Kurt Cobain’s 50th birthday shows how far we’ve strayed from nirvana

Me and my crew, high school days in Washington State circa 1993 when Nirvana was all the rage

Kurt Cobain would have turned fifty years old today had he not committed suicide on April 5th, 1994. At the height of Nirvana’s fame, I was in my early teens living in the heart of the USA grunge scene in Washington State. I loved the mosh pits, stage diving and the shock on my parents’ faces as I wore baggy pyjamas and old men’s flannel shirts to school. I reveled in the rebelliousness and anger of Kurt Cobain’s screaming vocals and the anti-establishment ethos Cobain reluctantly represented.

Two decades later, I can’t help but wonder what Kurt Cobain would have thought of the world now if he were still alive.

Musically-speaking, he’d be sickened by the boy bands and X-factor contestants conforming to corporations and market research when he felt “the duty of youth is to challenge corruption”. But beyond the bubble-gum pop and triteness of so much of today’s music, I wonder what Kurt Cobain would think of our society more generally.

Twenty-four years ago, I was brought to tears of joy as saxophone-playing Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States, believing he represented the needs of my generation. Today, the neoliberal polices of lower regulation, more competition and free trade agreements promoted by every U.S. president in my lifetime have dismantled social institutions and democracy, making the 1% wealthier while the 99% are squeezed to the point of near-collapse. 

Twenty years ago, the science of climate change was well-established, yet we’ve done little to address it and are still headed toward global warming that will make much of the Earth uninhabitable by the end of the century. Already, boats of migrants drown in the Mediterranean Sea fleeing hardship in their home countries exacerbated by extreme weather. More will come as the climate continues to destabilize. 

Twenty years ago, I thought becoming an educated woman would allow me to “have it all” thanks to feminism. Now, I realize the opportunity women’s liberation gave me was to become a "double-shift employee", working by day to make countries and corporations rich and by night as a guilt-stricken caregiver trying to make up for lost time with her child. Where did those twelve years I spent in university get me? They’re becoming worthless fast as so many ivory towers join the market economy to become degree supermarkets for those who can afford to pay their premiums. 

​Twenty years ago, the U.S. was well into fighting its “war on drugs”, which it eventually lost in 2011 but not before it became the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world where approximately one in every 32 Americans are under criminal justice system control and one in five black Americans spend part of their lives behind bars. And while America was fighting that futile war on drugs, the U.S. obesity rate went from 11% in 1990 to 35% today and the number of homeless went from less than 300,000 to more than half a million (a quarter of which are now children). 

“Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don't speak bird.” 

Cobain wrote those cryptic words in ‘The Journals’, the birds symbolizing “grumpy old men with turrets syndrome” and representing his passion for the writings of William S. Burroughs. Would 50 year old Cobain scream in hellish rage at the world today? In Cobain’s suicide note, he explained:   

There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.

Perhaps the broken systems we’re surrounded by today would be too much for his sensitive soul to bear. This is something I relate all too well with now as a mother  –caring so much for the well-being of the next generation that it hurts. 

So, what do you do when everything around you, all the systems you were taught to trust are broken and it hurts? You either give up and try to join the apocalypse party, or you try to fix one thing that has positive, knock-on effects to all the other broken systems.

​To me, that one fix comes in the form of a low-carbon transition, transforming society away from the fossil fuel dominated energy production that powered our Industrial Revolution toward clean, renewable energy production as part of a Technological Revolution. 

Ironically, William S. Burroughs had similarly strong opinions about the need to move on from the Industrial Revolution. In ‘The Place of the Dead Roads’, Burroughs explored more sustainable forms of human organisation, writing: 

We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap. 

Who would have ever imagined the invention of the combustion engine would be the cause of both so much human prosperity and yet so many global problems at the same time? 

Clearly, a low-carbon transition would solve a lot of our climate and environmental problems, but it could also be the solution to so many of our other broken socio-economic systems too. Evidence shows moving to a clean-energy society:

• Increases employment
• Takes people out of extreme poverty
• Improves heath, including decreasing obesity and incidence of respiratory disease
• Revitalises towns and villages
• Alleviates fuel poverty through energy efficiency
• Reduces likelihood of migration of climate refugees
• And is an essential part of feminism, as women are disproportionately victims of climate change and traditionally perform the “low carbon” duty of caregiving. 

Lately, I’ve been approached by a lot of people in need of hope. The alarming rate of warming in the Arctic and current global politics are getting to everyone around me, particularly parents and millennials. I’m struggling too – questioning my decision to bring a child into this world; wondering if the country I grew up in will become too dirty to drink the water or breathe the air as the current regime dismantles environmental protection; and worrying that U.S. politics might halt urgently needed global progress on climate action. 

For today, I’ll let Kurt Cobain influence me again. He once said: 

There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life.

perhaps echoing the words of Burroughs who argued “there are no innocent bystanders – What are they doing there in the first place?” 

So I’ll do something (anything) rather than remain a bystander because I can’t afford to spend twenty more years sitting around while our “leaders” take us further away from nirvana. 

High school me complete with flannel and (yes) slippers in anti-establishment chic, 1993

Happy Birthday, Kurt Cobain -wherever you are- and thanks for two decades of inspiration. To my fellow generation X/Y-ers who where inspired by Cobain too, keep fighting the good fight! ;-)
-Cara