Cobain crosses the fine line between art and death - Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain has ascended to the pantheon of celebrated suicides and joined other self-destructive rock stars such as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix as a symbol of romantic alienation, thrust by fame onto a stage that requires annihilation for the denouement of the final act.

The modern self-made man must self-destruct to maintain the purity of his ideal, to show utter contempt for those who follow but fail to understand, believing that he speaks for them when he expresses anguish. Actually all he ever sought was the nullity of his own experience.

We haven't a clue about what drove this icon of post-adolescent torment to kill himself, except that drugs must have poisoned his brain while delivering an all-too-brief respite from his demons. Ultimate escape from pain becomes an end unto itself, of course, the logical extension of what Cobain sought in his glamorous music. For the modern knight of Nirvana, the purity of his perverse message requires that success be viewed as failure; the tortured outsider can never become the satisfied insider any more than the existential rebel can find his cause, the stranger can be surrounded by friends, the loner happy in a crowd.

Pain that drives an artist to create will not be soothed by opiates. Fame for an artist who thrives on negation is a mirage. The singer was unable to endure the fantasy he decried in "Dumb": I'm not like them, but I can pretend Such pretense is fraudulent - no better than what he rails against.

One of his fans offers a sociological twist to his popularity among those now dubbed as Generation X. "Kurt Cobain was one among a league of kids raised by '60s parents who shuffled their children from relative to relative in a quest for personal freedom," Lorraine Ali, a Los Angeles critic, writes in the New York Times. Such heroes "suffered the fallout of free love, and as adults, they sell millions of albums to peers who can relate to their rootless anger and dysfunction."

Well, every generation chooses its own brand of star to represent the zeitgeist that may (or may not) explain the ways it articulates the problems of growing up. But media hype stories that concentrate on the links between suicide and fame tell us more about the times we live in than the stringy-haired artist's wails of masochism: Everything is my fault, I'll take all the blame.

Suicide is a significant theme in the history of drama, music and literature. It's especially important in the history of 20th-century fame, writes Leo Brady in The Frenzy of Renown, "not because it is so characteristic of those who get or fail to get the fame they desire, but because the act and the talk that surrounds it crystallizes conflicts about fame an aspiration that in previous eras might be presented by the saint in the desert, the Renaissance melancholic, or the nineteenth century dandy."

Suicide is a mortal sin for Catholics - an act against God - but for many iconoclasts today, the suicidal artist competes with God as an alternative creator of lifestyle. Famous American self-destructors in the 20th century have been writers (Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath), movie stars (Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland) and, of course, rock stars. Interpretations of their demise are fascinating because they offer fashionable psychological insights into our culture, if not necessarily into a precipitating mental illness.

Hemingway could not reconcile his public persona with the private person, the professional writer. He wanted to keep his writing pure, the product of a hidden self, but he could not always separate the serious discipline of his craft with his craving for public attention. He once fretted in a letter to New Yorker writer Janet Flanner that popular approval actually might become the symbol of his failure. He shot himself to keep from facing the pain of his cancer, but also to maintain his control over the public image, the brave white hunter, albeit a hunter of himself.

Plath, whose literary subject was an obsession with death, had a desire to join her father, who died when she was a child. Suicide fused subject and object.

Monroe and Garland reflect the emptiness inside the body of talent that drew attention to them before they developed a strong sense of self. Both women appeared to have led tortured private lives, trying to live up to what others saw but, what they could not feel themselves. Their talent reflected the vulnerability of inner cravings, but led them to self-destruction with pills and booze because they never found a way to soothe the wounded heart that gave their talent its pathos and poignancy.

Professionalism, whether in art, poetry or music, requires discipline, an aspiration for excellence, a personal appreciation of the self-driven talent that comes from within - no matter how difficult the burdens it imposes. "True valor, true sainthood, true professionalism required no awards, no canonizations to affirm its conviction of accomplishment," writes Brady. "But in a world characterized by the journalistic urge to discover new stars every few seconds and then throw them aside, self-approval was becoming more difficult for anyone whose profession, talent, genius, vocation, or mere occupation had anything to do with the approval of others."

Goethe once wrote that the hero of his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, committed suicide so that he wouldn't have to. It's possible that Cobain, so admired by the Grunge Generation, could never make such distinctions between art and death.

Cobain crosses the fine line between art and death - Kurt Cobain - rock singer