Kurt Cobain’s voice sounds neutral and disaffected through the tape recorder, as if his confession belonged to someone else and not to the beleaguered teenager he himself had been a few years back: “In a community that stresses macho male sexual stories as a highlight of all conversation, I was an underdeveloped, immature little dude that never got laid”. Sixteen year old Kurt often lied to his friends, boasting about a series of sexual encounters that never happened. Until one afternoon, hormones bubbling, the future leader of Nirvana slipped into the home of a disabled girl and began to fondle her breasts, willing to lose his virginity drastically. All of a sudden, he was invaded by a feeling of depression: “ I tried to fuck her but I didn’t know how […]I got grossed out very heavily with how her vagina smelled and her sweat reeked. So I left”. Despite of not consummating intercourse, the double humiliation (the self-hatred for his lack of determination and the remorse of the inflicted abuse) followed him for the rest of his life.

The episode, registered in his musician diaries and reproduced by himself in a recording exhumed in the documentary ‘Cobain: Montage Of Heck’ (Brett Morgen, 2015)’, marks a point of no return in Kurt’s existence: the beginning of a slow retreat into himself, which precipitates his definitive mental exile from a city whose crudeness had turned him into a whirlwind of fear and anger. In a later promotional leaflet destined to present the album ‘Bleach’ (1989), Nirvana’s debut record, Cobain would remember Aberdeen, Washington as a community composed mostly by “ignorant lumberjacks and fanatics, tobacco chewers, deer hunters and homophobes”. There, he grew terrified by an atmosphere of brutal masculinity starting from high school, where his classmates persecuted him for his allegedhomosexuality, and extended to the males in the family: a grandfather who “often told racist jokes”, and a stepfather who, due to the infrequence with which Kurt brought girls back home, harangued him daily with the idea that “a man needs to be a man and act as such”.

Little by little, teenage Kurt began to defend himself from the world with the few weapons he has at his disposal: filling the city with graffiti sprouting like ulcers (the most famous one being ‘God is gay’, which would be recovered years later in Nirvana’s song ‘Stay Way’), and filling notebooks with his thoughts and drawings reflecting his state of increasing isolation. Those notebook, partly published under the name ‘Diaries’ (Mondadori, 2003), are naturally integrated within the whole of a work we must understand, above all, as Cobain’s great attempt in transforming his marginalisation into art. In one of the pages Kurt sketches a comic, drawn in a crude and inflamed style, starring Mr. Moustache: a rude and primitive character who synthesises all the hustlers he feared in Aberdeen. In the first vignette, Mr. Moustache approaches his pregnant wife’s belly and expresses his desires “My son! Boy he’s gonna be quite a man, listen to the power in those little strong legs! He’s gonna be a football player!”. Suddenly, Mr. Moustache lights up: “The kid better not be a lousy little girl. I want my very own, honest, hard workin, jew, spic, nigger, and faggot hating 100% pure beef AMERICAN MALE! I’ll teach him how to work on cars and exploit women.” In the third vignette, the character transforms back into false tenderness, (“Ahh listen to those strong little legs kick”), to which the foetus responds to his desire in a decisive way: giving him an energetic kick in the face.

Many more annotations, specially those relating with his incipient interest in feminism, come from his new life in Olympia, Washington, where Cobain escapes to in 1987, in an attempt to erase any trace of his time in Aberdeen. In this small student city where punk rock flourishes within a scene as small as determined, Cobain comes into contact with women who are beginning to lay the foundations for the riot grrrl: an intense current which stimulates punk ethics and fights collectively for women’s empowerment, starting from the active intervention of women in rock music. The day Kurt meets Tobi Vail, a promoter of the outstanding fanzine riot Jigsaw and imminent cofounder of the band Bikini Kill, he feels so overwhelmed by the solidity of her speech (and her never-ending collection of records) that he throws up out of pure nervousness. A short time later, united in a fleeting relationship, Kurt’s diaries reveal and intense construction of the feminist icon we know today, The inspiring intellectual influence of Tobi and other riot girls like Kathleen Hanna, is made evident in Cobain’s abundant lists of his favourite albums, which start getting filled by female, underground, and avant-garde pop between the 70s and 80s: The Raincoats, The Slits, Marine Girls. In addition, the musician’s conscience seems to burst in every page, every corner: “people can’t deny any ism or think that some are more or less subordinate except for sexism… I still think that in order to expand on all other isms, sexism has to be blown wide open”, or: “I like the comfort in knowing that women are generally superior, and naturally less violent than men. I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock and roll.”

In January of 1992, after fulminating Michael Jackson in the Top 1 of the Billboard list with Nirvana’s album ‘Nevermind’ (1991), Kurt Cobain becomes one of the two most famous male rockstars of the United States. The other is Axl Rose, the leader of Guns N’ Roses, an ultra-conservative band that still embodied the fiercest values of Reaganism. The tension between them doesn’t take long to erupt, staging a conflict in which the limits between the personal and the political are blurred. Next to Cobain, the eventual spokesperson of the youth hit by the savage neoliberalism of the Reagen and Bush administrations, Axl presents himself as monstrous extension of all the Aberdeen thugs: a metaphor for American nightmares. So much so that the simple idea of sharing a common audience begins to terrify him. Yet the best-selling records they both deliver couldn’t be farther apart. With ‘Use Your Illusion’ (1991), a baroque and excessive double record, Guns N’ Roses persist in the tradition of androcentric rock, with songs that either place women between romantic clouds or present them as simple ‘bitches’. At the same time, Cobain achieved something that until then seemed unlikely: introducing a handful of dark reflections on alienation, sexual abuse, and misogyny in mainstream music channels. In less than four months, ‘Nevermind’ sold three million copies. Today more than thirty-five million have been sold.

Critic Charles R, Cross, who would years later sign the definitive biography of Cobain, (‘Heavier Than Heaven’, Random House, 2005), is sceptical about the ‘Nirvana phenomenon’, arguing the band had an audience, but not a message. Cross barely scratched the surface of ‘Nevermind’— a great record of distorted pop, blown up with the breath of a poetic weirdo— without perceiving that Cobain was detecting the wounds attached to his time with an unprecedented efficiency in his contemporaries. Sometimes, as with the punk earthquake of ‘Territorial Pissings (“Never met a wise man/ If so it’s a woman”), Kurt explicitly revolts against sexism, calling attention to the feminist approach that had stimulated him so much in Olympia. His tendency towards ambiguous texts sometimes caused misinterpretations with fatal consequences, as was the case with ‘Polly’, an abstract song about written about rape by Kurt from the aggressor’s first person perspective. ‘Polly’ was based on a real event that had occurred years before in Tacoma, Washington, and triggered a second terrible event when two Nirvana fans sexually assaulted a woman while humming the song, oblivious to the sharp anguish the lyrics transmitted.

Cobain, who considered rape one of the most serious crimes that could be committed, writes the following notes destined to be included in a rarities booklet for the album ‘Incesticide’ (1992): “Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song ‘Polly’. I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience. […] If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us-leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records”. He tackles the subject in a diary entry written around the same time: “I remember what Kathleen Hanna told me about high school. There was a class in which they taught girls how to prepare for a possible rape. And when you looked outside and saw the rapists right there, playing soccer, you thought ‘They should be teaching them these things’”. In 1993, Cobain recored ‘Rape Me’, a kind of response to the controversy caused by ‘Polly’, whose title recycles a provocative slogan commonly used by the riot grrrls. The song was doubly effective. On the one hand, Cobain helps amplify the grrrls discourse from his privileged position as a pop celebrity. On the other, it became his definitive antirape hymn: a composition of crude poetic justice, in which “A guy rapes a girl. He ends up in jail and is raped there”. However, it is once again misinterpreted, this time by feminist association that crash into the ambiguity of the title. Cobain becomes a bomb that provokes fiery reactions wherever it falls, often found, and not always clean. The conservative and sensationalist press frequently begins to shoot at him, using his partner Courtney Love, a seemingly easier prey, as a target. Coming from a prehistory of riot, although she never became integrated into its dynamics, Love was a strong and selfself- sufficient woman who built her own career fighting under Nirvana’s shadow. The records of her band, Hole, which explored complex taboos on femininity, were difficult to assimilate by the patriarchal culture in which pop continued to dilute itself, but she persisted with blind faith in the power of discrepancy.

Soon the sum of an outspoken woman and a feminist man became an irresistible prey for the means: an ideal channel to intoxicate both of their public images. So much so that Kurt slowly beings to be perceived a pusillanimous being managed by an unscrupulous witch. A version that Brett Morgen, author of ‘Cobain: Montage of Heck’, recently denied in an interview with El País: “Kurt was a great feminist. 20 years ago everyone felt threatened by a women with such a strong personality as Courtney’s, but he wasn’t. He knew how to give her her place and live with equal power in their relationship. That made a lot of people see him as a puppet before a manipulative woman. I don’t think that’s what it was”.

Although the centre of the storm moved from side to side, although Kurt’s power detonated stages around the world, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the star never managed to leave Aberdeen. When in January 1992 he strikes his tongue in Krist novosleci’s, Nirvana’s bass mouth, mouth on a prime-time television broadcast, he does it rejoicing in the possibility that on the other side of the screen all those “homophobic thugs” from this town are watching him. When he comes into scene, stuck in one of Courtney’s short dresses, there’s some joyous exploration of his feminie side, but also an, act of revenge against his undiluted past.

Yet all of this hid a powerful symbolic load that stimulated millions of people around the world. One of them was London journalist Amy Raphael, who in her book ‘Never MindThe Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock’ (Virago, 1995), wrote the most beautiful summary of Kurt’s legacy: “Cobain recognised the feminine in himself more than any other artist in the 90s. For us, he was a model of conduct more subversive than Camille Plagia [New York theoretical feminist] could have ever been”.