Verse Chorus Verse

. Punk rock ponders the personal destiny of suicide.

"Be a man, kill yourself!" screamed Johnny Rotten (a.k.a. John Lydon), as the Sex Pistols self-destructed on stage at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom. Was Rotten's taunt hyperbole, irony, prophecy? It was January 14, 1978 and it would be their last performance. The following year, bassist Sid Vicious would die form a drug overdose.

Punk rock seemed to erupt from the dour social fabric of recessionary Britain in the mid-1970's. The blasphemous music was loud and furious, the clothes and hair were ripped and dishevelled, and the pioneering Sex Pistols lasted less than ten months.

America's recession of the early 1990's would spawn a resurgence of punk--but with a terrible twist. "Grunge" rock expresses the frustrations of a generation who feel they have "no future." As the Sex Pistols named their only album Never Mind the Bollocks, America's punk idols, Nirvana, dubbed their 1991 national debut Nevermind.

Like most young Americans, Nirvana's leader, Kurt Cobain, sensed the attraction of living out the fantastic myths of his punk heroes. He decoded his simple mission in the booklet for the 1992 compilations album Incesticide. "To pay tribute like an Elvis or Jimi Hendrix impersonator in the tradition of a bar band." Yet, both Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix were rock gods who succumbed early to tragic drug overdoses. So wouldn't chance departure form this life be a pathetic cliche?

Cobain almost did join rock's long list of dreadful mistakes in early March when he unwittingly mixed prescription tranquilizers with some celebratory champagne. After Cobain awoke form his coma, his doctor confirmed that the musician "came close to death." Yet, what would his death have meant as a drug-induced fatality? A suicide? An accident? More likely, with Cobain's ambiguous lyrics, a mystery.

A spokesman for Nirvana's Gold Mountain Management portrayed the coma as a close-call, a near miss form joining the deceased pantheon of rock idols, but "definitely not a suicide attempt--it was strictly accidental." So Cobain almost became an "accident"--just like his rock and roll predecessors.

In early April, Cobain decided to add a powerful twist to the rock and roll tragedy. His faceless corpse was found in his Seattle home--along with a clenched fist, a shotgun and a suicide note. Cobain even left his driver's license next to his body, apparently to quell any confusion about murdered and murderer. In this case, Cobain was both.

A friend, Kim Warnick, of the Seattle band the Fastbacks, immediately perceived this subtle shift in rock folklore: "Kurt didn't want any mistakes about what he was doing. He wanted to be perfectly clear." Despite the statements of his mother, Cobain had not merely "joined that stupid club." Cobain's death was no accident.

In 1992, Cobain expressed his disdain for the glory of rock culture: "...at this point in rock history, Punk Rock (while still sacred to some) is, to me, dead and gone." In 1994, Cobain made himself dead and gone, while overcoming the cliche of accident with the violence of willful destiny. In a land swelling with nihilism, perhaps Cobain's' bang highlights our whimpers--past and present.

But should we take the metaphor so literally? While John Lydon committed aesthetic suicide, Frances Bean will never know her father. Perhaps we should recall Johnny Rotten's last words: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

Brad Edward White's column appears on alternate Wednesday