Nirvana
All apologies

The chronicle of a foretold death. Kurt Cobain was a fragile and defenseless boy, an angel in life with skin too thin, with the gaze of a child hunted by the world and who didn't count for a damn thing. The foretold death is exactly "All apologies." A heartbreaking song, a utopian scream of a private revolt always too overwhelming. It was composed in 1990, but Nirvana recorded it only on January 1, 1991, in Seattle. Cobain dedicated the song to his wife Courtney Love and his daughter Frances Bean, stating to Michael Azerrad that the lyrics had nothing to do with family but that the melody was meant for them. On November 18, 1993, Cobain announced an MTV unplugged concert, a sort of collective death testament, where he performed a harrowing version of "All apologies." Here, he was already dead. He was already a simulacrum of himself, he had left us. And he died on April 5, 1994, in Seattle at only 27 years old, just like Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison. And it was the mythologized exit for a singer of a generation that needed a martyr, ready to sacrifice himself first to then be venerated and never sufficiently thanked. He was an artist endowed with sensitivity beyond the norm, he had that look that smelled of adolescent spirit, and therefore of rebellion, transgression, genuineness. He was the perfect anti-hero; the right medium to combine utopia and reality, to fall in love with a brutally defeated yet wonderfully rough, dirty fairytale. He was the megaphone of the overthrowing of a system not for political, state conviction, but because he'd had enough of hypocrisies, pretenses, double faces. He was a forerunner of everything, an excellent singer, a drug addict to the core and always. Not for fashion, not to be the protocol rock star, but out of necessity; it was a way to persuade himself that pain could know respite, that the malaise that gripped him could be a more welcoming and less stepmotherly mother. It was an illusion, like his whole life, like all his art. The boundary between public and private, in him, did not exist. It was a whole, a natural flow without inhibitions. That way of holding the guitar low, that way of playing it with the left hand was a signal to the world that he was not like the others. That he couldn't be labeled in one way or another, that defining him in a certain way would have meant expropriating him of all the demons that tormented him. That of Kurt Cobain was a revolt of heart and guts, heightened iconoclasm that was like reaching out and not letting it fall, and not letting him die in devouring solitude. Kurt Cobain was everything; he was the dream and the illusion, he was the purest belonging. Kurt Cobain was a soldier who came to fight for a little decipherable generation with little hope for conservation.