The Nirvana Ritual

When Graham lays the paper down on the carpet, a corner curls up, so he weighs it down with a CD case. He’s printed out the instructions on this sheet. He has everything he needs - five CDs in a circle along with some pictures of his idol. There’s a bottle of Gaviscon as an offering, an antacid to ease the singer’s infamous stomach pains. There’s a guitar, which Graham can’t play, but maybe his idol’s spirit will. The ritual is ready. All he needs now is the sound track.

A certain edit of songs is supposed to summon Kurt Cobain. The list was on Tumblr for a time, then vanished. It’s complicated - 4 seconds of this song, 3 from another and so on for five minutes. The mix for the Nirvana ritual appears on YouTube sometimes - although it’s often retitled to hide it from bots, or it’s played backwards, or it’s titled in a translation pulled from Google Translate - a version labelled in Thai as พิธีกรรมนิพพาน was online for several months.

Graham looks at his preparations and feels silly, glad that the only person he’s talked to about this is Phil. Phil is his only friend, even if he sometimes takes the piss. Graham doesn’t really have anyone else to hang out with, and sometimes Phil’s jokes make Graham wonder why he bothers living. That’s what he wants to ask the spirit of his favourite singer: should he carry on or give in like Kurt did?

Graham lights the candle, turns the light out and settles into the gloom before pressing play. The soundtrack ties together Cobain’s grunts and screams into something that sounds like a new language - one YouTube comment said it sounded like Enochian. He listens to the track and feels stupid as it comes to a close.  

Then he looks across the room and sees Kurt. Back against the wall, legs drawn up, hands cradling his stomach. Converse boots, torn jeans. Those shocking blue eyes. A faint smell of something sick and acidic that Graham realises is Kurt’s broken stomach. The ritual has worked, and he’s not thought about what he would do when Kurt was there, and all he can think to do is say hello. “I…” Saying he can’t believe this would be a cliche. But everything is a cliche when you think about it. “I’m glad you’re here,” says Graham.

“Hey,” says the spirit.

They sit there together. “I need your help,” says Graham.

“Yeah?” The rock star ghost sounds kind, even if he’s not speaking much. He seems more settled and takes the guitar. Kurt is not quite a ghost, since ghosts are not supposed to be able to pick things up. Less surly now, he’s plucking the strings. The music sounds bluesy, maybe some Leadbelly song that Graham doesn’t know.

“I don’t know,” says Graham. It sounds stupid to say aloud, but how can he not, when he’s gone to so much trouble. “I’m so unhappy, and I don’t know what to do. They hate me at school. And… I just want to be free of it.”

Graham is too ashamed to give the details. About being called a greaser, because he wears his hair long. Sometimes the teachers say he should just cut his hair, but that won’t help because other kids have hair longer than his and don’t get any shit. Girls hate him too and join in with the taunts. Last week he had Alice and Heather pinching him in front of the others, trying to provoke him to retaliate, so the rest of their friends had an excuse to beat him up. Just thinking about it makes his cheeks burn as hot as they did at the time.

But it’s good to be here, listening to Kurt play the guitar, just for him, and it sounds so beautiful. And he just loses himself for a time listening to the music, and he does feel a little better.

His phone goes off - he glances down and sees the text previewed on his lock screen - IT’S NOT KURT. DON’T DO THE RITUAL. He goes to grab his phone and a static shock makes him pull his hand back, so he tries again - same result - and knows - he’s not going to pick the phone up. The thing that looks like Kurt Cobain is still fingering the guitar but looks straight at Graham, grinning. Phil’s text is right - it’s not Kurt, it’s something that has borrowed his face.

“I can help,” says the creature, still using Kurt’s lazy drawl, but the grin is all wrong. “We can make it gentle and painless.”

The creature puts down the guitar and leans forward, offering Graham his hand to take. And Graham thinks then of being a kid - of the enthusiasm he had as a child, so full of love, and he could live if he could get that back again. He wants to live and survive. He grabs one of the CDs, In Utero, breaking the circle, the picture on the disc with the woman in her bra, and he’s flexing it, so much stronger than he expected, then it finally snaps, shatters and splinters, and when he looks back at the ghost it is gone.

Graham lies on his back and looks at the ceiling. He’s not going back to school. He’s worth more than that. He’s smart enough to teach himself from YouTube and fuck school as long as he passes his exams. He picks his phone up to text Phil then decides he’s had enough of so-called friends like that too. He clears the stuff from the ritual, then puts on the acoustic Nevermind album he loves, the one he found on Spotify by Alison Rose and curls up in bed to sleep. He’s not giving in.

Afterword

In The Nirvana Ritual, Graham refers to “the picture on the disc with the woman in her bra” – this is actually Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny Michael 'Cali' DeWitt wearing drag. The Alison Rose album that Graham listens to is highly recommended.

I came to Nirvana’s Nevermind a few months late, but fell in love with it hard as a moody sixteen-year-old. One reason I became so obsessed with Nirvana was the interviews in the run-up to their final album, In Utero, particularly the two-part Melody Maker piece, where Cobain talked about how hopeful he was for his life, how he'd got the better of his depression. I took this all at face value and was shocked in April 1994 when Cobain took his own life.

The music press quickly built a death cult around Cobain. I think journalists today would be more careful about how they discussed such incidents. There should have been fewer articles about ‘Kurt’s final days’ and ‘Why Cobain Had To Die’ - and more articles about how he might have asked for help, and how other people had navigated the problems he saw as insurmountable.

Like any 90s indie kid I have a problem with Oasis, but I recently read an interesting interview with Noel Gallagher:

"[Live Forever] was written in the middle of grunge and all that. I remember Nirvana had a tune called I Hate Myself and Want to Die, and I was like 'Well, I'm not fucking having that.' As much as I fucking like him and all that shit, I'm not having that. I can't have people like that coming over here, on smack, fucking saying that they hate themselves and they wanna die. That's fucking rubbish. Kids don't need to be hearing that nonsense.”

I hated Live Forever when it came out, and would have bristled at this quote at most points in my life. But these days I think Noel Gallagher was right.