The first thing that needs to be said before we start plotting the Netflix docuseries is this: there are real, breathing people struggling with heroin and suicidal ideation right now. They are not symbols. They are not case studies. They are not aesthetic backdrops for our retro-nineties grief cosplay. 

Self-destruction is not a genre. It is a medical emergency. I know this both academically and biologically. I have had seasons where not existing felt logistically simpler than continuing. I know that 988 works, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. There’s something life altering about speaking to a stranger whose sole assignment is to keep you alive for sixty consecutive minutes. Especially, if they happen to feel like the only one who cares enough to do so. I have also checked myself into the hospital because I was not  mentally okay, due to my surroundings and the way stress takes over the body like a demon. It worked.

Survival, it turns out, is not melodrama. It’s administrative. If you are reading this and you are not okay, you are allowed to say that out loud.

Now, here is the part where you start to hate me, and also realize why Metal Insider keeps me locked in the dungeon exclusively for album reviews. 

This editorial began as a hit piece. Leading the group of investigators in the Kurt Cobain Homicide allegations is a pretty pink haired individual, who exposed their evidence to the gas station sushi journalism outpost known as Daily Mail. I desperately wanted to maim her as a boundary-overstepping punisher fan who mistook obsession for purpose. I wanted to trash her entire investigation. I wanted to eviscerate Michelle Wilkins.

Instead of utterly destroying Michelle, over seventy-two sleepless hours, I watched as many of her 208 video podcast episodes as I could in chronological order and read all of her substack entries. I read the forensic files by Bryan Burnatt who just seems like he is ready to retire after this. I looked at shotgun victims that were not Cobain. Then after seeing the lifeless body of Cobain, I discovered something far more agonizing: On the bright side of Michelle is what she is asking of my generation, those of the late 80’s born cyber brats, to do. She is asking for us to forgive the drug addict in order to better understand the truth. 

That request isn’t abstract to me. I grew up in Reno, where my mother would hover in the corner of drug deals like a freelance missionary — high as orbit, reciting passages from The Book of Mormon to women from the Mustang Ranch who were actively shooting up. This was presented to me as spiritual outreach, which is maybe the most American sentence ever constructed. I knew these women the way other kids know their neighbors. I knew which one instructed her son to call her “sissy” and rebranded grandma as “mom,” because the wrong drug dealer boyfriend could transform a random Friday night into a cautionary tale behind the Circus Circus. The drug world was never cinematic to me. It was fluorescent and adhesive and loud. It was adults performing sex in front of children. It was meth and locked doors and the anticipatory dread of finding paraphernalia in your mother’s bedroom and understanding, with child logic, that prison was next.

I lived in what felt like a witness-protection program without the protection. A dual life that would eventually earn diagnostic language I didn’t yet have. It was gaming the system with my friends by doing our mothers’ drugs so they’d fail a court test that relied on our urine. It was knowing too much before you knew what “too much” meant and assuming the chaos was baseline. On my early-’90s playground, trauma wasn’t an outlier; it was social capital. If you hadn’t been molested, you were statistically unusual. That was being an average Reno, Nevada kid. Or at least, it was my version of it.

That was also the ecosystem of the 90s leading up to Kurt Cobain’s death. And this ecosystem did not exist in opposition to mainstream America; it was a distorted reflection of it. The 1990s are often remembered as an economic upswing bracketed by dial-up optimism and the illusion of post–Cold War clarity, but chemically they were an era of bifurcation. On the west coast, heroin purity rose and prices dropped (Mexican “black tar” moving up Interstate 5, Colombian powder refining the East Coast) while the Clinton administration quietly expanded the architecture of the “War on Drugs” that had metastasized under Reagan and Bush. 

Somewhere off to the side of the culture, far from whatever we were pretending mattered, pharmaceutical companies were quietly auditioning catastrophe. The introduction of OxyContin in 1996 allowed the kind of frictionless optimism usually reserved for devices that promise to improve your life without changing it. A pill sold as controlled relief in a country pathologically attracted to the idea of control. At roughly the same moment, rural Nevada and the interior West were no longer flirting with meth as a kind of outlaw accessory; it was becoming procedural, domestic, weirdly civic. Less biker folklore, more supply chain. And the strangest part is that none of it registered as news. It felt ambient, like bad weather you assume will pass because you’ve decided storms are temporary, even when the barometric pressure keeps dropping.

Music functioned as both soundtrack and solvent. When Nirvana detonated in 1991 with Nevermind, heroin chic followed in the cultural imagination; not because every suburban kid suddenly found a dealer, but because alienation became the aesthetic currency. The spectacle of Kurt Cobain (his addiction, his refusal of rock-star triumphalism, his eventual death) blurred into the larger narrative of Generation X as chemically numbed and spiritually unmoored. At the same time, rave culture was importing MDMA into American suburbs and warehouses, selling a temporary theology of empathy under strobe lights. Hovering above all of it was a parallel intoxication: Evangelical revivalism. 

The 1990s were also the era of stadium Christianity, of youth pastors warning about Satan in the backmasking of CDs, and parents convinced that Marilyn Manson represented a literal apocalypse. The religious right experienced its own altered state—a high from certainty, from moral clarity, from the belief that cultural decay could be rebuked with enough altar calls.  

Were they wrong? Historically, yes and no. 

They misdiagnosed the mechanics. Music did not create meth labs. Nirvana did not synthesize heroin but they intuited a vacuum. When institutions erode and economic transitions destabilize communities, people self-medicate. Some with narcotics. Some with noise. Some with God. In that sense, the frenzy–chemical or religious–was less about rebellion than anesthesia, a way to survive a decade that looked prosperous on paper but felt, in certain ZIP codes, like a fluorescent room with no windows.

So when I hear men like Joseph Burns, the frontman of Aspirin Feast and an early gravitational character in Michelle’s vlog/podcast Who Killed Kurt?—describe watching Kurt Cobain ditch out on rehab and overdose (the night that he died) at the hands of people who were themselves chemically dismantled, I don’t experience intrigue. I experience déjà vu. The internet wants this to feel like a prestige conspiracy, a Reddit-native Zapruder film for Generation X. But to me it smells like a couch that’s absorbed a decade of sweat and cigarette ash. I can see the kitchen pacing, the half-whispered panic, the way everyone in the room is simultaneously terrified and too intoxicated to calibrate that terror into action. The mythology collapses into something ugly and domestic. It stops being about cultural martyrdom and starts being about the banal physics of too many compromised adults in one enclosed space. There is nothing operatic about that. It’s not In Utero; it’s chaos and a carpet that should have been replaced in 1987.

For most of my life, I categorized Nirvana alongside Faith No More, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots as an elitist MTV priesthood that rocked me to sleep—too cool for the aerosol optimism of ’80s hair metal, too self-serious to be accidentally fun. Grunge weaponized suffering as proof of authenticity. Pain was the backstage pass. The less you cared, the more you mattered. In the case of the testimony of Joseph Burns: The more likely you’d front drugs in an economy that only allowed an ATM withdrawal of $300 dollars per day, the more you were admired by Kurt Cobain. (Doesn’t help his case that he testifies to Kurt taking his child into that environment at all.)

They were the Kings of the underground, and I’ve always distrusted Kings on principle. But here’s the part I suspect doesn’t get said enough: If Cobain had survived, he would not still be wearing flannel like a Smithsonian exhibit of 1992. He would have mutated or vanished. The idea that he’d tolerate the algorithmic sludge of this era (the content churn, the weaponized nostalgia, the monetized vulnerability) feels absurd. Cobain’s whole ethos was allergic to stasis. Survival would have required reinvention, and reinvention would have disappointed the people who most needed him embalmed.

I also think drugs do more to the brain than our diagnostics can articulate, which is not a stoner aphorism but an experiential one. I’ve admitted I’m a closet weed user, though I rarely explain the vantage point it affords me. As a practicing Latter-day Saint, I use cannabis as prescribed to manage the chronic aftermath of cancer. I have had multiple confrontations with my religious superiors where the conversations feel more like talks with a thoughtful friend than a tribunal, about the residual guilt that hums beneath the relief. I truly want nothing to do with my past and I certainly don’t want to raise my kids in a world even close to what I grew up in. What they’ve said is that the recreational version of the drug doesn’t simply dull pain; it edits it. It can temporarily erase the memory of suffering. That is miraculous, yet terrifying. Pain is data. Pain is the body’s push notification that something is wrong. If you were bleeding out and felt nothing, you wouldn’t be enlightened—you’d be endangered. And that’s the paradox that hovers over every addiction narrative we try to retrofit onto Kurt Cobain or anyone else: anesthesia solves the immediate problem while quietly deleting the evidence that the problem exists. 

The question will never be whether the religious people were naïve about drugs back in the day. It’s whether the rest of us are naïve about pain.

Which is why Michelle’s work on Kurt Cobain’s death initially irritated me so much. She and her forensic team have argued before the Seattle police that Cobain was murdered. They reconstructed the mechanics of the shotgun. They cataloged the absence of blood spatter on his hand. They compiled binders and thumb drives arguing the scene was mishandled, perhaps tampered with. It sounds like the most 1994 sentence imaginable: evidence lost, rumors metastasized, accountability evaporated. But the factual question of the verdict eventually started to feel like the least interesting variable in the equation. Suicide or homicide. Not irrelevant. Just… smaller than advertised. 

What actually destabilized me was what happened internally while I was mainlining Michelle’s work. Around the sixth video, I felt a white-hot rage toward men who annihilate themselves and then get posthumously canonized for it. There’s a specific American loophole where self-destruction, if accompanied by distortion pedals and enough ambiguity, gets reframed as profundity. We don’t just mourn the wreckage; we curate it. There is something infuriating about the way certain male artists torch their own circuitry and leave the women and children in their orbit to decode the ashes like its liner-note poetry. By the twentieth episode, though, the rage began to metabolize. Outrage requires stamina, I guess. It needs a villain who stays two-dimensional. And the more footage I consumed, the harder it became to flatten Kurt Cobain into either martyr or monster. He started to look less like a symbol and more like a sick person in a room full of other sick people, all of them improvising badly.

By the hundredth video, I ran into a possibility I’ve resisted my entire life: mercy without bias. Not selective compassion, or the kind that chooses the child but not the addict.Total mercy. The kind that doesn’t ask whether the death was self-inflicted or engineered, because it assumes brokenness either way. Maybe that’s the neurotic Mormon in me trying to broker a truce between justice and cosmic empathy—trying to meet God halfway so I can sleep at night. But I also carry a stubborn, unfashionable belief in an afterlife that is aggressively uncinematic. An afterlife where Kurt Cobain is not frozen at 27, not eternally backlit by stage lights, not looping Nevermind for the angels. An afterlife where he doesn’t pick up another guitar because he doesn’t need to. Where he’s hovering around his grandchild with the distracted tenderness of someone who has finally exited the feedback loop of public consumption. Where he could not care less about documentaries, theories, or whether strangers on the internet think he was murdered. Because from that vantage point, this is a spectator sport. We are the ones in the bleachers, arguing about the play. Kurt Cobain is no longer on the field.

It’s easy to forgive a victim. It’s harder to forgive an addict. Harder still to forgive the addict who hurt you. And nearly impossible to forgive the addict you once were.

I reached a strange equilibrium somewhere around the videos about Courtney Love. I tried on the costume of loyalty: If Kurt Cobain were my husband, I’d be furious too. I’d scorch the Earth. I’d be mean to everyone. But mercy, if it’s real, cannot be partisan. It cannot hinge on who we think deserved better PR.

Michelle also writes on Substack about the resistance she encountered—original investigators bristling, old-guard figures protecting their narratives. I understand that resistance. The Cobain case calcified into mythology within days of his death. Mythologies don’t appreciate revisions; they prefer incense and repetition.

So here is the part you’re going to hate: whether Kurt Cobain was murdered or not, whether Michelle is ultimately vindicated or dismissed, the cultural moment she’s forcing is necessary. She is dragging us back into the moral swamp of the ’90s and asking us to look at it without flinching. She is saying: reexamine the addict. Reexamine your parents. Reexamine yourself.

Forgiveness is not exoneration. It is not pretending the shotgun didn’t fire or the heroin wasn’t injected. It is the radical decision to stop confusing punishment with healing.

I used to think people like Michelle Wilkins were trespassing into sacred territory. Now I think she may be functioning as something stranger: a rock vigilante for a generation that aestheticized its own wounds and never finished the autopsy. Her timing feels less obsessive than providential.

Take her evidence seriously or dismiss it. Watch the videos or don’t. But understand that beneath the forensics is a far more destabilizing thesis: it is time to forgive the drug addict. As a generation. As survivors. As former children who learned too much too early. And if that makes you angry, good. Anger is often just grief that hasn’t been metabolized yet.

Michelle Wilkins Substack

Who Killed Kurt Podcast

Bryan Burnett Forensic Research

Jordeana Bell

See Full Bio