Kurt Cobain Conspiracies by Allison Kingery

The singer who had it all at his time, took his own life at the young age of 27 in 1994. That's what supposedly happened to the famous Rockstar, Kurt Cobain. He dropped out of high school two weeks before his graduation and had many failed attempts at rehab before he died. Since his death, many conspiracies have been formed: he was going to divorce his wife, he was going to leave his band ‘Nirvana’ and go solo, or someone murdered him. We’re going to examine all these possibilities.

Kurt Cobain didn’t have the most perfect Rockstar life. He had many problems internally and externally. Some of those problems made people see him as an INFP. The acronym INFP stands for Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving (INFP in Depth - Discover Your Strengths and Make the Most of Your INFP Talents 1). This means someone who is more energized by alone time (introverted), who puts more focus on ideas rather than facts (intuitive), who makes decisions based on thier values and feelings (feeling), and who prefers to go with the flow rather than having a plan set for everything (perceiving) (What is an INFP 1). What made people think he was an INFP were his song lyrics, or what he said during concerts and interviews. One of the many famous quotes he said that really made people think this about him was “I would like to get rid of the homophobes, sexists, and racists in our audience. I know they’re out there and it really bothers me” (Famous INFPs - Individual Differences Research Labs 1). Why would he want to get rid of some of the fans in his audience that spent money to go see him and his band perform live? Because he was against all the things he listed and that’s part of the feeling category in the INFP. Another quote he had said was “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn’t identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music, they just wanted to fight and get laid” (INFP in Depth - Discover Your Strengths and Make the Most of Your INFP Talents). This goes for the introverted part because people usually listen to music and do art alone. 

 Another problem he had was that he was Hypochondriac. A hypochondriac is a person who is abnormally anxious about their health and think minor illnesses are life-threating. An ache or a cough could be a sign of a life-threatening disease to a hypochondriacal person. What made him become a hypochondriac was his stomach. He went to see many doctors about his stomach problems and they all kept giving him different medicines that didn’t seem to help him the way drugs did. In one of his interviews he says “No, they never figured out what it was, most gastrointestinal doctors don’t know anything about the stomach diseases, they just have a PhD. They get paid a lot of money for pretending and prescribing you different drugs, and it’s a total scam as long as I’m concerned” (MTV. Kurt Cobain Talks Music Videos, His Stomach & Frances Bean 1). He was also interested in the human body overall. In many of his songs and album covers he wrote/drew something involving some part of a human body. In one of Nirvana’s early albums “Incesticide” it has a drawing of a distorted body on it. One of the songs from this album is called “Molly’s lips” and is talking about the famous actress Molly Weir’s lips. In another album called “Utero” the front cover is a woman whose intestines and muscles are showing, and the back of the album is some of his own artwork with multiple fetus’ in the background. During an interview he tells the interviewer “I’ve always been fascinated with medical techs and charts and I guess I secretly want to be a doctor or something, I don’t know. Or a person that works in a cremation factory. I don’t know, I’ve always just liked anatomy ever since I was a little kid” (One of Kurt Cobain's Final Interviews - Incl. Extremely Rare Footage 1).

Cobain and his wife Courtney Love did not know each other for very long before they got married. They started dating later in the year of 1991 before she became pregnant with their only child in the early year of 1992. They married on one of his tour stops in Hawaii of that year in February (Who Is Courtney Love, When Did She Meet Kurt Cobain, What’s Her Net Worth and Who’s Her Daughter Frances Bean? 1). When they got married, the pregnant Love wore a vintage dress that once belonged to actress Frances Farmer and he wore a Guatemalan purse and green checkered pajamas because he was “too lazy to put on a tux”. They had a very private ceremony with only eight people attending, and one of those eight being the drummer for the band ‘Nirvana’, Dave Grohl (When Kurt Cobain Married Love 1). A lot of people did not approve of their marriage because they were both heavy drug users at the time of their wedding and during Love’s pregnancy. Love claimed that her drug habits were because it was “all part of the package of building a home” and that they were a “damn normal couple” (When Kurt Cobain Married Love 1) (Who Is Courtney Love, When Did She Meet Kurt Cobain, What’s Her Net Worth and Who’s Her Daughter Frances Bean? 1). After Cobain died investigators found a brief hand-written note in his wallet mocking their wedding vows. It read “even when she’s a b**** with zits and siphoning all your money for doping and whoring” (Sex, Love, and Marriage 1). This is some fuel for conspirators who believe that Cobain was going to divorce his wife Love before he committed suicide.

Not only do conspirators believe that he was going to divorce Love, they also believe that he was going to split from ‘Nirvana’ and go solo. Everyone around him thought that all the fame that came to him and his band so quickly affected him negatively. One of their producers said, “When I saw them in Amsterdam a few months back, it seemed like they were a little grouchy and . . . under pressure, let’s put it that way.” “Kurt is ready to strangle the next person who takes his picture,”. “People are treating him like a god, and that pisses him off,” “They’re giving Kurt this elevated sense of importance that he feels he doesn’t have or deserve. (Nirvana: Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain 1). The singer of the band of course argued this with “It really isn’t affecting me as much as it seems like it is in interviews and the way that a lot of journalists have portrayed my attitude, “I’m pretty relaxed with it.” (Nirvana: Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain 1). One of the band’s show’s in 1989 at Rome would prove otherwise. During the show, Kurt had an “onstage breakdown”. The co-owner of Nirvana’s first record label recalled “After four or five songs, he quit playing and climbed up the speaker column of speakers and was just going to jump off. The bouncers were freaking out, and everybody was just begging him to come down. And he was saying, ‘No, no, I’m just going to dive.’  (Nirvana: Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain 1). He believed this was because of the stress that him and his band were under at the time. The drummer of the band Dave Grohl, did an interview and talked about the band and what would happen if they broke up. In the interview he gets asked “was the band on the verge of breaking up anyway?” which he responds with “kinda, a little bit, sort of.” “It’s all too crazy” (Dave Grohl On If Nirvana Was About To Break Up Before Kurt Cobain's Death 1). In a different interview with Cobain, he says “I feel like I have an obligation because I like this band and I wanted to break it and I wanted to quit” (Kurt Cobain Fala Sobre Sair Do Nirvana 1). The ex-guitarist Eric Erlandson, from his wife’s band ‘Hole’, claimed that he was working on his own solo album. After Kurt died, he mentioned "That’s really what he was going towards, a solo album but working with different people" (Kurt Cobain Was Working on a Solo Album before He Died, Says Writer of Sh***y New Kurt Cobain Book 1).

Some conspirators don’t believe that his death was solely by himself. They believe that he was murdered. One of the main reasons people think this is because the private investigator, Tom Grant, that Love hired to help find her husband a few days before his death believes that she and the house nanny, Michael Dewitt, finally succeeded in one of their many attempts to murder him. He strongly believes in this because the two people he thinks to have caused Cobain’s death haven’t taken any legal actions against him (10 Dark Theories And Claims Surrounding The Death Of Kurt Cobain 1). A few of the other reasons that not only Grant but other people think he was murdered is because: there were no finger prints on the murder weapon or bullets, there were three freshly loaded bullets in the weapon, he had three times the lethal amount of heroin in his system than of a normal drug addict would, his suicide note doesn’t really talk about suicide until the last four lines (it talks about his love and appreciation for music), the last four lines appear to be have been written by someone else, his credit card was still being used even after the investigators found his wallet next to his body, at the crime scene in his ashtray there was a different brand of cigarette than the brand he usually smoked, and many more reasons (10 Dark Theories And Claims Surrounding The Death Of Kurt Cobain 1). If he had that much heroin in his system, that would have killed him almost instantly, and he wouldn’t be able to wipe the finger prints off the gun or bullets because he would’ve been dead or too intoxicated to even focus on such details. If he did shoot himself how would he wipe the finger prints off the gun and bullets? Why were there freshly loaded bullets in the gun, and why was there more than one if he had the intention of shooting himself the first time? Why does the note not talk about him ending his life until it looks like someone else wrote it? Why was his credit card still being used after he was dead? How/why was there a different brand of cigarette in the ashtray if he only smoked one kind? All these unexplained questions and many more questions with no answers are the reason why conspirators believe that he did not commit suicide, but that he was murdered in the greenhouse of his home. 

On April 8, 1994, Kurt Cobain took his own life at the young age of 27. The results of this led to some conspiracy theories:

1.       Was he going to divorce his wife before he died?

2.       Was he going to break up from his band and become a solo artist?

3.       Did someone murder him?

      After the twenty-fourth anniversary of his death, it remains a mystery to many conspirators as to how he really died.

Works Cited

“10 Dark Theories And Claims Surrounding The Death Of Kurt Cobain.” Listverse, 6 Apr. 2018, listverse.com/2018/04/08/10-dark-theories-and-claims-surrounding-the-death-of-kurt-cobain/.

Azerrad, Michael. “Nirvana: Inside the Heart and Mind of Kurt Cobain.” Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/nirvana-inside-the-heart-and-mind-of-kurt-cobain-103770/.

“Case Outline.” Case Outline, cobaincase.com/.

“Famous INFPs - Individual Differences Research Labs.” IDR Labs, www.idrlabs.com/infp.php.

Hyden, Steven. “Kurt Cobain Was Working on a Solo Album before He Died, Says Writer of Shitty New Kurt Cobain Book.” News, News, 23 Aug. 2017, news.avclub.com/kurt-cobain-was-working-on-a-solo-album-before-he-died-1798230867.

“INFP in Depth - Discover Your Strengths and Make the Most of Your INFP Talents.” Truity, www.truity.com/personality-type/INFP.

“Kurt Cobain Fala Sobre Sair Do Nirvana.” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Oct. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YddHIePOQjU.

 “Kurt Cobain Talks Music Videos, His Stomach & Frances Bean | MTV News.” YouTube, YouTube, 29 Apr. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJtm9HomKdE.

Music, Art And. “Dave Grohl On If Nirvana Was About To Break Up Before Kurt Cobain's Death.” YouTube, YouTube, 23 Dec. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=25MS9dkVLag.

Nye, James. “Kurt Cobain's Note about Courtney Love and Marriage Found at Death Scene.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 29 Apr. 2014, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2616087/Kurt-Cobains-note-Courtney-Love-marriage-death-scene.html.

“One of Kurt Cobain's Final Interviews - Incl. Extremely Rare Footage.” YouTube, YouTube, 20 Feb. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CTsGievjMU.

Waring, Olivia. “Who Is Courtney Love, When Did She Meet Kurt Cobain, What's Her Net Worth and Who's Her Daughter Frances Bean?” The Sun, The Sun, 4 Aug. 2017, www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/4162780/courtney-love-kurt-cobain-widow-age-net-worth/.

Wawzenek, Bryan. “When Kurt Cobain Married Courtney Love.” Diffuser.fm, 24 Feb. 2017, diffuser.fm/kurt-cobain-marries-courtney-love/.