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."^[1] Cobain was uncomfortable with the attention and placed his focus on the band's music, believing the band's message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, challenging the band's audience with its third studio album In Utero (1993).

During the last several years of his life, Cobain struggled with drug addiction as well as the professional and personal pressures surrounding himself and his wife, musician Courtney Love. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle, the victim of what was officially ruled a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. The circumstances of his death have become a topic of fascination and debate.

Since their debut, Nirvana with Cobain as a songwriter has sold over twenty-five million albums in the US alone, and over fifty million worldwide,^[2][3] making Cobain one of the most commercially successful songwriters in the history of popular music, and one of the most influential and iconic individuals in the history of popular culture, and the late 20th century.