Kurt Cobain grew up facing the same deprivations as most children of working-class people. The divorce of his parents when he was ten apparently provided the first major blow to his happiness, which was further aggravated in his teen years by being constantly shuffled between homes and the demoralizing, abusive environment found in the American education system. Some release from the tedium of life in Aberdeen was achieved through music, and throughout high school Cobain put together a series of different garage bands; he also occasionally took refuge in the counter-cultural writings of authors such as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett and Charles Bukowski. A sympathetic accomplice was eventually found in the person of Krist Novoselic, who shared his enthusiasm for punk and provided a receptive ear to his friend's musical ideas.
As soon as Nevermind hit the shelves in 1991, any peace of mind that Cobain had hoped to achieve for himself was trampled out of existence. The music press, with the record-buying public firmly in tow, immediately began frothing and dribbling all over the place about the release, prompting sales to swell past the triple-platinum mark by the early months of 1992. Trumpet calls heralding the rebirth of rock music sounded from every mountaintop, while the single Smells Like Teen Spirit essentially became the anthem for this "new" and revolutionary musical style, appetizingly labelled "grunge" by the press. Some of the other Seattle "grunge" bands that were willing to adopt the more polished sound evident on Nevermind (Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains) were also caught up in this tumultuous upsurge, while others (like The Melvins, who continued being too inventive and peculiar) were given only a momentary boost of popularity before being abandoned once again by the mainstream. Every move made by Cobain and his bandmates subsequently became a matter of legend: sneaking a few bars of Rape Me onto the MTV Video Music Awards, kissing on Saturday Night Live, goofing around on Top of the Pops, etc.