A troubled hero for our times?

Kurt Cobain, charismatic and tortured lead singer with Nirvana, may have killed himself in 1994, but his iconic status grows by the day. One unreleased song and a scruffy hand-written journal are the latest devices that the music industry is using to get rich on the back of this John Lennon for the grunge generation. John Harris reports

On 28 October, after months of legal tussling, Geffen Records will release a "Best of" compilation simply entitled Nirvana. Millions of pubescent rock fans who are just easing into the world of angst, self-doubt and hatred of their elders will put it on their Christmas wish list; by the end of 2002, it will surely have sold millions.

Craftily, Geffen has ensured that more seasoned music consumers will also have to buy the album. As well as all the hits, it's set to contain a song called "You Know You're Right", recorded in January 1994, just before Nirvana were tragically laid to rest. In the music business, no one underestimates the allure of the phrase "contains unreleased material". Despite the fact that the Nirvana album will feature little over three minutes of it, the promise will do its work.

With no little fanfare, promotional CDs featuring "You Know You're Right" have just been mailed out to the media. As journalists are discovering, for all the hype, what's most striking about the song is the fact that, in the modern context, it sounds so run-of-the-mill. What with grinding guitars, growled vocals and and a vague air of emotional pain, it could be the work of any number of currently successful bands: Puddle of Mudd, Staind, Nickelback, Creed... you name them.

But its rather generic nature matters little. "You Know You're Right" was among the last recorded works of Kurt Cobain. For that reason, it is already being dissected and discussed. Tellingly, Nirvana's more hard-bitten fans already claim to have divined the song's veiled subtext: in lines such as "I would crawl away for good" – not to mention its sarcastic title – they sense Cobain announcing an unfulfilled desire to leave his infamous wife, Courtney Love.

Those who pay such close attention to Cobain's music have even more to look forward to. In November, the diaries he kept from his adolescence onwards will be published in their original, hand-written form. The sales pitch recently offered by the book's US editorial director sounded positively hucksterish: "It's a replica of his notebook pages. We have excised any thought of editorial intrusion. This is pure, unadulterated Kurt Cobain." And, no doubt, a very straightforward way to cash in on the singer's loyal – and needy – fan base.

Kurt Cobain took his own life on 7 April 1994. In the UK, his suicide marked the end of one musical era – the three-year period that saw the rise of what came to be known as "grunge" – and the decisive start of another. The week after the NME commemorated his death, its next issue contained a review of Blur's agenda-setting album Parklife and a famous interview with Oasis in which Noel and Liam Gallagher went most of the way towards punching one another.

Within little more than a year, those two bands were squaring up to each other in the so-called "Battle of Britpop", and Cobain seemed a distant, irrelevant presence. Britpop was about the celebration of everything that he had sought to reject: celebrity, hedonism, the worship of commercial success. As if to announce the changing of the guard, Liam Gallagher elegantly announced, to remarkably little protest, that Cobain had been "a sad c*** who couldn't handle the fame".

But now look. The prospect of Nirvana's Best of becoming one of the year's biggest-selling albums is not the only token of Cobain's posthumous ubiquity. Just as the Britpop generation made John Lennon its patron saint, so the droves of adolescents who pledge allegiance to the music known as nu-metal (any resident of an average British town will know them: they're the youths who dress in generously-cut jeans and black hooded tops and affect the archetypal air of teenage dissent) have placed Cobain on a very elevated pedestal indeed. Their T-shirts and button-badges feature his portrait; his music is regularly taken as something close to a sacrament.

I first became aware of this phenomenon while researching an article for this newspaper, based around the nu-metal sub-culture. It involved talking to a gaggle of sixth-formers in Manchester: while we chatted about Cobain, I mentioned that I had briefly met him in 1991, after Nirvana's appearance on Channel 4's deservedly forgotten "yoof" show The Word. Much to my embarrassment, they were fantastically impressed. The rest of the interview departed from the script and kept returning to that most unanswerable of questions: "What was he like?"

This month, Q magazine published a list of the 50 Most Powerful People in Music. Bono sat at number one; Radiohead's Thom Yorke was at six; the Gallagher brothers, presumably to their annoyance, were placed at a lowly 43. Kurt Cobain, meanwhile, was at number five. "Ten years and eight million copies later, the ripples Nirvana created with their second album Nevermind extend further than ever", ran his entry's blurb. "Kurt Cobain's power from beyond the grave has never been stronger... interest in the troubled singer is still at a premium."

One factor above all others underwrites his iconic status. Much like Lennon, for all his complexities, Cobain has come to embody everything that the modern music industry is held to be destroying.

Modern rock fans sit in an embattled, slightly paranoid position. They might rail against the singing Redcoats accorded their 15 minutes by Popstars and Fame Academy, but they also tend to demonise suspect members of their own constit- uency with a zeal that seems to border on the Stalinist. The huge success of the US nu-metal band Linkin Park, whose debut album Hybrid Theory sold 2.5 million copies across the world, was swiftly followed by widespread suspicions that the group were in some way inauthentic: one website recently characterised their music as "manufactured, soulless, commercialised rebellion for 14-year-olds".

In the case of some bands, such accusations seem to carry weight. One of Limp Bizkit's biggest international hits was a song entitled "My Way", intended to be a celebration of angry individualism. "This time I'm a-let it all come out/ This time I'm a-stand up and shout/ I'm a-do things my way", spat the group's singer, Fred Durst. His call to arms seemed slightly compromised by the fact that Durst is a 30-year-old senior vice-president of his record company, Interscope.

Cobain, by contrast, is held up to be the very embodiment of integrity and defiance. Indeed, in the mythical telling of his life story, his profound distaste for the ways of the record industry led him to express his protest by killing himself.

The truth, of course, is a little more complicated. Kurt Cobain was born and raised in Aberdeen, Washington, a quiet logging town a hundred or so miles south of Seattle. His parents divorced when he was eight, a turn of events that left him bewildered: history records that his bedroom wall featured the graffito "I hate Mom, I hate Dad, Dad hates Mom, Mom hates Dad, it simply makes you want to be sad". The strife only continued: in his mid-teens, he watched as his mother threatened his stepfather with a gun, and then threw the family's firearms into a nearby river. Cobain retrieved the guns, sold them to a second-hand dealer and used the money to buy his first amplifier.

Although his formative tastes took in soft-rock bands such as Journey and Foreigner, by his late teens, he had fallen under the spell of a strain of American punk rock that came out of California. The massively influential band Black Flag were a particular favourite: like many of their peers, they peddled not only music, but a righteous ideology, founded on the imperative nature of staying true to punk principles, keeping one's music free of corporate pollutants, and never, ever selling out.

Thus, as well as convincing Cobain of the wonder of pared-down, cranked-up music, they also sowed the seeds of a rather neurotic vigilance about what was and wasn't "punk". At the height of his success, the question was still uppermost in his mind: in 1993, Cobain was heard pondering whether to spend $55,000 on a guitar that had once been owned by the iconic black folk-blues singer Leadbelly. He reportedly could not decide whether doing so would be "a punk move" or "an anti-punk move".

Nirvana's first recorded music appeared in 1988. Their debut album, Bleach, appeared the following year, and in October 1991, they released an era-defining single entitled "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Its title was taken from a brand of American deodorant, and its lyrics were at least partly nonsensical ("A mulatto/ An albino/ A mosquito/ My libido"), but its brutal, instantly infectious music struck a chord all over the globe. By January 1992, Nevermind, the album from which it was taken, had knocked Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the US album charts. By now, Cobain had become a star. Prior to Nirvana's rise, mainstream American rock had been in the habit of emphasising escapism, glamour, and a notion of rock'n'roll founded in the airbrushed expanse of LA: the late Eighties' most notable genre was so-called hair-metal, which brought the world such talents as Mötley Crüe, Poison and Vixen. By contrast, Cobain – bedraggled, slightly dazed, and fond of sabotaging Nirvana's promotional appearances – became the poster-boy for a new kind of authenticity. The fact that his success seemed to cause him no end of disquiet only added to his allure.

The follow-up album to Nevermind was recorded in early 1993. Though Cobain was set on calling the album I Hate Myself and I Want to Die, it was released that September as In Utero. It stands as Nirvana's masterpiece, not only on account of its musical accomplishments, but because its coruscating, prickly aesthetic is the very embodiment of Cobain's refusal to chase the market. The first single from the album was entitled "Heart-Shaped Box": its lyrics include the lines "Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back" and "I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black". The album also included a song whose intro suggested a satirical re-write of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" – until Cobain's lyrics proved that his intent was slightly more serious. "Rape me, my friend," he sang. "Rape me again." For all the portraits of Cobain as a man driven to distraction by the demands of success, by this time, his chief problem was a seemingly undiagnosable stomach complaint. The chief symptom was a crippling, never-ending pain that Cobain dulled with the aid of heroin. The resulting addiction only seemed to add to his woes.

In March 1994, while recuperating in Rome after a run of European concerts, Cobain attempted suicide, overdosing on Rohypnol, a potent tranquiliser used by withdrawing heroin addicts. The following month, at home in Seattle, he used one of his collection of fireams to kill himself. He left a convoluted note that seemed to justify the idea that success had corr- oded his spirit: "I haven't felt the excite-ment of listening to as well as creating music for too many years now," he wrote.

The idea that his troubles arose from a still-fervent belief in punk-type principles was perhaps undermined by the fact that the note went on to admiringly cite the example of Queen's Freddie Mercury, "who seemed to relish in [sic] the love and adoration of the crowd". As Cobain's posthumous cult took root, however, such ambiguities mattered little. He was soon fixed as a martyr to one of rock music's customary mixed-up, indecipherable, vaguely countercultural causes.

Since Cobain's death, however, the values he represented have been thrown into ever-sharper relief. These days, the stars that regularly emerge from the "alternative" milieu that spawned Nirvana are a strikingly compliant bunch, happy to troop along to awards ceremonies, pose for Vanity Fair and spend weeks at a time on their videos.

No one embodies all this as gloriously as Cobain's widow, Courtney Love. Since his death, she has remade herself as a celebrity with one foot in rock music and the other in Hollywood. Dressed in Versace and endowed with a new-found elegance, she is nigh-on unrecognisable as the pockmarked, hard-faced wastrel whom Cobain married. On occasion, she claims to have entered her new world in the name of punk rock, though aside from her tendency to shout louder than anyone else, the ideological link between her past and present seems rather questionable.

Younger stars seem no less fond of life in the mainstream. The nu-metal groups that were created in Nirvana's image have mastered the slippery art of turning rebellion into money: the alleged spirit of dissent that is alleged to underpin their music seems to extend no further than a harmless kind of disaffection. Even those who are alleged to be avenging their dominance seem to be easily neutered. When The White Stripes emerged from Detroit, they were hailed as the harbingers of a return to music's primal roots; recently, their singer Jack White announced that he had taken a role in a forthcoming movie called Cold Mountain, starring alongside such well-known counterculturalists as Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger.

All told, one begins to get the impression that once Cobain was out of the way, the US mainstream could get on with bringing the last of rock's more troublesome factions to heel. And now, just in time for Christmas, you can buy his new greatest hits, feat- uring – roll up, roll up – previously unreleased material. As the million-selling angst-rocker Alanis Morissette once put it, isn't it ironic?

John Harris's first book, 'The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock', will be published next year by Fourth Estate

LIVE FAST... THE STARS WHO DIED YOUNG

As ever in the world of pop, it's the style that makes the myth, especially when it comes to popping off. If Buddy Holly had died in a barbeque flame-out rather than a plane crash, it's questionable whether he would have ascended so rapidly to rock heaven. Plane crashes, car crashes, total systemic crashes – these are good rock deaths. And successful rock stars have a habit of coming up with the goods. Think of Jimi, Janis, Jim, Otis, Brian: the ones who slipped away during the prime rock death era, 1967-71. Think of The Who's Keith Moon and Led Zep's John Bonham, who died the classic drummer's death by excess all areas. Barbeque flame-outs aren't good deaths. Nor being electrocuted in the bath while playing the electric guitar. This fate, it is said, was met by The Yardbirds' Keith Relf.

Nor did the deaths of Gary Thain of Uriah Heep, who also electrocuted himself at home, and Cliff Burton of Metallica, who fell out of the back of the tour bus. Sandy Denny, the beloved English folk-rock lark, fell down stairs, and Marvin Gaye was shot by his dad during, it is said, a row over Marvin Snr's wife, Marvin's mum.

Some rock deaths are better left to mythology. For years after Lynyrd Skynyrd were wiped out in a plane crash, the story was that singer Ronnie Van Zant, the high priest of ass-kickin', live-in-the-flesh boogie was really killed by the plane's VCR falling on his head.

But the one true R'n'R death was died by the one true original R'n'R star, Elvis, who died on the lavatory of what boiled down to a lethal dose of constipation.