Kurt Cobain's Birthday: Twitter Remembers Late Musician

Culture

In Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, the Nirvana singer quoted a line from Neil Young’s song “Hey Hey, My My,” writing, “it’s better to burn out, than to fade away.” For Young, the song was about changing musical styles; he compares fading away to rusting, and he wanted to avoid rusting by producing similar music. Throughout the entire song, he reiterates his belief that “rock and roll can never die.”

While Cobain may have opted to “burn out” with his suicide rather than fade away, the idea that rock and roll can never die is as evident as ever. It has been almost 19 years since he committed suicide, yet Cobain still holds a stranglehold on the rock and roll world. Wednesday would have been his 46th birthday, and the impact he had on the world is still being felt. Twitter has emerged as the place to pay tribute to Cobain. 

The tweets have been touching, fun, and downright weird. Let us take a journey through the Twitterverse on what would have been Kurt Cobain’s 46th birthday. The voyage through the tweets goes from touching, to funny, and all the way to "huh?"

A lot of the tweets commemorating Cobain's birthday have included pictures of the musician along with a message showing appreciation of the late musician or a quote from the artist. Even though Cobain has been gone for almost two decades, the quotes are still powerful:

Even without a TwitPic, the inspirational Cobain quote is a popular and retweetable. Way to go:

Here's where the journey through the Kurt Cobain Twitter trend starts to take a strange turn. It's a nice picture of Cobain and everything, but why show him with a cat? Even @BuzzFeedNews doesn't seem to know, as all they say is, "Here's a picture of Kurt Cobain with a cat." Here it is:

Then the tweets started getting funny. In a season 6 episode of South Park, the show claims that you can respectfully joke about something tragic 22.3 years after it has happened. While we're still a little under that deadline (it's only been 18.7 years), these tweeters tried to approach Cobain's birthday with a sense of humor:

And:

While it may be a little odd to try to joke about someone who has died, the following Tweet was the oddest/most confusing thing to come out of Cobain's birthday:

For those wondering: that is NOT Kurt Cobain. No, it's actually Billy Ray Cyrus of "Achy Breaky Heart" and Hannah Montana fame. Why is a Billy Ray Cyrus picture being used in place of a Cobain snapshot? It could be that some foolish Twitter user does not know who Cobain is.

Or, if you do some quick research on the situation, you can see that Billy Ray Cyrus and Cobain were buddies back in the day.

There are most likely Nirvana fans out there who aren't loving that Cyrus is being mistaken for Cobain, but know that because of this Twitter mix-up, we found out the country star and the grunge icon were friends.

Happy birthday, Kurt Cobain.