Kurt Cobain, or excess as a sign of the times. Subjectivity and biographical interest in cultural semiotics

Abstract

Thirty years after the death of Kurt Cobain, it is interesting to ask about the exceptionality that pop culture has assigned to the leader of Nirvana, a question to which semiotics can provide some answers. I propose to review a late lesson by Yuri Lotman who, regarding biographies, defines the unusual that embodies exemplary subjects who risk challenging the norm. Lotman’s premises about semiotic excess would find course in postmodern culture, especially in a decentred subjectivity that Fredric Jameson defined in terms of intensities. Analysing Cobain, it will be possible to verify such subjectivity that, mired in instability and without the possibility of total subversion, oscillates between the romantic pursuit of originality and the fetishistic adoration of the market. In accordance with the interests of this semiotic theory, the reading will be undertaken in artistic texts that portray the life of the singer and his mythologization, thus corroborating how, in certain periods, a biography becomes a laboratory for the observation of culture.