The Aweful Music of Kurt Cobain: Nirvana and the Mysterium Tremendum

Abstract

This article addresses the music and legacy of Kurt Cobain through Rudolf Otto’s elaboration of the mysterium tremendum: a shuddering experience of awe and overpowering dependence evoked by an encounter with the great unseen powers of the universe. The methodology of this article includes comparative and autoethnographic components; I will draw on my own encounters with the sound of Cobain’s music, the memorial to his life in his hometown as marked by pilgrims from around the world, and the significance of this confluence as expressed by fans. To contextualize my personal experience, I was driven to look deeper into Cobain’s life and death. This is an effort to identify the connection between Cobain’s life, Nirvana’s music, and the spiritual dimensions of our experiences that tie us all together as human beings on the face of the earth. The connection between the implications of Otto (the Prussian thinker who endeavours to conceptualize the “holy”), and the punk rock, anti-star from Aberdeen, Washington, is made using the framework of historian of religion Charles Long’s assertion that “religion” may best be understood as “orientation in the ultimate sense” ( Long 1999 ). We will see how the sound of Cobain’s music resonates across time and space, reflecting elements of Otto’s mysterium tremendum as well as a potential source of orientation for others struggling through their experience as human beings in the world.