaps most enduring - lyric, “Oh well, whatever, nevermind.” The sullen indifference (sometimes referred to as irony) of grunge - and the generation that produced it - was mind-boggling and infuriating to the generation of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, generations defined by wars and causes. If you asked grunge what it was for, the answer was, supposedly, “Nothing.” The same answer might be given if you asked grunge what it was against. It was not a rebellious negativity but a passive negation, a canceling out. Grunge was often defined by its negativity. Cobain sang hunched over with his eyes nearly shut, as if were simultaneously performing and elsewhere. There were candles all around the stage a purple light glowed around the band. Unlike Lead Belly’s bluesy, waltzy 1944 version, Nirvana played “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” as a dirge. The tempo Cobain chose seemed almost too slow but the band did not hurry him. “I absolutely love it more than any rock’n’roll I ever heard.” On the MTV stage, Cobain told the audience, “This was written by my favorite performer… Our favorite performer, isn’t it?” he asked his band. “I’d never heard about Lead Belly before so I bought a couple of records, and now he turns out to be my absolute favorite of all time in music,” he said. In a 1993 interview, not long before his death, Cobain told a reporter that he had been introduced to Lead Belly from reading William S. The fragile and surprising live performance of this song is Kurt Cobain’s defining moment.

“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” was the last in the Unplugged set, the last song on what would be Nirvana’s final album. The memory is so strong that I know it must be false. They played “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” over and over again. Nearly 20 years after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, I found myself watching this performance once again, Nirvana’s rendition of Lead Belly’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” The television played this MTV Unplugged in New York performance on a loop as I sat on the floor at a friends’ apartment in the East Village the night Cobain was found dead at 27.

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