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Kurt Cobain remains a tragically fascinating individual even more than 30 years since his death. Watching and reading old interviews can give fans a glimpse into who he was, especially young fans who may have just started getting into Nirvana. Beyond listening to the music to feel close to him, there’s a different level of understanding that comes from hearing an artist directly talk about their art and their life.
In a 1993 interview with Jon Savage, Cobain parted the curtain on self discovery. He shared a story of how he learned where his family came from, which ignited a sort of spirituality in him.
“I’ve never really known my ancestry,” he said at the time. “I didn’t even know until this year that the name Cobain was Irish. I found out through different phone books throughout America, I couldn’t find any Cobains at all. So I started calling Coburns. And I found this one lady in San Francisco and she had been researching out family history, and it came from County Cork.”
This discovery led to an epiphany for Kurt Cobain, as the band had toured Ireland that year. He continued, “Which was a weird coincidence because when we toured we played in Cork, and the entire day I walked around in a daze.”
For Cobain, being in Cork seemingly unlocked a deep-seated part of his identity. “I’d never felt so spiritual in my life,” he said. “I was almost in tears the whole day, it was the weirdest thing.”
Kurt Cobain Also Found His Identity in Punk Music
Kurt Cobain spoke vulnerably for a moment about his parents’ divorce, which impacted him throughout his life but especially in high school. He didn’t have many male friends at school, so he hung around with the girls a lot. This perspective made him realize that women are generally oppressed in society, but also in music.
“I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they’d written,” said Cobain. “[But] it took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism … and I was just starting to understand what was pissing me off so much those last couple years of high school. And then punk rock was exposed.”
Discovering punk rock was a turning point for Kurt Cobain. “Then it all came together,” he explained. “It just fit together like a puzzle.”
Punk music “expressed the way I felt socially and politically,” said Cobain. “Just everything. The anger that I felt, the alienation.”
Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage
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