Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) was an American musician, best known as the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of grunge band Nirvana.
With the lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from Nirvana's second album Nevermind (1991), Nirvana entered into the mainstream, popularizing a subgenre of alternative rock called grunge. Other Seattle grunge bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden also gained wider audiences, and as a result, alternative rock became a dominant genre on radio and music television in the United States during the early-to-middle 1990s. Nirvana became the "flagship band" of "Generation X," and Cobain, as its frontman, found himself anointed by the media as the generation's "spokesman...>